The pull-push, often neurotic relationship between Turkey and Europe has always been a complex one indeed. If the European world ever loved Turkey, it never once counted the ways.
Since the 1920s, when Kemal Ataturk turned his country’s back on the Middle East, reorienting its social, legal and cultural institutions to reflect "secular and modernist beliefs," including the compulsory abandonment of the Arabic alphabet in favor of a Latin one — thereby denying future generations of Turks access to the entirety of their archival heritage, which they now could no longer read — Turkey has had a constant identity crisis.
After more than seven decades of harboring the grand illusion that it was a European country, and with its efforts to join the EU repeatedly snubbed, Turkey continues to be viewed by the continent it so ardently wants to be a part of as an alien with "a different culture, a different approach, a different way of life."
The words are those of former French President Valery Giscard d’Estang who told the French newspaper Le Monde in an interview last week that admitting Turkey to the EU "would be the end of the European Union" because, unlike the current 15 members and ten others likely to be invited to join soon, "its capital is not in Europe and 95 percent of its population live outside Europe. It is not a European country."
Them are fighting words. Certainly controversial. Perhaps even bigoted. But whichever way you read them, they represent a repudiation of Turkey’s remonstrations of being a European, not a Middle Eastern, nation.
Sure, in these politically correct times, d’Estang’s remarks produced swift public rebukes from prominent intellectuals and political leaders, including Pat Cox, president of the European Parliament. But truth be told, d’Estang, who currently heads a convention that is drafting a constitution for the expanded EU, simply stated openly, as Keith Richburg, the Washington Post correspondent filing from London wrote last Saturday, "a view that many Europeans hold but express only privately — that populous, Muslim Turkey will never be invited to join the European Union." (Turkey has a population of about 65 million.)
The ten new members projected to join, when the EU convenes in December, are eight countries from Eastern Europe, plus Malta and Cyprus. Turkey is out.
A senior official at the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, who requested anonymity, told Richburg that "Giscard is expressing indeed what many of our elite think. Many people are delighted he said so."
One concern of the EU is how the military in Turkey, which has been a NATO member since 1952, has traditionally interfered in the country’s politics, staging three coups since 1960, and how Ankara has chalked up what Europeans consider a dismal record on human rights, particularly in regards to the treatment of its Kurdish minority. As if to underscore that, the armed forces chief of staff, Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, stated ominously in the wake of the Islamist victory in the national elections early last week, that his troops will do all in their power to "protect the republic against all types of threats, especially fundamentalism and separatist activities."
Since March 1924, when Turkey exiled Abdul Majid, its last Ottoman caliph, a year after it declared itself an independent republic, the country has remained big and raw, insecure and divided, never sure of its identity, and unable to make friends in Europe and influence people in the Middle East.
The issue of Ankara’s warm diplomatic and military relations with Israel certainly has not endeared it to its Middle Eastern neighbors. Nor, it would appear, to a great many Turks. Early in 1997, for example, the mayor of Sincan, a town outside Ankara, laid on a boisterous celebration of Jerusalem Day. The military saw the event as a "provocation," sending there a column of 35 tanks and personnel carriers to break up the fete and arrest the mayor.
In December the same year, President Demirel walked out of a meeting of the OIC held in Teheran over criticism by members leveled against Ankara’s relations with Israel, particularly the Turkish-Israel agreement on "Military Training and Cooperation" signed in Feb. 1996, which provided for mutual military visits and the acquisition of military know-how, besides joint exercises in which Israeli and Turkish pilots would train in one another’s airfields. This along with a free-trade agreement signed earlier between Ankara and Tel Aviv.
And as far as Europe is concerned, the EU got itself committed to talks on Turkey’s accession to membership in 1998 — with little, if any support for that bid among its member states — only after strenuous behind-the-scenes American pressure on behalf of Turkey. It will also be recalled that it was the entente with Israel that tipped the balance of power in favor of Turkey in its confrontations with Greece, Syria and the Kurds, besides giving it access to advanced American military hardware which might not have been made available to it otherwise. (The tab for the lobbying on the Hill on behalf of Turkey’s foreign policy interests is picked up by AIPAC.)
So quo vadis Turkey?
Unable to tempt or cajole Europeans into accepting it into the club, going from applicant in the 1980s to mendicant today, and with its foreign policy totally out of tune with its Middle East neighbors, it is a pallid figure whose immediate prospects augur no intimations of a happy ending.
It is not fart-fetched to suggest that Turkey’s military forces, already watching the newly elected Islamist government like a hawk, will pounce at the slightest hint of deviation from the country’s perceived "secular and modernist beliefs."
14 November 2002
