[A-List] Turkey: Garton Ash on EU membership

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

A bridge too far?

In deciding if Turkey should join the EU, the logic of unity clashes with
the logic of peace

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday November 14, 2002
The Guardian

When should Iraq join the European Union? A ridiculous question, you may
say. But next month Europe's leaders will be talking very seriously about
taking in Iraq's immediate neighbour, Turkey. If Turkey, why not,
eventually, Iraq?

Because it is not a European country, you say. But is Turkey? By all
conventional geography, only a tiny part of Turkey, our side of the
Bosphorus, lies in Europe. Through much of European history, Europe defined
itself against "the Turk", the Arabs and Islam. For the EU to cross the
Bosphorus is already to cross a rubicon. This is to move from a community
based on centuries-old notions of shared history and geography to one based
on shared democratic standards and the future. Turkey, they say, is a
"bridge" between Europe and the Middle East, but having stepped on to that
bridge it would not be a much larger step - in terms of history and
geography - to cross to Iraq.

Yet we may be right to step on to the bridge. The case for accepting Turkey
is strong, especially in the post-9/11 world. It has everything to do with
the "war against terrorism". This is not because Washington will need
Turkish co-operation for the northern part of its planned three-prong
invasion of Iraq, although it will. That must not sway Europe, one way or
the other, in such a big decision. But if you are going to address the
deeper causes of Islamist terrorism you need to show people in the Middle
East the benefits that can flow to Muslims who accept the basic standards of
democratic modernity. What better example could there be than the moderate
Islamist party which just swept to power in free and fair elections in
Turkey, which accepts the secular state, and whose leader will tomorrow
start a tour of European capitals to press for his country's EU membership?

Of course, to join the EU you must be a democratic state, respecting human
and minority rights. Obviously Iraq - less a haven for terrorists than a
regime of state terror - is light years from that. But Turkey has also been
far removed from the necessary standards. It has routinely persecuted its
own dissidents, and especially its Kurds. Human Rights Watch notes detailed
reports of torture involving 55 people since February this year. This
summer, however, the country passed a raft of legislation abolishing the
death penalty, freeing the media and improving minority rights for the
Kurds. It has a draft anti-torture law which the new, Muslim government will
probably enact.

Why is Turkey getting better? Because it wants to join the EU. Who is its
strongest supporter inside the EU? Its historic enemy, Greece. What a
chance! The logic of spreading democracy and respect for human rights, of
addressing the deeper causes of terrorism, of helping Islam to adapt to the
modern world and avoiding a bloody "clash of civilisations" cries out for us
to say "yes".

Yet last week Valery Giscard d'Estaing said what many Europeans actually
think: never! Turkish membership would, he opined, "be the end of the EU".
There are some very bad reasons for saying this. A Turkish member of the
Convention on the Future of Europe immediately retorted that Giscard is a
mirror-image of the Muslim integrationists: "He's a Christian
integrationist. He thinks the union is a Christian club." And, we might add,
a rich white man's Christian club, reluctant even to admit not-so-rich
Christian Slavs, let alone poor and not-quite-so-white Muslim Turks.

However, there is one good reason beside the bad ones. Giscard is not just
an elderly, white, conservative, Catholic Frenchman; he is also president of
that Convention on the Future of Europe. If you are trying to think how the
European Union might itself be a more coherent political community then the
prospect of Turkey joining can lead you to blow a fuse.

As I argued in my last column, it is hard enough to imagine a vibrant
democratic community of 25 European countries with no common language. Throw
in 70 million mainly Muslim Turks, with such a different history and
political culture, and the mind boggles. Can you see Shropshire farmers or
Scottish workers happily accepting a Brussels decision swung by Turkish
votes?

At stake is not just whether this thing could still be called a European
Union. It is whether it could ever be a union at all. So when they talk
Turkey next month, at the Copenhagen summit, Europe's leaders will be asking
the biggest question of all: what's Europe for? Two powerful logics clash at
the gates of the Bosphorus: the logic of unity and the logic of peace. If
Europe is mainly about creating a coherent political community, with some
aspirations to be a superpower, we stop this side of the Bosphorus - for
another decade, at the very least. If we think it is more urgent to promote
democracy, respect for human rights, prosperity and therefore the chances
for peace in the most dangerous region in the world, we step boldly on to
that bridge.

Yet we must know what we are doing. Each bridge leads to another. Morocco's
application for membership of the EU has been turned down on the grounds
that it is not a European country. Can we really argue that Turkey
definitely is a European country and Morocco definitely is not? Just down
the road from Turkey is Israel - a chunk of Europe implanted in the Middle
East. European-type solutions, with lots of cross-border cooperation,
putting economic ties before military ambitions, are just what the state of
Israel and the new state of Palestine will need. If it comes to war with
Iraq, you can bet your bottom euro that Europeans will be centrally involved
in the subsequent "nation-building". ("America does the cooking, Europe does
the washing up," as the bitter quip goes.) So then you could end up with a
European protectorate - Iraq - right next to a European member - Turkey.

Of course, the ideal thing - at least from the point of view of rich,
pro-integration Europeans - would be for countries in the Middle East to
make their own Middle Eastern union, one of a worldwide network of unions of
democratic states. But that hardly seems likely. A rejected Turkey would not
just turn round to make a nice little local copy of the EU in the Middle
East, even if it could.

We have to decide. Giscard thinks including Turkey would turn the union into
the old British dream of an ever larger free trade area. Even Britain is way
beyond that.

But an EU including Turkey would be somewhat less European and somewhat less
of a union. It might more accurately be described as a community of
contiguous democracies. Is that necessarily a worse thing? It's quite
possible to conclude that Turkey is not a European country and should join
the European Union.

So, with Iraq and Osama bin Laden in mind, should we want Turkey in? For
decades, Europe's answer has been: we very much want Turkey to go on wanting
to join, but we secretly hope it will never quite make it. Now the space for
such false-bottomed ambiguity is shrinking. The crunch is near.