Human angle
EU: Membership in Full
Negotiations between the Republic of Turkey and the European Union will begin on October 3, 2005. These negotiations should aim at Turkey’s full membership of the Union. They should be conducted within the framework of respect for treaties, the superiority of the law and the understanding that Pacta sund servanda - in other words, the basic principles for the establishment and maintenance of international peace and brotherhood. And yet both the EU and by the governments of some EU member countries have over the last two years made a series of statements which failed to conform to these principles, and which reflect an outmoded “international relations philosophy” based on jealousy, greed and sometimes even hatred.
Some deny that Turkey is a European country and the Turkish nation a European nation.
Some qualify the principles of Atatürk - accepted by many academics, politicians and international organizations, especially UNESCO, to represent an exemplary case of democratic revolution and peaceful foreign policy - as an obstacle to EU membership.
Some do not hesitate to state openly that instead of full membership with equal rights, the Republic of Turkey might be offered a limited status, so “anchoring” Turkey in the EU in an unjust and derogatory manner.
Some put forth the conditions that Turkey should abandon its rights originating from international agreements on issues such as Cyprus and the Aegean Continental Shelf.
Some envy the unity and solidarity of the Turkish nation and claim that the Republic of Turkey is made up of conflicting ethnic groups.
All point out that the negotiations will be open-ended and may not lead to full membership, and that even if they do so, this will not come about before 10 or even 15 years have passed.
Every one of these positions is contrary to the elevated values which the EU originally represented. In a speech in Bonn on September 4, 1962, General De Gaulle commented on the French-German friendship and cooperation agreement, which laid the foundation for the EU. The friendly relations between the two countries, he said, were one of the most important events which Europe and the world had ever witnessed. The growing integration between France and Germany was not, he said, a respite taken by two eternal enemies tired of conflicts, but a union, which they aimed to establish in order to act together.
The enlargement process which the EU has been undergoing for the last 40 years has been based on this understanding of “acting together”. The Turkish people, especially the intellectuals, expect the EU to treat Turkey in the same way. The importance of inspiring trust and affection among the nation and its opinion members is clear. Turkey took its place in the EU process with the Treaty of Rome of 1962, and assumed the heaviest burden of European security in NATO throughout the 35-year cold war period. Today’s negative attitudes are out of harmony with the EU’s raison d’être.
A few reminders
EU officials should therefore attend the full membership negotiations which should be launched between Turkey and the EU on October 3, 2005, in awareness of the following facts:
1. Turkey belongs to Europe rather than Asia. Turkey’s destiny is based on that of Europe. The borders of the geographical continents are nominal. It cannot be said that since the border which separates Europe from Asia passes through the Black Sea and the Turkish Straits. Anatolia is European and has never been and cannot be an Asian society such as Iran or Iraq.
2. Thanks to its geography, and secular and democratic social and economic order, the Republic of Turkey has a central geostrategic position in the world, and especially in the region sometimes referred to as the Greater Middle East. To exclude Turkey and pursue policies aimed at undermining Turkey’s unity and peace would be the worst mistake the EU could make.
3. I concluded my article in the August issue of DÝPLOMAT with an appeal made by former US President Bill Clinton to the West to demonstrate to other nations that it was capable of not running after selfish interests and that it wanted to establish a world based on common objectives together with them. In that case, Clinton said, the respectability of the West would increase. The world, he said, needed proof that reason, intelligence and good will were more powerful than historical destiny. His words should ring in the ears of EU officials in their relations with Turkey.
4. Concerning Cyprus, the 1960 London and Zurich Treaties should be taken into consideration for two reasons - first, because international relations should abide by international law, and second because they can contribute to a solution of the issue, since they were signed as a requirement of the political and cultural conditions which explain the fact that Cyprus is not only a Greek Cypriot island. To recognize the Greek Cypriot side, which has never set up a political administration in the history of Cyprus, as the only sovereign state on the island, and to put the Turkish Cypriots under their sovereignty by means of pressure and blackmail is contrary to the basic principles of the EU and of international peace and order.
Ethnic divisions?
While the EU aims at establishing continuous peace, freedom, prosperity and partnership, but not at dissolving the national societies in the member countries, its tendency to encourage ethnic divisions in Turkey is unacceptable.
