The European Union is faced with a difficult decision. If it doesn't allow Turkey to join the EU, it could be viewed as further proof of the "clash" between the Muslim world and the west. If it does allow Turkey to join, it faces a potential wave of immigrants that people aren't ready for or fully accepting. And, with open borders and Turkey's neighbors, obvious security concerns.
Europeans praise themselves for their ability to overcome the past, by creating things like a European Defense Agency 90 years after World War I and only 15 years after the fall of Communism. But to turn its attention away from overcoming centuries of exclusion and battles against the Muslim world and the Turks would be to ignore a much more pressing issue.
International Herald Tribune -Is EU ready for Turkey? Muslim world is waiting
Roger Cohen: Is EU ready for Turkey? Muslim world is waiting
Roger Cohen International Herald Tribune
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Globalist
ISTANBUL
Where Europe ends, and with it presumably the European Union, has long been a vexed question. Just how vexed will be demonstrated over the next seven months as the EU grapples with a critical decision: whether to begin negotiations leading to Turkish membership.
The EU has just admitted 10 new members without being sure how it will run itself as a 25-member club. So the notion of opening the way for Turkey appears far-fetched. This is a country of close to 70 million people, the vast majority of them Muslims, bordering Iraq, Syria and Iran. Few Europeans associate such dangerous borders with their continent.
But Turkey amounts to a special case. Its links with the EU go back to 1963, when it entered into economic agreements. Ever since, the prospect of possible membership has been dangled with growing specificity before this diverse and determinedly secular state. Now the EU Commission is completing a report on Turkey that will form the basis for a decision by European leaders in December.
The looming verdict will provoke sharp divisions. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, recently expressed strong support for Turkish membership, saying it would bring a "new dimension" to the EU. The German government also appears favorable. But Alain Juppé of France, the leader of President Jacques Chirac's UMP party, said last month that his party opposed opening negotiations with Turkey. Chirac himself has been more evasive, saying Turkey has a "European vocation." Make of that Delphic phrase what you will.
Scrutiny of the EU's next move is intense in the United States, in the Islamic world and in Turkey itself. The American view is straightforward. Europe says it wants good relations with Muslims. That being the case, it cannot slam the door on Turkey.
"If the Muslim world is not an enemy, they have to go through with this," said one American official.
The American idea, of course, is that Turkey's natural role is as a bridge between the West and the Islamic world at a time when suspicion and anger are growing over Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To open talks leading to EU membership would sweep away suspicions of religious and cultural prejudice that have grown as Turkey has waited on the sidelines for four decades. It would show that a Muslim country that is also a secular democracy has its place at the same European table as France, Britain and Germany.
Support for EU membership is strong in Turkey. Saban Disli, the vice-chairman of the governing Justice and Development Party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that negotiations should begin in the first half of next year with a view to bringing Turkey into the EU by 2008, or 2010 at the latest.
"If Turkey is left out, close to 1.5 billion Muslims around the world will feel as bad as I will feel," he said. "The clash between Islam and the West will be sharpened."
Erdogan, who leads a party with Islamic roots that some now refer to as "Muslim Democrats" (an echo of Europe's right-of-center Christian Democrats), has worked hard to persuade European leaders that Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is now ready. Just last week, special state security courts sometimes used to try Kurds were abolished, one of a series of amendments to the Constitution.
In general, the army has lost its once dominant behind-the-scenes role; the often trampled rights of Turkey's minority Kurdish population have been bolstered. Erdogan has also pushed hard to reunite the divided island of Cyprus through support for a United Nations peace plan that was rejected last month by Greek Cypriots.
In all this, he has shown himself responsive to European and American prodding. Colin Powell, the American secretary of state, wrote to the Turkish government in February, urging it to do more for judicial transparency. This month, he called Turkey a "very, very secular democracy" (after causing ire earlier by mistakenly labeling it an "Islamic republic").
But resistance to Turkey in Europe remains strong. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president and overseer of efforts to draft a new EU constitution, declared in 2002 that Turkey's entry would mean "the end of Europe." Such views are widely shared, if seldom expressed so directly.
Turkey resides somewhere deep and ambivalent in the European psyche. It was against the westward pushing forces of the Ottoman empire and Islam that Europe long fought. The Ottoman army at the gates of Vienna, the centuries-long battle to put an end to Turkey-in-Europe - these events were marking.
The mingled minarets and church steeples of Bosnia are only the most obvious imprint of the Turkish presence.
Today, that presence is felt most immediately in the large number of Turkish immigrants in the EU, particularly in Germany. The specter of hordes of young Turks moving west troubles many people. Europe remains uncertain about how to integrate its growing Muslim population. The notion of the EU as some sort of Christian club has not been entirely lost. In such a club, of course, Turkey does not fit.
So, many Turks are skeptical. "Turkey is a big thing to swallow," said Lerzan Ozkale, a university professor. "I think the EU prefers us cooperating on the outside." Up to now, it is true, the EU has done well by tantalizing Turkey without admitting it.
But that game now looks exhausted. Turkey is impatient; a world of tensions between Islam and the West is watching. The country has much to offer the EU: its understanding of the Islamic world, its vitality, its large army, its geographic bridge.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Green politician, spoke this month of the EU as a land of "miracles." The first two were Franco-German reconciliation and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The third, he suggested, could be Europe's rapprochement with the Muslim world through Turkish membership. He had a point. To close the EU to Turkey would be to look backward at a time when a troubling future must be confronted.
Posted by Andrew Becker at May 11, 2004 02:52 PM