Reporting: Europe
CULTURE CLASH IN E.U.'S ADMISSION OF TURKEY WORRIES U.S.
by Lucy Komisar
American Reporter Correspondent
LaBaule, France
LaBAULE, France -- People's eyes now are on Iraq, deemed by Bush officials a key factor in reshaping the Middle East. A few glances ought to shift toward its neighbor, Turkey, which could be as important for the future of the Muslim world.
Events occurring in Europe now will have a major impact on what role Turkey plays. I remember when, in college history classes, I heard Turkey referred to as "the sick man of Europe." Now that it's started to get healthy, there's a debate among Europeans about whether it's "of Europe" at all.
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Tordjman, Parmentier, Berg on Turkey: Friend or alien? Photo: Lucy Komisar |
In July, the Turkish parliament passed two laws that, if enforced, will move the country toward democracy. One weakens the power of the military, which mounted coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980. The U.S. either kept silent or offered support to those takeovers, but the Europeans, who roundly denounced the especially brutal 1980 military junta, made Turkish repression a target of continuing criticism. The new law would make the military-dominated National Security Council - until now a shadow government - advisory.
The other measure is a limited amnesty for Kurdish guerrillas. Till the 1999 ceasefire, they engaged in a war in the south-eastern part of the country prompted by repression so severe that it denied them the right to speak their own language.
Other laws already passed would - again, if enforced - limit arrests for crimes of expression (generally deemed to be "promoting terrorism" or "attacking the secular state") and the abuse of prisoners, routinely subject to torture.
The reason for these changes is Turkey's desire to join the European Union. It's been on a "waiting list" for years, and it got a promise from EU ministers meeting in Copenhagen at the end of 2001, to move to the "short list." It has until the end of next year to show that it meets European standards of governance. It is hoping for a date on which negotiations for accession can begin.
But Turkey's admission to Europe also depends on whether ordinary Europeans and the political elites overcome strong doubts about whether Turkey is really "European" enough to join them. That is heightened by the fact that the ruling party calls itself "Islamist." The Turks have denounced these assertions as anti-Muslim racism, or as economic protectionism against the large Turkish labor force.
At Forum 21 (http://www.forum-21.com/), an annual meeting in France of Americans and Europeans from the worlds of business, diplomacy, science and culture, former French officials expressed divergent views. Forum 21, held this year at LaBaule, on the Atlantic coast of Brittany, was started in 2001 by Paul Weinstein and Abby Hirsch Weinstein, Americans living in Paris. He is president of Rive Droite International Investments, and she is a journalist.
Guillaume Parmentier is director of the French Center on the United States at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI). He was Director of the Civilian Affairs Committee of the North Atlantic Assembly, Deputy Director of Information and Head of External Relations at NATO, and advisor to the French Minister of Defense. He has visited Turkey 17 times.
Parmentier said, " Turkey is changing so much, so rapidly, that it would be an error to let it join the European Union."
He explained, "Traditionally Turkey has been ruled by a traditional elite, the military and the professional classes. Both were to a very large extent taught either in foreign schools and universities in Turkey - American, British, French, German, Italian - or abroad. This is an elite that can justifiably call itself European, or more than European, international. It's an elite that shares an internationalist tradition, although it has nationalist elements."
"But," he continued, "there is a new elite, and the present government party is an expression of this new elite. I call that the party of 'the bazaar.' It is the party of economic development and welfare, a capitalist or pre-capitalist kind of party. This is the elite that is taking over. This change is every bit as important for Turkey as the change from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie in the early 19th century."
Together with that he pointed to the demographic factor, with the Turkish masses growing at "enormous speed," while the elites, especially the professionals, have very small European-size families. "The country is becoming increasingly dominated in numbers by people who are Middle Eastern rather than European in the way they feel in their minds," he said.
"This makes it very risky, indeed very unreasonable, to expand the EU to include Turkey fast," Parmentier continued. "Turkey would be the largest country in terms of numbers in the EU in 10 or 15 years, and it would be a country that is radically different from any other country in the EU. That has very little to do with religion. It has to do with culture."
He proposed instead a system of close association, giving Turkey a special status with the EU. He acknowledged that it would be very difficult to go back on the Copenhagen pledge. He said, "I'm not sure how we can get out of that except by creating different levels of membership in the EU, with the core of a small number of countries that have a real determination to move together."
But Jean-Daniel Tordjman, French Inspector General of Finance took an opposite approach. Tordjman, whose focus is economic, was formerly Special Representative of France for International Investment, Minister for Economic and Commercial Affairs at the French Embassy in Washington, and Deputy Secretary for the French Ministry of Commerce,
The question of Turkey is "crucial for all of us, European and American," he declared.
"Turkey is not a second-rate underdeveloped country," Tordjman explained. "It's a former empire which has dominated China, India, Russia, which was very present in Eastern Europe, which has major influence in Central Asia, which is crucial for the Middle East...it's a very powerful country with a strong army with a lot of discipline."
He noted that Turks after World War I with their leader Kemal Ataturk had "made a clear choice to become a secular country with religion in its place, opening the way for emancipation of women, fighting the irrationality of religious movements, integrating themselves into NATO and being an ally of the West." He added, "They can be very helpful, but if they are against us, it can be a real drama for all of us."
