Turkey Coming home to Roost?

I had a fairly trippy experience over Christmas, when I was reading Snow by Orhan Pamuk. It's an amazing novel, combining journalistic immediacy with literary grandeour, as if Tolstoy had written War and Peace in 1813, though in many ways it reminded me more of The Plague by Albert Camus, though he can switch effortlessly from existential angst to dark, Murakami-like humour effortlessly.

What made my experience with this book so exceptional was that I turned on my TV about an hour before I finished reading it. My TV doesn't work so well and it takes about an hour to heat up and as I was reading this novel set in Eastern Turkey I gradually started seeing blurry images coming through of the news that Turkey was being accepted for talks to join the EU. It was like I had two different windows into history at once, as if I'd been reading Rousseau or St-Just and next thing I saw live images of Louis XVI getting his head chopped off.

No-one can express the soul-searching going on in Turkey at the moment better than Pamuk. It's country that genuinely doesn't seem to know whether it's future lies with Asia or with Europe, with Islam or with securalism.

When EU leaders agreed to invite Turkey for accesion talks, someone in Copenhagen protested by draping the little mermaid statue in a Burqa. I wonder if our Danish friend was aware of the ironies. It's pretty obvious that The Mermaid legend is just as much about desexualising women as much as the headscarves that women are forced to wear in many Moslem countries. However, Turkey isn't one of those countries. In fact, wearing a headscarf has been banned there for quite some time. In Pamuk's novel, a group of girls in Eastern Turkey rebel against this law and their leader plans to commit suicide in a stage performance. The area has a particularly high suicide rate and the protagonist in the novel is a journalist sent from Istanbul to find out why this is so, but he never quite does.

My issue with Turkey is not that they treat women badly, but that they treat their Kurdish minority badly. One of the reasons that the US and Britain attacked Iraq was that the Baathists had allegedly killed 100,000 kurds in the 80's, mainly with chemical weapons supplied by Britain and the US. Yet they were willing to use Turkey, where at least 30,000 kurds have been killed, as a base for their invasion, citing the enormous strides Turkey had made towards democratisation. When Turkey told Uncle Sam that he wasn't allowed to use their bases, America suddenly changed it's tune, claiming that it wasn't really that democratic, because if it was, their goverment would support the US.

It's a little ironic that the US, many of whose citizens think the EU is the antichrist, is pushing for Turkey to be accepted as a recipient for our kinder, gentler form of imperialism. I'd be a little disturbed if George Bush really thought that people in places like Georgia and Belarus would prefer to have the crap bombed out of them and then have their shattered countries rebuilt by Halliburton than get the massive strucural grants the EU offers, but EU expanision is a form of imperialism nevertheless. One of the funny things about this form of Imperialism is that countries have to change before they are colonised rather than after, which is why headscarves have been banned for a while.

It's also ironic that the most anti-EU nation in the EU is Turkey's biggest chearleader within the Union. It's intriguing that there's a debate within the UK as to whether giving sterling the heave-ho and joining the Eurozone will lead to Britain becoming more social democratic or the continent Thatcherising. I think this debate might be a bit redundant as Gerhard Schroeder has gotten so Thatcherite that I expect him to start growing his hair and quiffing it back and carrying a handbag round the place. The debate on whether letting Turkey into the EU will make Turkey more secular or the EU more Islamic is a bit more pertinant.

Poor Old Europe. It seems so nice in here right now, with our governments exceptionally generous welfare states, our short working hours and many public holidays, we can go anywhere we want in the world and everybody loves us because we're rich and aren't Americans. But our demi-semi-paradise isn't going to last forever, as on either side of us are fundamentalist religous forces bent on imposing their way of life on us, whether it's the dog-eat-dog Calvinist hyper-capitalism of the US or the bleak, life-denying dogma of Islam.

Birth rates are so much higher in the US and the Moslem world that Europe is eventually going to get squeezed. In Europe many women have careers and don't marry that early and use contraception and have smaller families. In moslem countries, they're generally not allowed work so have bigger families. In the US, many are marrying early and having more kids, spurred on by sinster, Republican-funded abstinence programs even though many of them still have to have jobs to make ends meet, and pay someone else to take care of their kids. It's this sucking of every aspect of life into the cash ecomomy that is responsible for Americans economic pre-eminence.

Faced with this problem, it seems the EU's leaders are trying to secularise the Islamic countried on our fringe, not just Turkey but Morocco and Tunisia as well. Apparently, Morocco asked to join the EU a few times but there never seems to be anyone there to return their calls, though if there was, they'd probably say really slowly, that Morocco was in A-fri-ca. It's a pity, because Morocco is probably a more democratic and open society than Turkey. Whether Turkey is a European country or not is a more complex question. Up to the first world war, it was considered part of Europe because it had a big empire like most Western European nations. Two world wars and quite a few world cups later, the definition of being a European nation has changed radically.

Many in the EU, especially France, are sceptical as to whether Turkey really wants to be a tolerant, democratic nation or whether they're just pretending so they can get lots of money out of us. This debate is familiar to many of us in Ireland because we've had to do our own soul-searching over the years about whether we wanted to be an isolationist nation where everybody danced at the crossroads but not to any of that nasty rock'n'roll stuff or an outward-looking, progressive European nation. The difference is that while we were looking inward, to a fantasy, catholicised version of our own past, the conservatives in Turkey have more extreme nations to their East to look to. I think that we realised that the fantasy de Valera was feeding us was just that, whereas the emperor does have some clothes in the fundamentalist muslim nations, and the empress has even more clothes.

There are analogies, though; the irony that a culture that created Sheela-na-gigs becoming a fundamentalist theocracy replicated in the culture that gave the world harems and belly-dancing forcing women to cover up their faces in public.

My own feeling is that while many people in Turkey, especially the west, are willing to sign up to the whole tolerance thing, many in the East and in rural areas would rather die than admit that their narrow world view might not be the only way of looking at things. Then again, while the oracle at Delphi imprecated us to "know thyself", how many of us really do? I'm sure inside every muslim fundamentlist there's someone who'd prefer an iPod (especially one of the ones that plays videos - they are so cool) in this life to the promise of 40 virgins in the next. So in a way Turkey's plight is all of our plight. None of us know for sure whether the scientific view or the religous view of the world is right, and the more people insist they do, the more they reveal their inner doubts.