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A
week from today, barring a last-minute upset, there
will be a small, quiet signing ceremony, probably in
Strasbourg. Not even the UK Foreign Office seems
entirely sure of the venue or its format. But no one
is questioning the scale of the ambition nor the
risks which underpin this event — the opening of the
accession process for Turkey’s membership of the
European Union. Welcome to regime change,
European-style. The parallels are inescapable: the
US launched its regime change in a Muslim country
with shock and awe, an unprecedented onslaught of
military power. The EU quietly initiates its regime
change in the Muslim country next door with the
shock of 80,000 pages of EU regulations on
everything from the treatment of waste water to the
protection of Kurdish-minority rights. While one
sends in its Humvees and helicopters, the other
sends in an army of management consultants,
human-rights lawyers and food-hygiene specialists.
The EU model uses the incentive of membership to
insist on dramatic change — once a country is a
member, the leverage is lost. So Turkey will have to
jump through a number of hoops on issues such as
corruption and sewerage, which might trip up many of
the oldest EU members. It’s a style of regime change
which is “cheap, voluntary and hence long-lasting”,
points out Steven Everts in a new pamphlet,Why
Europe Should Embrace Turkey.
This kind of regime change is the only way in which
the EU can lay claim to being a serious global
player — on almost every recent international
crisis, from Bosnia to Iraq, internal squabbles
crippled an effective response. No wonder then that
there are plenty of Europhiles, particularly in the
UK, whose eyes glitter at the prospect of Turkey in
the EU queue. They rattle off the long list of
advantages: the geo-strategic significance of Turkey
in relation to the Caucasus and the Middle East; the
key gas supplies that now run through Turkey; the
demographic advantages of a much younger population;
the dynamic Turkish economy — grown by a quarter
since 2001; securing Europe’s back door against
drugs and people-trafficking.
Besides, Turkey has aspired to EU membership for
over 40 years, and such has been its enthusiasm in
the past few years that, to win Brussels’ favour, it
has agreed to the most ambitious political and
economic reform programme since the secular
moderniser Kemal Ataturk. Regime change is already
well under way in Istanbul, but not irrevocable; the
prospective trial of the novelist Orhan Pamuk for
his comments on the Armenian massacre indicate that
some in Turkey are only too keen to torpedo the
whole process. If Europe was to turn truculent with
Turkey, an extraordinary opportunity to strengthen
human rights and ensure stable democracy would be
lost. The conclusion is clear: Turkish membership is
a “no-brainer”, insist Britain’s Euro elite —
commentators, government and analysts alike.
What fuels this British enthusiasm is that Turkey
offers the tantalising possibility of exorcising the
“clash of civilisations” ghost. If there was a
secular, democratic, economically successful Muslim
state it would kill off intense arguments about the
incompatibility of Islam with democracy or Islam
with human rights and modernity. Furthermore, 80
million Turks within the EU would also kill off the
EU’s credibility deficit in the Muslim world, where
it’s seen as a Christian, white club with a dodgy
imperial past (although the latter is as much a
Turkish problem as a European one in the region).
Finally — the coup de grace — it would strengthen
the claim of Europe’s 15 million-strong Muslim
minority to a home in Europe. In sharp contrast to
the US, Europe could shape a new, prosperous and
peaceful accommodation between Islam and the secular
West.
But this is the nub of the problem — vast swaths of
Europe don’t buy it. Either they don’t believe a
peaceful accommodation with Muslims is possible or
they fear it requires such a dilution of European
identity that they don’t want it. Britain’s
enthusiasm is echoed in only a few countries such as
Poland and Spain, while across the rest of the
continent the “clash of civilisations” argument is
flourishing. Hence the quietness of the short
ceremony next Monday. No one has any desire to
launch this project of regime change with a fanfare
— it fills European populations with horror. The
figures from a recent Eurobarometer poll tell it
all: 80% of Austrians are against, and only 10% in
favour; 70% of the French are against and 74% of the
Germans. It’s going to need a very hard sell to
convince millions of people that Turkish membership
is in their interests, and after the failure of a
previous Euro elite project — the constitution — no
one’s relishing the challenge.
The accession process will take at least a decade
and over that time both the EU and Turkey are likely
to change dramatically, but what will make the
process so fascinating is that as the rows rumble on
(no one denies that it’s going to be rocky — the
Turks are allegedly “terrible negotiators”, every
detail becoming a point of national honour) it will
be the canvas on which will be projected all of
Europe’s crucial choices.
Will self-interest — put crudely, young Turks might
pay for ageing Europe’s pensions — be trumped by the
unpredictable politics of identity as an insecure
Europe, aware of its shrinking demographic and
economic weight in the world, pulls up the
drawbridge and opts to define itself more narrowly
around its historical Christian identity?
This self-interest isn’t obvious: it will need
European politicians to do a lot of explaining.
Geo-strategic thinking doesn’t come easily to your
average voter and they’ll need reassurance that they
are not going to be swamped by cheap Turkish labour.
Free movement of labour can be staggered, as it is
for the new eastern European members, and is
unlikely to come before 2022. Similarly, structural
funds are not going to be swallowed up whole in the
peasant hinterland of Anatolia and probably won’t be
accessible by Turkey until after 2020.
But the reticence about taking on the advocacy role
for Turkish membership has been evident across the
political spectrum in Germany as politicians fear
being ambushed by the visceral emotions stirred up
by Turkey. Austria and Germany are still thinking of
the geese whose honking woke the army when Vienna
was under siege from the Ottoman Turks in the 16th
century, commented one seasoned observer.
Can such history be laid to rest when it has sunk
such long and deep roots into the national identity?
All over the world, in places such as Rwanda and
South Africa, there are many grappling with
different formulations of just that question. The EU
ploughs funds and diplomacy in to achieve an
affirmative. How hollow does that ring if Europe
itself, despite all its vaunted values of freedom
and tolerance and its envied prosperity, fails the
test and lets history win. Watch Turkey’s accession
process in the years to come as the barometer of
Europe’s degree of civilisation. —Dawn/The Guardian
News Service
www.dawn.com
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