Turkey and the Same Old Bollocks

Odd that I should by coincidence be reading a biography of Kemal Ataturk - the founder of the modern Turkish state - at the very time when an election in Turkey has generated a minor fuss among British politicians and foreign-office types (and bloggers, natch).

Simon Scott Plummer in the Telegraph has the right of it: Turkey has recently seen impartial, well-conducted elections and the victory of the moderate Islamic AKP party and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and now is the time for the EU to start seriously talking about Turkish membership. “A democratic Muslim country with a dynamic economy should be welcomed by a continent faced with the threat of Islamic fundamentalism,” he writes, and he could have added that Turkey is a democratic Muslim country with a secular constitution, no less, and a political elite willing to divorce itself from the powerful military. It is also one of the few Muslim countries to have dealt maturely with the creation of the State of Israel, and one of the few in which the government is in some way accountable to its populace. It is a powerful, influential presence in the Middle East, ideally poised to throw its weight behind Israel-Palestine peace talks, a security regime for Iraq, and demonstrate the worth of good governance to its neighbours. The EU should be opening its doors with open arms.

It won’t, though, because in the main members of the EU find it difficult to see the big picture. They hear that the AKP is an Islamic party (never mind that it is a moderate one, and that explicitly Christian parties are the norm in Central and Northern Europe) and they become nervous. Daniel Hannon believes that there is also fear of an energetic, patriotic and populous country coming along and spoiling the EU party, and I’m inclined to agree. The Kurdish problem is something Europeans are also wary of (hypocritically, since it was Europe which originally denied the Kurdish people a State of their own).

But I also have to wonder whether the old spectre of racism isn’t involved too. Europeans still haven’t quite adjusted to the fact that those without white European roots can be economically competitive and politically powerful. It’s never put explicitly, but there is still a marked tendency to patronize and belittle, and it manifests itself most often in attitudes towards Palestinians, Iraqis and Iranians, which persist in seeing them as victims and irrational actors, rather than intellectual equals. (Most Europeans, for example, are incapable of understanding that Palestinian terrorist organizations behave in a rational, intelligent way - we prefer to see them as desperate men driven by fear and powerlessness.) Turkey is another victim of that tendency; whereas European countries are capable of incorporating Christianity into their democratic systems, it is believed that Muslim countries are not - the implication being that Islam is inherently irrational and Muslim peoples are generally not capable of running a country well.