Earlier this fall, at the bureaucratic, utilitarian offices of the European Union in downtown Brussels, a scene unfolded that was historic and filled with pathos.
Leyla Zana, a Kurdish and Turkish woman who had been jailed by the Turkish government for her activist role on behalf of the long-oppressed Kurdish minority in eastern Turkey, traveled to Brussels to receive a humanitarian award. “I am free now,” she said that day, “and I can speak my language in Turkey. There is television and there are schools in my language. I don’t know if the Europeans know the effect it has had, because if a country doesn’t fulfill the EU criteria, it will not become a member. Thanks to the EU,” she added.
The woman’s speech may sound a little stilted, but it was given from the heart. Over roughly the last 10 years, Turkey has been working day and night to transform its institutional, regulatory and trade bodies, as well as its civic and moral principles, to adhere to European Union principles.
The Kurdish problem? As recently as two years ago, when I was in Turkey, the country had relented and allowed Kurdish-language broadcasts and other uses. In the offices of the Turkish ambassador to the EU, a dense volume of 521 pages, in which every part of the country, from the environment to women’s rights to indirect taxation and the value-added tax, was being adjusted in preparation for joining the EU.
“This is the power of mobilization that we have,” a leading official of the organization in Brussels told me. “It is the attraction of being a member. This is what we call `regime change’ but we want it in the softest possible manner,” she went on, obviously comparing the European style to the Bush administration’s style of trying to impose democracy in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.
“In fact,” she added, “this is more `systems change’ than regime change.”
The Turkish question came to the fore this fall, when the European Commission directed the EU to begin serious accession talks with complex, Islamic, European-Asiatic, pivotal Turkey. But as early as 1963, the European Economic Community held out the carrot of membership to Turkey, and in 1997, 1999 and again in 2002, Turkey moved up the ladder for membership. By this year, it had met most of the basic conditions: abolition of the death penalty, a ban on torture, the reform of criminal law, cultural rights for Kurds and other minorities, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
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Javier Solana, the foreign policy chief of the EU, told me: “Turkey has done a fantastic job. The government has showed significant intelligence in tackling their problems. It has set in motion quite an impressive set of reforms, which have allowed us to start negotiations some years before actual membership.”
The road to the EU, which brought such prosperity to earlier poor members such as Spain and Portugal, will not be so easy for Turkey. Everyone agrees it will take at least 10 years, maybe 12 or 15. Turkey now has 71 million people; Germany, the largest country in the EU, has 80 million. In 10 years, Turkey would probably be the largest country in the group. Meanwhile, 75 percent of the French are against membership, as are high percentages in other countries, because of the tremendous difference in living standards in Turkey and the real fear of Islamic immigration.
But the immigration picture has another, more complex angle that figures into the equation. Secular Turkey is not only a majority Islamic country, it also has a government of the Islamic Party. (To illustrate the complications, women’s headscarves have been banned in Turkey since the 1920s; so the president’s wife, who wears a headscarf, simply does not go to public gatherings.)
Yet, the idea came up repeatedly in my discussions in Brussels that Turkey could be the key to unlocking and relieving the hatred building up between the West and Islam.
As German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder wrote in the German newspaper Die Welt in early October: “A democratic Turkey committed to European values would prove that there is no contradiction between Islamic faith and enlightened modern society. Turkey would thus become a model for other Muslim countries in our European neighborhood.”
What’s more, the Turkish example, in terms of religion, is most interesting. Two years ago in Ankara I went to see the minister of religious affairs. This is a secular country, right? I asked him. Why, of course, he told me. Then he proceeded to relate how, within that secularity, he, the representative of the government, controlled not only all the imams in Turkey but all those across Central Asia–and they were all moderate. These kinds of contradictions (only to a Westerner) could help Europe, with its dangerous plethora of radical imams wholly outside any governmental or religious control.
In fact, the Europeans are onto something. Where military force did not work, as during the Balkans wars of the ’90s, the lure of joining Europe and actually “becoming European” now does work. But first countries have to put their houses in order and, especially, give up their old clan, ethnic and religious feuds. Only this November, Macedonia, which was locked in internal war between its majority Macedonians and its minority Albanians a bare three years ago, easily defeated a referendum meant to keep the minority from gaining full rights. Europeans expect that it will be the siren-song of Europe that will eventually lure even recalcitrant Serbia.
The Europeans have developed this one way of doing it; the U.S. is deeply into another way. The race has started, and before the second Bush administration is over, we should have a pretty good idea of which approach has won.
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E-mail: gigi(underscore)[email protected]