OBAMA’S DECISION TO VISIT TURKEY WAS SYMBOLIC
The Gazette
April 14 2009
Montreal
It spotlighted a Muslim country in which secular democracy works
By choosing to end his grand tour of Europe in Ankara and Istanbul
last week, Barack Obama fulfilled his pledge to visit a Muslim country
during his first 100 days in office.
He took the opportunity of his address to the Turkish parliament to
reaffirm that the United States was not at war with Islam. But his
visit was also testimony to Turkey’s strategic importance for the
West as a whole.
That reflects partly geography, partly geopolitics. As Obama pointed
out, Turkey is a natural bridge between Europe and the Middle East. Its
potential as an energy transit corridor to Europe was again made
obvious during January’s gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine.
Turkey has the chance to play a pivotal role in the troubled Caucasus
region, especially if its current efforts to repair relations with
Armenia succeed. Militarily, Turkey has NATO’s biggest army after
America’s, and hosts a large U.S. airbase at Incirlik.
Recently its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has also engaged
robustly in Middle Eastern diplomacy, mediating between Syria and
Israel, talking to Iran and keeping a beady eye on the aspirations
for self-rule of the Kurds of northern Iraq.
Turkey matters for another reason too. It is a working example of a
secular democracy in a Muslim country. It would be wrong to present
it crudely as a model for the Muslim – especially the Arab — world
to follow.
Turkey’s history and geography make it a special case. But it does
help disprove the widespread belief that Islam and overtly Islamist
political parties must always be incompatible with a functioning
democracy.
Almost since it first came to power in 2002, Erdogan’s mildly Islamist
Justice and Development (AK) Party has been under attack from Turkey’s
secular Ataturkist establishment, particularly the generals.
Yet although AK suffered a setback in recent local elections, the prime
minister and his party have retained broad support among voters. And
they have largely, if not always consistently, stuck to the path of
liberalizing reforms that passed a milestone in December 2004, when
Erdogan triumphantly secured a date to open formal negotiations for
Turkey’s membership of the European Union.
Those negotiations have not been going smoothly. The obstacles to
Turkish membership are numerous and as large as Turkey itself. Public
opinion in many EU countries is less than welcoming.
The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has loudly and repeatedly made
clear that he is against Turkish membership; so, less vociferously,
has the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. A settlement of the
long-drawn-out Cyprus dispute is anyway an essential precondition
for Turkish entry.
Troublingly, partly in response to Europe’s perceived lack of
enthusiasm, Turks’ appetite for more reforms to fulfill the EU’s terms
of entry has waned. Public opinion in Turkey has recently taken on
a noticeably anti-American and anti-European tinge.
Given all this, it is understandable that Obama repeated the U.S. view
that the EU should admit Turkey. Yet it was a tactical mistake.
The EU’s leaders (not only Sarkozy) do not take kindly to outsiders
telling them publicly who should join their club – any more than
Obama would like to be told by Europeans that he should throw open
the United States’ border with Mexico. They must be persuaded on the
merits of the case, not by lobbying that might make Turkish entry
seem like a U.S. idea.
Above all, they need to believe that the Turks themselves are prepared
to make changes at home to qualify. Turkish membership of the EU
is, at best, many years off. Keeping it on the table is the job of
political leaders in Brussels and Ankara, not Washington.
From: Baghdasarian