Multicultural Europe shouldn’t be hypocritical about Turkey

I swear this is not an urban myth. An Irishwoman I know who works in the Netherlands had to arrange a business meeting with a Dutch colleague recently. She rang him and suggested a date three weeks hence.

"I can't make it that day," he replied. "I have to go to my uncle's funeral."

"Oh, did he die abroad?" my friend sympathised.

She was greatly shocked by the response. "He's still alive," she was told. "But he is being put to sleep that day."

This conversation did not take place in a far-off country. It happened in a state closely bound to Ireland through the EU. We share free movement of workers and services, and thousands of regulations of every kind with the people of that country. Yet in some moral and social respects, they are a world away from us.

I tell that story because, last weekend, EU officials were busy trying to break a deadlock surrounding the commencement of negotiations with Turkey which would lead within a decade to that country's EU membership. While all member states, except Austria, favoured the commencement of accession talks, poll after poll was showing the population of Europe deeply divided, and distinctly nervous, about the prospect.

Despite the attitude of their governments, only 35% of EU citizens want to let Turkey in. Many are worried about the effect of incorporating a huge, predominantly poor, and mainly Muslim country into the EU. The issue of human rights is of particular concern.

Even as the Turks were reforming their law last year to meet the human rights requirements of the EU in relation to policing, the status of women, etc, the government tried to bring in a law that would criminalise adultery for women. They eventually backed down. Last week, the European Parliament called for Turkey to acknowledge what is a taboo subject in the country the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 to 1923, the first genocide of the 20th century. But a group of scholars who gathered in Istanbul a week ago to discuss it were pelted with eggs and tomatoes by protesters. A Turkish novelist is to go on trial in December for talking about it.

Sounds medieval. Yet in the light of the Dutch euthanasia experience, it seems hypocritical to point the finger at Turkey and declare them unfit for our European society.

The Turks don't have a love affair with death the way Europeans do. You wouldn't have thousands of elderly Turks abandoned by their family members during a heatwave, to die alone, as happened in France two years ago. And although Turkey is a secular state, 95% of its citizens declare their belief in God a level of faith only matched by Malta within the EU. The Turks are reproducing too unlike Europeans. Indeed, some commentators say that the future of Europe is to become a vast aged-care facility staffed by Turkish nurses. On Sunday, British MEP Daniel Hannan criticised the mentality among fellow members of the European Parliament opposed to Turkey. "Spend a day in Strasbourg," he said, "and you will come across religious fundamentalists, unapologetic Stalinists, nutty monarchist parties. You will find fascists, indicted criminals, apologists for the IRA. Yet these same MEPs presume to treat the Turks like half-civilised brutes."

Many arguments in Turkey's favour are about trade. It has a customs union with the EU since 1996. More than half of its trade is with the EU. It has adopted EU rules concerning competition and intellectual property. But the crunch issue is security. Admitting a reformed Turkey could set an example to the Muslim world, some believe. US President George W Bush is firmly in this camp.

"Including Turkey in the EU would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion, and it would expose the 'clash of civilisations' as a passing myth of history," he said in 2004.

Maybe. But what is troubling is the European fear that lurks behind the hand of friendship idea. Javier Solana, the EU's high representative for foreign affairs, says that denying Turkey full integration would pose a threat to regional stability.

GRANTING Turkey only 'privileged partnership' the option preferred by Austria and the leader of the German Christian Democrats Angela Merkel could put Turkey on the wrong side of Europe in a future Middle East crisis, he said.

"There is a huge risk of leaving Turkey without an anchor in the world It is better for EU citizens to have Turkey by our side than who knows where Go forward 25 years. Imagine we said no to Turkey, that there is a catastrophe in the Middle East, that there are huge oil and energy problems. Perhaps we will regret not having said yes, not having incorporated Turkey into our way of thinking, our philosophy, our values."

This, of course, is what we should expect from diplomats whose job, someone once said, is to keep saying 'nice doggie' until they can find a rock. But there are two particular problems with Solana's view. It seems that trade is his over-riding concern just as it always is at EU level. Officials there are much less skilled at predicting social and cultural problems, and much less interested in preventing them.

The second problem with the 'nice doggie' approach is that it is perhaps too optimistic in presuming that Turkish EU membership will guarantee Turkish sympathy to the cause of western Europe.

Turkish accession to the EU will see free access for its 69 million citizens to the countries of the union. Its population will punch well above its weight when you factor in the decline in Europe's population over the next generation.

But the attitude of Turkish people to western Europe will depend not on the reforms they made to join the EU, but on the extent to which they see themselves as part of a wider Muslim people and the nature of that wider view of the world.

The EU came about because of the desire to prevent European wars caused by aggressive, expansive nationalism. But in Turkey and other Muslim nations, nationalism was the solution. Kemal Ataturk, founder of secular Turkey in 1923, and Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who made peace with Israel at Camp David in 1978, did not share the dream of many in the Islamic world to create a universal Islamic theocracy.

But if the EU subsumes Turkey, what happens to Turkish nationalism? Do its proponents turn to Islam to assert themselves? Should we be afraid? Ideally, no.

It would be a poor reflection on Europe's Christian roots if we didn't have confidence in the capacity of our values and traditions to prevail on our continent. But right now, there isn't much by way of conviction to be found in the European soul. And that leaves a vacuum which others will want to fill.