Turks Deserve Better from the U.S.
An identity crisis.

July 11, 2001 11:35 a.m.

n 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.