Agreeing with Parmentier that there has been "a major revolution" moving power away from the Western-identified elite, he offered as an example the case of Foreign Minister Ismail Cem, who is a Sabbatian (a cult which two centuries ago was Jewish), and minister of finance Kemal Dervis, whose family members had served as ministers of finance in the Ottoman Empire for more than a century.
Tordjman said, "During the last 80 years, the military power was very strong, with a National Security Council which is not limited to military questions but which decides on the main issues of the country. These people had an alliance with the business community and with all westernized people."
"The westernized people were not able to take the leadership," he said. "The vacuum was taken by an alliance between the Muslims who were able to exclude the extremists and the military. This is now the strong alliance."
"Our reaction was really stupid," Tordjman said. He criticized the position taken by former French President Giscard d'Estaing who raised questions about Turkey's fitness for EU membership. "He was saying you are not European, you are not Christian, so you are excluded from Europe. That position weakened our friends in Turkey in a terrible way," Tordjman said.
Americans had shown comparable insensitivity when, he said, it attempted to "bribe" Turkey with $20 billion to allow the U.S. army to use Turkish territory as a staging ground for northern Iraq. Tordjman said, "You have invested in this country for 50 years constantly, and at a crucial moment you did not send a high level team to persuade people in the middle to facilitate the opening of the northern front. That was a mistake."
"You need to treat your allies as allies and not to tell them this is our decision, you have to comply," he said, adding, "One of the generals of the Turkish leadership talked about a new alliance with Iran and Russia."
Axel Berg, a Social Democratic member of the German parliament, got up from the audience to shift the focus. "Huntington is dead," he declared, "We won't have a clash of civilizations or religions or cultures, but maybe we'll have a clash between rich and poor, or between those who are sustainable in their politics and those who are not."
There's an economic reason behind political changes in Turkey, he argued, not religious or cultural ones. He said, "Poor people look for leadership, and in some of these Islamic groups they can find it." He added, "Three weeks ago, I was in Ethiopia. They're more scared of the radical Christians in Africa."
And he pointed out the shared interests of Europe and developing countries. "We in Europe have demographic problems: people get older, there are not enough jobs, and all our social systems are in question." He said, "The whole western world needs new markets. In Islamic states, they need enlightenment and separation of church and state. Turkey is the most advanced of all these countries in this direction. I think we should give a hand to Turkey as to the others, and that will be good for both peace and economy."
Tordjman agreed on the strategic economic importance of Turkey, pointing out that it controls the source of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers which supply water to Iraq and Syria, and it can host the pipelines that transport oil and gas from fields in Central Asia.
But he stressed the importance of its contribution to peace. He said, "Maybe we are like in the 30s between the French and the Germans. He said the evolution of the "Arab Street" could make one fear the potential confrontation between the West, China and India on one side and the Islamic countries led by sympathizers of Al Qaida on the other.
He said, "Turkey is a very powerful country. We need to have them on our side. It is a country looking to secular Islam. Having the west, Europe, open to this vision will reinforce it." He said that the alliance between the military and the Islamists comes partly from Europeans' attitude of excluding the Turks." He said, "If we focus on the building of Europe, we don't need the Turks. But, if we look at the more global picture, we have to be very careful."
Parmentier raised the central fear of critics of Turkish accession. He said one of the members of the audience was "right in hinting that the European Union cannot be democratic with Turkey in." He explained that "having Turkish members of parliament, given their traditions and the way they behave toward government, as the largest single national group in the European parliament doesn't seem to me to be the way to insure a proper democratic debate in this parliament - and I know the Turkish parliament reasonable well."
"More importantly," he added, "because the people in Europe won't accept it and it will have to be forced upon them."
Robert Pingeon, an American who is president of Mestre Associates Inc., a Paris public relations company, raised the issue of the strong U.S. lobbying of its European allies to have them accept Turkish admission into the EU.
Tordjman, replied, "I cannot imagine the U.S. now, after what happened on the northern front, to push the interests of Turkey in Europe. Within Turkey, the military leadership was torpedoing the agreement in Cyprus." (He referred to a UN-brokered attempt to end the division of the island between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, dating to a Turkish invasion in 1974. That invasion was the result of an attempted coup supported by the Greek military junta of the time.) And the people in power, the alliance between the Islamists and military, don't want to be integrated. The military don't want democracy, don't want to lose their economic interests; the Islamists don't want to be included in a majority Christian Europe."
Parmentier disagreed. "I think the army is not hostile to getting into the EU," he said. "Therefore I think they see that their getting into the political process in a very open way would delay consideration of membership in the union to such a degree that they are very reluctant to do it. It's a matter of the real amount of influence the army will want to have on political decision-making on a day-to-day basis. At the moment there isn't too much. I think this is bound to change, and the realities of Turkey will come back. We will see more and more interference in a discreet manner in decision-making. We saw that in Cyprus."
An American in the audience wondered, "Why does the EU care what the U.S. thinks about how the EU develops?"
Parmentier supplied the reason why the European want to persuade Americans of their views. He said, "You have an enormous amount of influence on the body politics of many European countries, so what you say is taken serious by many countries, even when it's not serious. Inevitably this has a bearing on our internal discussions."
Lucy Komisar welcomes your comments. Please send them to lkomisar@echonyc.com.
Copyright 2003 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.