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1950 when the British Cabinet was discussing whether to support
the entry of Turkey into NATO, the labor prime minister, Clem Attlee,
a former soldier and a man of very few words, sat quietly puffing
his pipe as the debate raged passionately around him. Eventually,
he summed up with decision: ''Fought against Johnny Turk at Gallipoli
in 1915. Much rather have him on our side than against us.''
That was good
sense in the 1950s. Turkey sent a contingent of troops to help America
in Korea. And it has been a reliable U.S. ally since. Now that it
is an established democracy, a vibrant capitalist economy and a
major military power situated strategically where Europe and Asia
meet, it makes even better sense to tie it to the West.
But the opposite
is happening. The Turks are being forced to question their identity
as a European and Western power — an identity they have cherished
since Kemal Ataturk's Westernizing reforms of the 1920s. Though
the European Union is mainly to blame for this growing alienation
of the NATO ally with the second-largest army in Europe, the United
States must share responsibility.
The most obvious
problem is economic. Turkey has an essentially young and dynamic
economy. But it is suffering from the Gulf War, which cost the nation
$40 billion; the tragic earthquakes of 1999, which devastated its
Western cities, like the bustling Istanbul with an estimated 12
million population, and an inflationary fiscal policy.
Turkish business,
cultural and military elites long to see market and political reforms
to repair these faults. But they despair of these ever being achieved
by the existing political parties. They place their hopes in external
pressures from bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and
the European Union.
This week the
IMF delivered. It forced the government to appoint competent technocrats
rather than party hacks to the board of Turkish Telecom in return
for releasing the latest tranche of a $16 billion loan.
But the EU is sending out increasingly clear signals that Turkey
will not be welcome to join the European club as a full member in
the near future and perhaps not until the Greek kalends — an ancient
phrase meaning ''never,'' which is especially appropriate since
Greek opposition is a major reason for Turkey's exclusion.
What is worse,
the reasons given (or hinted at) add moral insult to political injury:
that Turkey is not sufficiently European, or not sufficiently democratic,
or not sufficiently committed to human rights. As the Turks rightly
point out, their nation was regarded as sufficiently European to
guard Paris, Bonn and Rome against the Soviet Union. They have liberalized
the laws that previously banned, for instance, the public use of
the Kurdish language. And they feel they deserve sympathy and gratitude
rather than high-minded moralizing for retaining a genuine democracy
in the face of a political terrorism that cost the nation 40,000
lives in the last decade.
Sophisticated
Turks conclude that the EU's hostility is racial, cultural, and
religious. Europe simply does not want an Islamic country, even
one with a strictly secular constitution like Turkey, to join the
modern post-Christian agnostic Europe. And since there is an Islamic
fundamentalist section of Turkish opinion that would like to reverse
Ataturk's Westernizing reforms, it is possible to imagine that Turkey
might drift towards an Islamic, Middle Eastern and anti-Western
identity — gravely weakening the West's strategic position.
What seems
plain is that the United States should offset the EU's hostility
by making clear to our Turkish allies that their options are not
restricted to the EU and Islamic fundamentalism, but that a continuing
Western identity based on NATO, free trade with the United States,
and closer U.S.-Turkish political links is available.
Unfortunately,
U.S. policy is pointing in the opposite direction.
NATO is the
single most important institutional expression of Turkey's Western
orientation. Yet the EU's proposed European Defense and Security
Policy, which seeks to create an independent European defense capability,
would give the EU the right to use NATO assets without non-EU members
of NATO such as Turkey having any effective say or veto in how they
would be used.
Not unnaturally,Turkey
strongly opposes this new EU initiative. And the United States,
instead of leaning on the EU to accommodate one of its most reliable
allies on a matter of vital national interest, is leaning on the
Turks to go along.
''After the
end of the Cold War, Turkey is being left out of the [new] system
... being constructed in Europe,'' said the retired but influential
deputy head of the Turkish general staff, Cevik Bir, speaking at
a recent Istanbul conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe
organized by Turkey's ARI Movement and, among others, the Washington-based
New Atlantic Initiative.
There is no
reason why the Turks should accept that, and every reason why the
United States should help them to avert it.
This originally
appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.
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