Stronger ties with Turkey are important as a way to curb radical Islam
George W. Bush arrived for the NATO summit in Istanbul last month amidst a wave of protest, both civil and criminal: Days before his arrival on June 27, a bomb exploded on an Istanbul bus, killing four people; another bomb exploded in Ankara near the hotel where the U.S. president was to stay during his meetings with Turkish officials; and on the day of Mr. Bush’s arrival, he was met with a 40,000-strong throng of protesters, many of them chanting “U.S.A., get out of the Middle East.”
It was a reflection of a new reality in Turkey, a NATO ally long recognized as one of the world’s most progressive and moderate Islamic countries. World events since Sept. 11, 2001, are radicalizing and polarizing this traditionally secular country.
According to a survey released this spring, 31 per cent of the Turkish population felt that suicide bombings against American targets were justifiable. That is a striking contrast to the results of a similar survey taken just a year earlier, when only 13 per cent of Turks said that suicide bombings were acceptable.
This should be cause for alarm, considering that, as a NATO ally of Turkey, Canada is committed to defending the country in time of war. Imagine finding ourselves, some years in the future, in the odd quandary of having to militarily defend a radical Islamist regime.
One reason for Turkey’s increasing enmity towards the West is widespread opposition among Turkish citizens to the Iraq war. Another is the growing distance between the European Union and Turkey, despite major overtures on Turkey’s part to bring the country closer to Brussels. In the long term, this trend could prove tragic.
With significant Christian and Jewish communities, and a geography that stretches across parts of both Asia and Europe, Turkey is literally and figuratively a bridge between the West and Islam. As such, it is a focal point in the ongoing struggle between the Islamic and western worlds, the so-called clash of civilizations.
If Turkey turns to extremism, the world will lose its best example of the ability of Islamic nations to coexist and co-operate with the West. And that, in turn, will diminish the prospects of ever finding common ground between the West and Islam.
Turkey is a country of 70 million predominantly Muslim people who face a choice: Turn west or turn east. Sitting between continents, Turkey must make a decision to define itself as either a modern, secular European country or an Islamic, Asian country. While those 31 per cent of Turks support bombing Americans, 70 per cent support joining the European Union (a higher rate than in many of the Eastern European countries that joined the EU on May 1). How those two extremes are reconciled largely depends on the European Union.
While in Turkey last week, Mr. Bush reiterated his administration’s support for Turkey’s admission to the European Union. It is a position supported by the president’s strongest European ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Predictably, Mr. Bush’s stance was met with hostility in many European capitals, underlining the fact that the trans-Atlantic rift opened up by the Iraq war has hardly healed.
Chris Patten, an EU commission member, responded with dry sarcasm. “They (the U.S.) have very often offered Turkey membership in the European Union, which is very generous of them,” Mr. Patten said.
“Not only did he go too far, he ventured into territory that is not his concern,” French president Jacques Chirac said. “It would be like me telling the United States how to run its affairs with Mexico.”
Point taken. Given the hostility many Europeans feel towards the U.S. right now, Mr. Bush is hardly the right messenger for Turkey’s EU aspirations, and the risk here is that Europe could turn away from Turkey just because its EU membership has American support.
British support doesn’t help either. Long considered a spoil-sport in Europe’s dream of continental integration, Britain is suspected by many in Brussels of supporting an ever-larger, increasingly diverse EU so that the institution becomes “diluted” and too large to be manageable, and therefore effectively meaningless.
While it’s true that, as it expands, the EU is becoming an increasingly burdensome super-bureaucracy, determined to micromanage every aspect of life and commerce within its boundaries, it is also the world’s largest common market, and the world’s largest industrialized economy. The eight post-communist, Eastern European countries that joined the union this year had EU membership as their goal throughout the years of implementing tough medicine to turn their societies into functional, free-market economies. Today, these countries are rapidly narrowing the wealth gap with Western Europe, and becoming increasingly strong, civil societies. The EU could have a similar effect on Turkey.
Through Turkey, the EU could act as a political and economic compass for the entire Middle East. Turkey’s neighbours would watch the country become more prosperous, more secure and more influential on the world stage. The idea of solving the region’s problems through violence would seem increasingly absurd.
This policy of pursuing a diplomatic solution to the conflict between Islam and the West should appeal to those Europeans who so vocally reject America’s military solution. But, for the most part, it doesn’t. Europe’s traditionally xenophobic values are blinding the continent’s leadership to the reality of the situation. Former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing, for example, suggested that opening the door to Turkey would mean “the death of Europe.”
Meanwhile, Turkey’s moderate Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been intensively lobbying the European Union for membership in the EU. He has taken firm steps to bring the country into line with European politics and economics, abolishing the death penalty and initiating reforms to the country’s notorious prison system. He has begun restructuring the Turkish military’s role to bring it in line with militaries in western democracies.
Last year, he even took the politically risky step of rejecting American requests to use Turkish bases for the Iraq war, in order to satisfy both the EU countries that stood against the war and his own populace, which largely opposed the war.
Turkey is proving — albeit haphazardly, and in small steps — that it can be both Islamic and a modern, western society. As a democratic country, whose institutions are based on the will of the people rather than the will of Allah, Turkey is uniquely positioned to strike a workable balance between Islamic and western values.
But in order to do that, Turkey needs to take the wind out of its extremists’ sails — it needs the world to support its bid to become a part of the West. If the world turns its back on the country, it will strengthen radical Islam’s hand: This is proof positive, the radicals will say, that the West doesn’t want us and we don’t belong in it.
This December, at its summit in Brussels, the EU will have a chance to avoid that. Turkey’s allies, including Canada, should support its application to the EU club. However much Brussels doesn’t want to hear it, Mr. Bush was right to voice his support for Turkish accession. And if old-fashioned European prejudice proves a barrier to Turkey’s hopes, then the U.S. president should go one better, and begin negotiations on a free trade deal between Turkey and NAFTA, as Prime Minister Erdogan has also suggested.
Europe and the NATO countries face a stark choice: Help bring Turkey into the modern world, proving that a moderate Islamic culture can live in peace with its western neighbours, or watch a longtime friend and ally descend into the unnavigable waters of Islamic jihadism.
The Ottawa Citizen
Monday, July 5, 2004
