Why should Europe alienate Turkey from EU membership?
By Gwynne Dyer
LONDON (JP): Last Thursday, in Washington, the earth shook and the sun stood still. Whole squadrons of winged pigs took flight as the Greek foreign minister told the press: "Turkey certainly belongs to Europe....If Turkey is not part of European history, then Greece is not part of European history."
Well, obviously. From the 15th to the 19th century, the center of gravity of the Ottoman (Turkish) empire was in the Balkans. Turkey was Europe's only Moslem great power, but it was undeniably European: Istanbul is on the same latitude as Rome and Madrid, and hundreds of kilometers (miles) farther west than Moscow.
It was nonetheless astounding to hear a Greek official say so, given the deep fear and suspicion with which most Greeks view Turkey. But Greek Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos was coming out of a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright when he made those comments on March 6, and he had his reasons.
Most Greeks don't like the Turkey they have as a neighbor now: a big, powerful, rapidly industrializing country that outnumbers them six-to-one. But at least the 65 million Turks live in a democratic country with a free press, a constitution that bans anybody from using religion for political ends, and an army determined to keep the country's politics secular.
A fundamentalist Turkey would be a far more uncomfortable neighbor for Greece. Even a Greek foreign minister can be persuaded to say a few words in defense of Turkey's 'European vocation' if he thinks the alternative is a hostile Turkey ruled by religious fanatics.
But is such a Turkey really possible? It would take a political genius to drive Turkey, with its deeply rooted secular traditions, into the arms of the Islamic fundamentalists. But in German Chancellor Helmut Kohl we may have just such a genius.
Kohl simply got cross because Turkey was threatening not to ratify NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe (thereby blocking the process) unless the European Union allowed Turkey to join.
Turkey has been an associate member of the European economic block since 1962. It applied for full membership in the EU (which it has been promised repeatedly) in 1989. Then the Iron Curtain fell, and various ex-Communist countries like Poland leap-frogged to the head of the queue for EU membership.
This brush-off greatly annoyed the Turks, and the fact that they have been a full member of NATO since 1960 gave them leverage. So Ankara threatened not to ratify NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe unless its partners came up with EU membership for Turkey.
It isn't clear whether Kohl's aim was to warn Turkey or to punish it, but he retaliated by black-balling Ankara's EU membership. On March 4, at a Brussels meeting of the various Christian Democratic parties of Europe, the German Chancellor incited several of his fellow leaders to say that Turkey could never join the EU -- because it wasn't 'European'.
The bluntest words of rejection came from the former Christian Democratic prime minister of Belgium, Wilfried Martens, who said: "We are creating a European Union. This is a European project." After 34 years of Turkish negotiations to enter the EU, and numerous promises by Brussels that one day it would be possible, suddenly Turkey wasn't eligible because it wasn't 'European' enough -- wasn't Christian enough, to put it bluntly.
It was crystal clear that Kohl himself had instigated this rejection -- and Turks were furious. "When there is a struggle, Turkey is there," said Turkish Foreign Minister Tansu Ciller the next day, citing Turkey's 1,000 dead in the Korean War and its long loyalty to NATO. "But when the victory is being celebrated after the struggle," she complained, "Turkey is not included."
The country's most influential columnist, Mehmet Ali Birand, wrote that he had been arguing for 20 years that the EU was not just a Christian club. "I must have been wrong," he continued. "I do not believe you (Europeans) any more. I believe that you are no different from the Islamic fundamentalists here."
The internal situation in Turkey is what makes the current dispute so dangerous. For the present Turkish government is a coalition led by the Welfare Party, who are Islamic fundamentalists in the thinnest of disguises.
The Welfare Party won only one-fifth of the votes in the last election, but the tangled tactics of coalition-building delivered its leader, Necmettin Erbakan, into the prime minister's chair. He has been exploiting this historic opportunity to wean Turkey away from Europe and secularism, pushing for a more 'Islamic' society at home and for closer ties with countries like Iran abroad.
After eight months of this, the country is in crisis. Last week the Turkish army gave Erbakan an ultimatum to end his attack on the secular foundations of modern Turkey. After resisting for 36 hours, Erbakan gave in and signed the National Security Council's list of measures designed to stamp out Islamic fundamentalism, but everybody knows he is only making a tactical retreat.
The divisions in Turkish society are growing ever more acute, with millions of secular-minded Turks turning out their lights for a minute at 9 p.m. each night to express their opposition to the government's policies. And then, in this unstable situation, Helmut Kohl engineers a public rejection of Turkey as 'not European'.
If Turks act on the implications of Kohl's ignorant assertion, all Europe will rue the result: a powerful, fundamentalist Turkey dominating the Balkans, Central Asia, and much of the Middle East.
German foreign policy is in emergency damage control mode, and Erbakan has already been invited to Germany in an attempt to make amends. The United States is twisting arms in all the European capitals to get the question of Turkish entry in the EU back on the table. Even the Greeks understand the urgent need to reassure the Turks of Europe's good intentions.
It will probably be all right, because most Turks are neither fundamentalists nor fools. But no thanks are due to Helmut Kohl.