The
need to be cautious about
Turkey's entry into the EU
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
September 18,
2005
LONDON - A 'no' to Turkey starting
negotiations to enter the European Union on October 3rd
"will have centuries of implications", as one influential
academic, Husseyin Bagci, put it to me last week. It
would push a wounded Turkey back into the arms of the
nationalists, even perhaps the hard line fundamentalists,
and be grist to the mill of those who argue that the
Christian Western world will always consider itself
superior and apart from the Muslim one.
It would, as the provost of
Istanbul's Bahcesehir university, Eser Karakas, told me,
make clear that Europe has no interest in becoming the
great power that Turkey could help make it with its large
population and army, able to play an influential role in
the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus, and not
being subordinated always to the policies of the
U.S..
Yet if there are no good reasons
for a 'no', there are reasons for caution. Moreover, now
that Angela Merkel looks poised to become the next
chancellor of Germany, with her view that Turkey should
only be granted " a privileged partnership", not full
membership, Europe will be compelled to slow down and
think hard about Turkey.
Turkey is still too much muddling
through to modernity. For two centuries it has been
creating a middle class that belatedly has been trying to
absorb the wisdom and philosophy of the European
Renaissance and Enlightenment. But for still a majority
their inheritance remains the Ottoman Empire, which,
unlike the Arab caliphates of the eighth to eleventh
centuries, did not push forward the frontiers of
knowledge, despite its military prowess. The tensions
between these two worlds are what still make it difficult
for Turkey to be as European as its present day rulers
want. Turkey is still catching up and on important issues
this shows.
When I was negotiating last week to
interview the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, I was
repeatedly told by his closest staff, "This interview
will be on condition you promise not to ask about the
Kurdish situation". But since it is Turkey's long
standing brutal, civil war with its 20 million Kurds that
has done more than anything to keep Turkey waiting at
Europe's gate for so long this is a very old fashioned,
authoritarian, reflex. The fact is the reason that the
PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) and its 7000 fighters up
in the mountains of the southeast began fighting again
this year, breaking a five year truce, is that Ankara has
not delivered on its promises to the Kurds.
It promised free broadcasting in
Kurdish and education in Kurdish. Yes, there are now
Kurdish newspapers for sale on the streets, there is some
Kurdish music on the radio, there has been an attempt to
open private academies to teach Kurdish, but the sum of
it doesn't begin to compare with the freedoms the Welsh
have in the United Kingdom or the Basques in Spain. There
is no free broadcasting in Kurdish nor Kurdish in the
primary schools. The promised reforms have not been
pushed through an unwilling bureaucracy and this is why
when the prime minister made his conciliatory, landmark,
speech in Diyarbakir, the Kurdish "capital", a month ago,
the crowd was a desultory 600.
To refuse to discuss this subject
out loud and to pretend all is well suggests that Erdogan
believes that sweeping unresolved problems under the
carpet for the next three weeks will somehow make this
very serious falling short just disappear off the
European agenda.
Turkey is still not capable of
generating for itself all the essential ingredients of a
modern, democratic, state. It has only made the rapid
strides of the last five years to reform its human rights
practices, its judiciary and police, and the ubiquitous
and powerful role of the army in political affairs,
because the EU dangled the carrot of entry before it.
Turkey, 80 years after Ataturk pointed its nose in the
direction of Europe, is still lacking in original
thinking. All new ideas and high culture come from the
West. The liberal, open, law-abiding, state is not yet a
basic instinct.
Islam has a better historical
record of religious tolerance than either Christianity or
Judaism. But modern Turkey has been the exception. In
1945 Ataturk's successor, Inonu, dispossessed and
encouraged the Jews to leave. And ten years later the
large, Greek Christian community began to be driven out.
Even today the Byzantine churches largely remain
state-run museums. There is precious little trace of the
fact that for eleven hundred years Constantinople was the
centre of the Christian world.
On October 3rd a "yes" would be
consistent with previous EU promises. However it must be
a "yes, but". There cannot be promises about an entry
date. It should be probably a generation away.
Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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