The powers-that-be in the EU should abandon the view that Turkey consists of conflicting ethnic groups. They should not deny the existence of the Turkish nation. Noted Ottoman historian Professor Bernard Lewis, director of the London University Institute of African and Oriental Studies for many years, points out in the initial pages of his book “The Emergence of Modern Turkey” that it was not Turks who first referred to Anatolia as “Turkey” but Europeans. “Anatolia became Turkish in the 11th century,” he says. Of course, Lewis does not mean to suggest that there were no Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Kurds or Georgians in Anatolia. He merely indicates that Anatolia has had a Turkish cultural brand since that date. This view is based on the sociological data which covers the formation of a nation and the transformation of a territory into the native country of this nation.
The national identity of a territory cannot be determined only via the population, but also by factors such as transport, trade, industry, health, public works, education and arts - in other words, the “culture of the city”. If Anatolia began to be called “Turkey” by the Europeans during the Crusades, then this was the result of the creation of a multi-lateral urban culture especially by the Seljuk Turks. Historian Professor Müller of Columbia University documents this process in the relevant part of his book “The Loom of History”.
This process of becoming Turkish began in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia and has continued there. Neither prior to nor during this process was a political geography called “Kurdistan” established in Anatolia. For example, the writer of these words was born and grew up in Diyarbakýr, which has been a centre replete with the most advanced elements of the Turkish culture, just like Elazýð and Van, where his relatives live.
Republican order
The concept of the Turkish nation, which is the base for the Republic of Turkey, is a sociologic and democratic reality. Although it took many centuries for an organised nation-state to arise, the Turkish factor has been the most widespread element in Anatolia for 1,000 years, providing harmonisation with other elements. This is a unity which makes no discrimination regarding race, religion, sect, social status, wealth or occupation, within which good and bad times are shared, and preparations for the future are made jointly.
It is due to the existence of this unity that even when the Ottoman Empire disintegrated at the end of the World War I, and the whole of Anatolia was under occupation, an attempt to establish a Kurdish state in Southeastern Anatolia with the approval of the Sultan’s government and Caliphate and the support of the British army failed. The citizens of Kurdish origin in the region did not cooperate. “The attempt to establish of a Kurdish state in Southeastern Anatolia has failed and Kurds and Turks are united,” wrote Mustafa Kemal, the leader of the national independence movement on June 19, 1919, in a telegraph to Cafer Tayyar Pasha to organize the national resistance in Thrace. In every corner of Anatolia, there was a cultural integration which envisaged that the “language of the majority is our common language and the name of the majority is our common name.”
The Republican order has further consolidated this national unity and at the same time enabled secularism, which is the precondition for democracy, to dominate political and public life, leaving differences of religion and sect to the individual consciences of citizens.
Republican order
These healthy basic principles should be seen as a positive basis for the EU membership negotiations. European countries have followed similar routes. Just as a person from the Basque or Alsace regions of France may say “Je suis alsacien; mais je suis fier de ma culture française; je dois beaucoup à ma culture française!” (“I am from Alsace but I am proud of my French culture; I owe a lot to my French culture”), so a person of Arabian, Circassian, Laz, Kurdish or Albanian origin in Turkey should not be encouraged to espouse separatism. Again as they say in France: “Particularités culturelles, oui; mais particularisme culturel, non!” (“Yes to the expression of cultural characteristics, but No to cultural discrimination.”). Conditions which are contrary to these words should not be imposed on Turkey.
Attempts to weaken Turkey by supporting discrimination on the basis of language, religion or sect cause the EU to be perceived by the Turkish nation and Turkish intellectuals not as a positive force for world peace but as a destructive factor. Similarly, if EU attitudes towards Turkey are marked by ethnic discrimination, racism and sectarianism, repetition of the unfounded Armenian genocide slanders, the protection of Greek Cypriot and Greek interests on Cyprus and the Aegean and the offer of a privileged partnership, then the EU will be unable to find a government in Turkey willing to accept these suggestions, and the Turkish nation and the Republic of Turkey will be unable to associate the EU with peace, democracy or social justice.
(DIPLOMAT - September 2005 - Ankara)