Turkishness is not so EU

I waited with this post for some time. I am aware that an entire library of books and articles exists about the issues mentioned here and this is more or less based on my own limited knowledge and experience. It is also a bit crude and lacks broad discussion. I should also add that neither am I a fan of Turkishness or the EU project.

The temptation to include Turkey in the EU is strong; it has a huge market and a large workforce reservoir; it also sits on a historically important mercantile crossroad. Economy is the true reason behind Turkish willingness, and behind the support it is given by elements in Brussels in its pursuit of EU membership. However there is a clash between the ethoses under which the modern Turkish Republic and EU developed throughout the twentieth century. In this post I will first attempt to explain the concept of Turkishness and its historical development and in the later part of the post I will explain why it is not compatible with the EU ethos.

Turkishness refers to what I like to call an overt Turkish Nationalism, to demonstrate it let me tell you of my unique encounter with blatant Turkishness in one of the London’s university bars few years ago. One Turkish visitor there asked if we knew that Father Christmas was Turkish. Father Christmas is the figure known in the Anglo-Saxon World as Santa Claus. This fat bastard from the North Pole has a much more venerable, real life paragon however, St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, fourth century bishop of Myra. Myra is a place in southern Turkey, only in the fourth century there were no traces of Turks in southern Anatolia. When I objected by saying that he was Greek, the person was not happy.

My encounter may seem insignificant but it points to a phenomenon much larger that permeates the Turkish society. The modern Turkish Republic is the successor to the Ottoman Empire where the members of the ruling class were required to be Muslim; otherwise they were an ethnically diverse lot composed of the many nations that inhabited this vast realm. It did not actually matter that a person was a Slav, an Albanian or an Arab that much, as long as he was Muslim he could reach out for the dignified status. The Empire had a Turkish core around the Bosporus and in Anatolia and the Slavic converts in Bosnia for example were seen by their Christian neighbours as bearers of the Turkish culture. As it shrank in size and its territory was more and more limited to the Turkish core, Turkishness came to forefront of identity debates.

Islam as the mark of dignified identity became increasingly irrelevant and was supplanted by Turkish Nationalism. In this atmosphere of defeat, endangered sovereignty and Nationalist fervour the Christian minorities (Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians) began to be viewed not as the subjugated dhimmis they once were but as a fifth column working in service of Western Empires and Russia. To some extent these fears were justified, however this unfortunate mood led to the expulsion of Greeks and the infamous genocide of the Armenians and Assyrians in the latter days of the Ottoman Empire and the early days of the Turkish Republic.

 Turkishness is what prevents the Turkish to discuss the Armenian and Assyrian genocides and is also what perpetuates the tenuous relationship between Greeks and Turks which nevertheless exists for almost a millennium (dating from the reign of Constantine IX Monomakhos when Seljuk Turks first clashed with the Byzantine Empire). In 1974, following a coup d’état backed by the military junta which was at that time in power in mainland Greece, Turkey invaded Cyprus out of fear the new government might unite with its mainland cousin. In 2004 Cyprus entered the EU in hopes (hope is the only thing bureaucrats in Brussels have) that this would eventually usher in reunification but to date there was no such event.

The EU truly sees itself as the arbiter of disputes in Europe and the Mediterranean. It was born out of the post-War economic rapprochement between France and Germany but was soon to become something more than an economic club. The EU pushes forward an idea of a gray, Universalist European super-state without borders, without ethnic conflicts, governed from Brussels and dictating its visions to even the most peripheral reaches of its vast empire. Problem with this visionary, expansionist policy is that as the empire expands more and more problems begin to pile up.

We are often told by the supporters of Turkish membership in the EU that Turkey is a secular country and its Islamic identity is nothing we should worry about. Indeed, with Sharia courts in Britain, Turkey looks like the role model of secular politics and Islamism is nothing the Brussels bureaucrats sincerely worry about.  They worry, as you probably might have guessed, about Nationalism. Last thing they want is to be an arbiter between Turks and their Kurdish brothers in faith who have led a bitter struggle against Turkishness for the sake of their own self-determination.

There is also Turkishness beyond Turkey. When walking through the streets of Istanbul you might get the occasional feeling that you are in Baku on the Bosporus. Turkey re-established contacts with its newly independent cousins in Central Asia but also with other post-Soviet countries. The stringent entry requirements for travellers (unless you are an illegal) to the Union would severe Turkish contacts with these countries. I would argue that the countries of Central Asia, although not democracies like Turkey, display some similarities with its Anatolian cousin, especially in playing the nationalist card and in aversion to radical Islam. On my recent visit to Turkey I was told that Azeri is comprehensible to Turkish people, I can’t verify this claim but since both nations came out of the same wave of Turkish migration I have no reason not to trust that. You can also see some Turkish influence in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan adopting Latin as replacement to Cyrillic instead of the traditional Arabic script after its independence.

To sum my perceptions, I think Turkey would have to make concessions to the Greeks and Cypriots who are already members and have a particular dislike of the Turks, the Armenian, Assyrian and Kurdish diasporas living in the West and seriously rethink its Nationalism. Nothing the Turks are ready or even willing to do for access to EU funding and markets. There is also a whole new world to the east of Anatolia which has much more affinity to Turkey than Europe will ever have.