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Turkey's
destiny in Europe
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
December 20, 2004
LONDON - "Some frontiers are only
in the imagination", wrote Jan Morris in her remarkable
book, "Fifty Years of Europe". Prince Metternich used to
say the frontier of Asia was at the Landstrasse, the
street which ran towards Hungary, away from Vienna's city
walls. It was also said that Konrad Adenauer, the first
chancellor of Germany after World War 11, held similar
feelings about Prussia. He was a Rhinelander, and
whenever his train crossed the Elbe, on its way eastward
to Berlin, he too would groan, "Hier beginnt Asia", and
pull the blinds down.
We cannot help but ask, "What is
Europe?"
Geographically, it is no more than
a peninsula protruding from the landmass of Asia.
Culturally it has always been a potage of peoples,
languages and traditions. Politically it is a moveable
feast- of the 35 sovereign states in post Iron Curtain
Europe, nine have been created or resurrected since World
War 11.
Arguably the one and only thing
that truly unites it is not politics nor economic and
monetary union but religion. It is Christianity that has
provided the common morality and common identity that
made talk of union in the late 1940s a possibility
despite the wars of past times. The poet T.S. Eliot
broadcasting on the BBC to a defeated Germany in 1945
declared that "An individual European may not believe the
Christian faith is true; and yet what he says, and makes,
and does, will depend on the Christian heritage for its
meaning."
Now, using his immense prestige as
an intellectual, a former president of France and
president of the European Convention, Valery Giscard
D'Estaing has joined Eliot's chorus (in the FT of
November 25th.) in an attempt to derail the Turkish
application. Turkey is not an inheritor of the "cultural
contributions of ancient Greece and Rome". It has not
experienced the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Nor
does it share Europe's "religious heritage" and entry may
well not prevent Turkey "from sliding into Muslim
fundamentalism".
Not only does Giscard ignore
France's own Napoleon Bonaparte, the first pan European,
who once said, "If the world were a single state, its
capital would be Istanbul", he greatly misreads
history.
After the fall of Rome the center
of Christianity moved to Constantinople. It was the
Byzantine Christian empire that led Europe's climb out of
three centuries of cultural strife and military defeat.
It lasted a long time. Byzantine did not fall to the
Ottomans until 1443
During the crucial twelfth and
thirteenth centuries Christian scholars based in
Byzantium realized they had to learn from Islam the
Arabic corpus that incorporated Greek, Roman and Persian
learning. Under Charlemagne's anti-intellectual rule all
this had been lost to Europe.
Through all the ages it was Islam
that was, by and large, the tolerant religion that
respected the "Peoples of the Book", giving Christians
and Jews when it ruled over them a great deal of
autonomy. The bombing of synagogue in Istanbul last
December was the first hostile act (probably carried out
by Al Qaeda) against Jews in Turkey for 500
years.
The Christians for their part have
rarely been tolerant, unable to come to terms with
Islamic and Jewish minorities in their midst. The long
persecution of the Jews in Europe which culminated in
Hitler's gas chambers was always pursued by Christians
not Muslims.
Why should Turkey slide into modern
day fundamentalism? Turks across the political spectrum
were outraged by this bombing in Istanbul. Turkey and
Indonesia, two of the three largest Muslim countries,
have tolerance in their bones. Fundamentalism Al Qaeda
style will find thin soil for its seeds here.
Besides there is fundamentalism and
fundamentalism. That of the present government in Turkey
is seized by internal reform, not by anti-Western hatred.
Its roots are deep in religion, but in the sense that
drives it to resist corruption and to preserve moral
standards in family life.
Like all Turkish political parties
the ruling party is wedded to the ideals of Attaturk, the
revolutionary general who founded modern Turkey in the
1920s on secular principles, clearly separating state and
religion and driving through a series of political and
social changes whose consequence is that a majority of
its peoples now feel more at ease in being part of Europe
than Asia.
We Europeans, not only Giscard,
have to think hard about our prejudices. We have been
raised on Shakespeare's witches' brew of "nose of Turk
and Tartar's lips", Dante's portrayal of Mohammed in hell
and Delacroix's painting "Massacre of Chaos" with
Christian women pursued by Turkish lancers. We have to
put this behind us and look at history and the facts.
Turkey has earned its passage to Europe.
Copyright © 2004 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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