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.
