EU deaf to Turkey’s knocking

But at a summit in Copenhagen, the European Union on Friday only agreed to review Turkey’s application for membership in December 2004, let alone give the a date for talks to begin. In spite of support from six EU members and fierce lobbying from the United States, Ankara’s request for early admission was rejected. And any accession talks have been made conditional on an improvement in Turkey’s democratic and human rights record. These proposals will now be put to Turkish Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, who had demanded nothing less than a firm date in 2003 for the start of negotiations. On Wednesday, the Turkish daily Sabah splashed on its front page: "2003 or nothing."

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, former mayor of Istanbul and leader of the ruling Justice and Development Party, has been frantically touring key European capitals lobbying for the start of negotiations. He has also been to Washington, where he received total support from the Bush administration: Turkey is a key NATO ally and the role of Turkish air bases will be crucial in the event of an attack against Iraq. But even his efforts and the US pressure combined have not been enough for the Europeans to throw open their doors.

The latest snub does raise some awkward issues in the immediate term. The problem is, according to a poll by the University of Istanbul, 96.3 percent of Turks are against an armed offensive against Iraq, and 77.4 percent say that Turkey should not be involved and should not offer access to its air bases. Having been spurned, the country’s leaders could be tempted to pander to this sentiment.

In the longer term, though, Turkey’s march towards Europe seems as inevitable as America’s march to war against Iraq. On Tuesday, the Turkish parliament adopted a first batch of democratic reforms. A second batch will be voted in the next few days, and once the dust settles, it is unlikely that Turkey will abandon its European dream.

Yalta, the Black Sea resort, is assured of a place in history because that’s where Joseph Stalin, Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill actually divided Europe in February 1945. The division will disappear only in 2004, when a group of Central and Eastern European states enter the EU: Poland, Hungary, the Czech republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, new members alongside Cyprus and Malta. The summit in Copenhagen is formalizing their entry. But they will only be an effective part of the EU from May 2004 onwards. Romania and Bulgaria will enter only in 2007.

For 40 years, these Central and Eastern European states were on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The actual reunification of Europe is taking place 13 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Turks see these numbers and think: it’s not such a long wait. Turkey may become an EU member well beyond 2010, but Gul prefers to think current relations between his country and the European Union are based on ties that have been fructifying "for at least three centuries". In a sort of manifesto addressed to many key European partners and published by Le Monde, the prime minister says that Turkey abides by European values, and "because of its history, geography and system of values, acts and reacts as European". The prime minister defends Turkey’s entry in the EU as "a national project, supported by the great majority of the population". And he stresses that only by including Turkey will Europe realize its potential as "a truly global power".

Some historians and politicians scattered around Europe, though, are against Turkey’s entry in the European Union. They are incapable of answering the key question: What is Europe to do about the spread of Islam throughout the continent?

There are very few similarities between Islam in Turkey and Islam in the Middle East. The republic molded by Kemal Ataturk is essentially secular. There’s no question of going back to Sharia, Islamic law. Vakiflar – the religious foundations – were secularized. Wearing Islamic clothes is forbidden to men – and to women as well in certain occasions. Sufis are banned – although they continue to exist in a semi-clandestine way.

The most striking characteristic of Turkish Islam is a pluralist political system – that accommodates Islamists as well – mixed with the enormous influence of Western culture, and how it molded the thinking of Islamic intellectuals. That’s the charm of Turkish Islam – a truly peaceful Islam that may reject secularization a la Ataturk but does not try to subvert the Western notion of the Turkish nation-state.

There was a time when Europe wanted to turn the Ottomans towards Asia. But today the best European minds think the Turk way is the European way. Historian Lucien Febvre, in his famous lectures about Europe at the legendary College de France in Paris, wrote in 1999, "Our European political universe is not a universe in two dimensions. It’s a universe in three dimensions … and how, for instance, Europe and Asia could live without one another. Here, a Westernized Turkey, filled with European institutions, universities, schools, art services … from this Europe to this Asia, from this Asia to this Europe, we pass through a series of subtle translations. Today’s Turkey is something of a Balkanic state of yesterday. And a Balkanic state of yesterday is already the antichamber of a world that goes from Europe to Asia."

So it is impossible to refuse entry in the European Union to a Balkanic state. The problem for Europe is rather how to bypass the status of a mere free trade zone – basically what the British want – and arrive at the configuration of a true political entity. The best European minds believe Turkey’s entry would not threaten a regression in Europe. Febvre again: "How to integrate the biggest possible ensembles, ensembles united by history? What could we profit from the exclusion of Islam from a large Western world? Do we want to federate it again against ‘the infidels’."

In Turkey, a new generation of intellectuals, feminists, entrepreneurs from Anatolia all know Western thinking as well as Muslim thinking. They may consider Islamic communities more important than the nation-state, but they definitely want freedom, political pluralism, human rights and social justice. They want to destroy the abyss between the newcomers from Asia Minor and the elites in Istanbul.

For a new generation in Europe, Turkey’s accession to the EU represents a dialogue with Islam way beyond Western colonial arrogance. It will even lead to thinking in Utopian terms. There are many people now trying to invent many Europes in one, the Euromediterranean joining southern Europe in the Maghreb, and then reaching towards the Middle East, a continental Europe from Brest to Moscow, a Europe of islands, a Europe of seas. The common denominator is always the idea of one single Europe as a political and social model, based on common deliberations and social solidarity. This inclusive Europe could really be a role model for the whole world.