On October 3, after many long hours of squabbling and intense negotiations, the European Union finally agreed to begin membership talks with Turkey. By overcoming Austria’s considerable efforts to delay and even derail the process by imposing conditions for entry that were clearly unacceptable to Ankara, the EU succeeded in avoiding a historic collapse in Turkey’s decades-long effort to “join Europe,” as the saying goes.
Jack Straw, Britain’s foreign secretary, had relentlessly pushed for, and ultimately brokered, the deal. His subsequent triumphalism was, therefore, both predictable and irrelevant. (Its presidency of the EU having turned into such a muddle, the UK is desperate for any positive spin.) US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who had been actively involved in the arm-twisting, was more sedate. Things have not been going well lately for the Bush administration, and Dr. Rice may be suffering from imperial fatigue. Still, the secretary of state’s reserve was a better gauge of what actually occurred a couple of weeks ago than the foreign secretary’s premature celebration and forced, faux-historical rhetoric.
To many, the consensus reached on Turkey proved that the EU is capable of functioning as a united, and integrated, body on a very difficult—in fact, potentially divisive—issue, particularly when compared to the failed efforts to ratify the constitutional treaty a few months earlier. The problem is, the two issues could hardly be more different in nature—or, more to the point, in their fundamental meaning. The rejection of the European “constitution” by the overwhelming majority of the people of both France and the Netherlands represented a very conscious and direct repudiation of the EU’s direction—which is to say, of its leadership—during the last few years. The “successful” resolution of the Turkish talks on October 3, however, was negotiated precisely by that same leadership, a political and (even more important) social elite whose credibility among European electorates seems to diminish more each day.
In the event, the agreement on accession talks was reached because the entire negotiation was simply about that: accession talks, a mere first step in what is already proving to be an inordinately long haul. Austria notwithstanding, most countries, including Greece and Cyprus, did not seriously attempt to derail Turkey’s Occidental Express because they know that, at the moment, it looks more like a milk train than a TGV. Once again, the vast majority of the Greek media showed how disconnected it is from reality. In accusing the Greek government of not assuming a hard enough line against Turkey, it ignored the overarching European truth: namely, that Ankara’s fate will no longer be determined in Athens or even Leukôsia, but in Paris and Berlin and Copenhagen and, yes, Vienna.
Which is why things look bleaker now for Turkey than they ever looked when opposition to its accession to the EU came only, and conveniently for Ankara, from Greece and Cyprus. Public opinion among the electorates of the 25 EU member-states is negative, to put it mildly. This attitude is not likely to change quickly, if at all, unless Europeans become convinced—which they are clearly not now—that Turkey is not a Trojan Horse, either for religious medievalism or (six of one, half dozen of the other) American hegemony. In its vast majority, European opposition to Turkey stems from Europeans’ perception of what Europe actually means, of who they really are, and of how all of this is threatened by a transparent, and cynical, desire to sacrifice culture and society to politics and economics.
We have said it before, we repeat it now, and we will probably have to repeat it for many years to come: we support Turkey’s entry into the European Union, given that Turkey wholly fulfills the conditions for it. But even we have to wonder what Turks themselves really want from Europe when we see their leading writer, and Nobel Prize candidate, Orhan Pamuk, threatened with prosecution for defending historical truth (on the Armenian exterminations and Kurdish repressions), Turkish women being assaulted by police for demanding equality of citizenship, universities and scholars being legally enjoined from holding an academic conference (to determine precisely the premeditated nature of the destruction of the Armenian communities of Turkey), and newspaper editors being tried for “seditious” opinions. We know European bigotry when we see it, and hear it. But we can also discern Turkish ambivalence, and panic, and arrogance, and, yes, even a reverse anti-European bigotry, and—worst of all, and something that only Turks can struggle against and defeat among themselves—active opposition to conforming to European values because they are considered to be “anti-Turkish.”
Turkey’s foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, recently said that no country “can shoot itself in the foot like Turkey can.” Turkey runs the risk of shooting itself in the head. And more’s the pity, since we believe that Turkey’s accession to the European Union can radically alter the continent’s character—and not at all for the worse, as currently feared by so many.