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ANKARA, Turkey- A "no" to Turkey starting
negotiations to enter the European Union on Oct. 3
would have "centuries of implications," one
influential Turkish academic, Husseyin Bagci, put it
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 to the Muslim
one.
Such a rejection would make it clear, according to
the provost of Istanbul's Bahcesehir University,
Eser Karakas, that Europe had no interest in
becoming the great power that Turkey, with its large
population and army, could help make it - a power
able to play an influential role in the Middle East,
Central Asia and the Caucasus, without being
subordinated always to U.S. policies.
Yet if there are no good reasons for a "no," there
are reasons for caution. And now that it seems
likely that Germany's next chancellor will be Angela
Merkel, who has said that Turkey should only be
granted "privileged partnership" and not full
membership, Europe will be compelled to slow down
and think hard about Turkey.
Turkey is still just muddling through toward
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 8th
to 11th centuries, did not push forward the
frontiers of knowledge, despite its military
prowess. The lasting tensions between these two
worlds 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 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.
Ankara has not delivered on its promises to the
Kurds, which is why the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers'
Party, and its 7,000 fighters in the mountains of
the southeast began fighting again this year,
breaking a five-year truce.
The government had 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 Britain 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. That is why, when the prime
minister made a 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 failing 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. Eighty years after Ataturk
pointed Turkey's nose in the direction of Europe, it
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 the Jews
and encouraged them to leave. Ten years later, the
large Greek Christian community began to be driven
out. Today the Byzantine churches largely remain
state-run museums. There is little trace of the fact
that for more than a thousand years, Constantinople
was the center of the Christian world.
A "yes" on Oct. 3 would be consistent with previous
EU promises. It must, however, be a "yes, but."
There cannot be promises about an entry date. It
should probably be a generation away.
(Jonathan Power is a commentator on foreign
affairs.)
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