THE TELEGRAPH: Bringing Turkey into the fold raises profound questions about the very nature of European identity, reports David Blair in Istanbul.
Burying the grievances bequeathed by history lies at the heart of the European ideal. The enmities of living memory, particularly the fratricidal struggle between France and Germany, no longer haunt the European Union, yet one far older and deeper fear still lurks behind a vital question about its future.
Five centuries ago, Europe lived in dread of Turkey’s expansion up the Danube valley, with Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire’s longest-serving and most successful Sultan, dispatching his armies from Istanbul to conquer Hungary and besiege Vienna.
Today, Turkey is a secular democracy, a longstanding member of Nato, an adherent of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Council of Europe, and a country firmly anchored in the West. Suleiman built a magnificent mosque that still dominates Istanbul’s skyline, but the streets around his creation are not relics of Byzantium – they look and feel like any in Europe’s Mediterranean heartland.
Many ordinary Turks proclaim themselves to be European and their country’s Western outlook is woven into the very fabric of the secular republic created by Ataturk in 1923. Accordingly, Turkey’s government harbours a cherished ambition to join the European Union. Formal accession talks designed to achieve this aim began in 2005, with Britain the most prominent supporter of Turkey’s bid for membership.
Yet bringing Turkey into the fold raises profound questions about the very nature of European identity and the boundaries of its civilisation. It also stirs deeply ingrained folk memories of that advance along the Danube.
Many leaders, particularly President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, make no secret of their unease. Since winning power in 2007, Mr Sarkozy has hardened France’s position on Turkey’s accession into an outright “no”.
Earlier this year, he urged European leaders to stop “lying” about Turkey’s chances of achieving full membership and declared that he would not “tell French schoolchildren that the borders of Europe extend to Syria and Iraq”. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, quietly agrees with him, leaving Gordon Brown as the only leader of Europe’s “big three” to favour Turkey’s application.
Lying behind these concerns is one unspoken fact about Turkey’s possible accession: if it succeeds, the EU’s second most populous member state would be 97 per cent Muslim. At present, Turkey has 72 million people, but this will rise to almost 100 million by 2050. Letting Turkey join would create the near certainty that, eventually, the biggest EU member state would be overwhelmingly Muslim. Leaders who oppose Turkey’s ambition tend to tiptoe around this fact, while dropping hints that it is not far from their minds. Most candid was Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president who was chosen to oversee the drafting of the EU’s stillborn constitution.
Allowing Turkey to join “would be the end of the European Union”, he declared in 2002, because the country has a “different culture, a different approach, a different way of life”. >>> | Thursday, September 24, 2009
Turkey in the EU >>> Mark Alexander | Friday, September 30, 2005
More Reasons Why Turkey Should Not Join the Union! >>> Mark Alexander | Saturday, October 01, 2005
