LONDON, 21 December 2004 — As Britain’s Conservative prime minister at the beginning of the 1990s, John Major proclaimed his determination to place Britain “at the heart of Europe”. In the event, Major became the victim of endless plotting by the so-called “Euroskeptics”, Tory politicians fanatically loyal to Major’s jingoistic predecessor, Margaret Thatcher. Forever portraying the European Union as a conspiracy to undermine British sovereignty, these bilious right-wing Britons made Major’s life a misery.
Elected prime minister of Britain in 1997, Tony Blair promised to put an end to the rancorous dissension over Europe that had for years disfigured British political life. Much was made of the fact the New Labour leader was fluent in French, a cosmopolitan statesman capable of cultivating a rational relationship between Britain and its partners in the European Union. That Blair would turn out to have no magical solution to the chronic British ambivalence about Europe was predictable enough. Eight years on, Europe remains as bitterly contentious an issue in Britain as ever. What nobody could have foreseen was that Blair would involve Britain in US military adventurism, breaking ranks with France and Germany and prompting many to doubt his credentials as a good European.
If truth be told, Blair has done more than any other individual to call into question the European Union’s geopolitical significance. For a stand against US intervention in Iraq by Britain, France and Germany might well have deterred the administration of President George W. Bush from pursuing a unilateral foreign policy. Blair’s endorsement of the US doctrine of pre-emption hurt the credibility of the European Union as an effectual body founded on a faith in multilateralism and the sanctity of international law. Conducting himself as a European leader who understood the necessity of engaging with the US, Blair left the EU looking pathetically inadequate in the face of American power politics.
Given all this, it may seem strange that Blair emerged last week as a leading champion of the European Union with his ardent support for Turkey’s campaign to become an EU member. Playing host to German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in London, Blair worked hard to assuage the reservations of Germany and other EU members about the desirability of admitting Turkey to their ranks. By the end of the week, the British government had played a key role in brokering a deal between the EU and Turkey which has set a date for the start of accession talks and which could mean that Turkey is admitted to the EU within 10 or more years. Observers of Blair’s Machiavellian politics are bound to wonder why a British leader who is keenly conscious of British public unease about both Europe and Islam should be pressing for the expansion of the European Union to include a populous Muslim country.
It must be said that the question of Turkey’s admission to the EU is less of an electoral embarrassment for Blair than it is for Chancellor Schroeder. Though London has an expanding Turkish population, Turkey’s application to join the EU is not the stuff of right-wing demagoguery in Britain that it is in Germany and other North European countries. Blair has therefore enjoyed a license to argue the case for Turkey which is not available to Schroeder — or to the pro-Turkish president of France, Jacques Chirac, who rules a country with the largest Muslim community in Europe and has to contend with vociferous public opposition to Turkish entry. What must also be borne in mind is that even as he plays the exemplary European, Blair is in some measure serving as a tool of the US. Nelson Mandela’s charge that he is America’s foreign minister is one the current British prime minister will not quickly live down. If Britain is especially anxious to incorporate Turkey within the EU, it is because this is the will of Washington as well as that of London. From the US point of view, Turkey is a country of incalculable strategic value — hence, the more it is drawn into the Western sphere of influence the better; moreover, its assimilation to the EU would accord with the neoconservative emphasis on the diffusion of democracy and free-markets.
Still, compromised though his motives may be, Blair’s stance over Turkey and the EU ought to appeal to progressive opinion everywhere. His was surely the proper European response to the spirit of amity that the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan brought to last week’s negotiations. Erdogan talked impressively of Turkey as a bridge between East and West, as a means of forestalling what the US neoconservative ideologue Samuel Huntingdon called the “clash of civilizations”.
“To have a country like Turkey”, declared Erdogan, “where the cultures of Islam and democracy have merged together, taking part in such an institution as the EU will bring harmony of civilizations. That is why we think of it as the project of the century. We are there as a guarantee of an entente between the civilizations”.
At a time of dangerously mounting tension between the West and the Muslim world, the persuasiveness of Erdogan’s words needs no underlining. It is true that Turkey still has plenty to do in order to become fully attuned to European norms in terms of democratic reforms and human rights. Nevertheless, it has set out on a path that, with luck and encouragement, could help to assuage the historic antagonism between the West and the Islamic world.
Yet quite apart from such idealistic considerations, the EU has a manifest material interest in welcoming Turkey as a member state. The harsh truth is that Europe has an aging and dwindling population and seems fated to find itself in increasing need of an influx of young people if it is to support its growing numbers of pensioners. It is sobering to reflect that, on current trends, a third of Europeans will be over 65 by 2050. Turkey, by contrast — in common with country after country in North Africa and the Middle East — will be experiencing a population boom among the young. Certainly, the demographic contrast between aging Europe and the youthful societies in question is a stark one, with implications as obvious as they are vast. For all its present affluence, for all its democratic culture and commitment to civilized values, the European Union can appear a sterile, if not doomed, project — especially when viewed from the perspective of the “tiger economies” of the Far East. Loath though many Europeans may be to acknowledge it, the long-term future of the EU looks less than promising. Turkish energy could yet arrest Europe’s decline into terminal decadence.
Full Turkish accession to the EU may prove a lengthy and arduous process. Much stands in its way, what with Turkish outrage over the EU’s insistence that Turkey recognize the Greek Republic of Cyprus and Europe’s rising tide of Islamaphobia. Conceivably, the whole exercise could miscarry. All the same, many sensed that history was being made last week. No one will have been more mindful of this than Tony Blair. The British prime minister has often seemed unduly anxious to present himself as a man of destiny. Last week he had credible grounds for doing so.
