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Energetic, honest, transformed - so why does Turkey need us anyway?

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  • Energetic, honest, transformed - so why does Turkey need us anyway?

    Energetic, honest and transformed - so why does Turkey need us anyway?

    NORMAN STONE, Guest contributors

    The Times. UK
    October 03, 2005

    THREE OF THE greatest engineering projects of modern times are under way in
    Turkey. By the Maiden's Tower, on the Bosphorus, a famous old landmark, two
    elaborate structures have appeared. They are the surface end of an enormous
    underwater enterprise, to link the European and Asian sides of the city by
    tunnel. It will widen the traffic bottleneck that so besets Istanbul, and do
    much to make it once again one of the great European cities. Already, huge
    areas of the old European part of the city are being restored, brought back
    to where they were in 1900, when the city was the heart of a Mediterranean
    empire.

    Then there is the vast Baku-Ceyhan pipeline that brings oil from the Caspian
    to the Mediterranean; again a gigantic enterprise, negotiating its way
    through poor mountain country, to keep Europe going. It also brings life to
    towns such as Kars, in northeastern Turkey, where, with an endless winter,
    the inhabitants had to heat themselves with `straw bricks' - combinations of
    animal dung and straw, dried out in the open in the summer and then used to
    keep the people going in a cold that reaches well below zero. These things -
    tezek - were used in Alpine Europe until the Fifties, and then, not. Turkey
    is following that path.


    The greatest of these engineering enterprises is the GAP, the `southeastern
    Anatolian project', by which great dams are to be placed on the biblical
    rivers Tigris and Euphrates, flooding an area the size of Belgium and
    turning what, for centuries, has been a dirt-poor area back into `the
    fertile crescent' that it used to be. If you go to that mainly Kurdish part
    of south-east Turkey, you can see the green areas spreading, and towns such
    as Urfa, on the Syrian border, growing ever more prosperous.

    These projects are the background to the debate about whether Turkey should
    be allowed to join the European Union. A stage army of Euro-Lilliputs has
    put up objections, humiliating for the Turks in general: too many of them,
    too poor, too Muslim, too nasty to their minorities, too likely to migrate
    in droves and set up kebab houses all over the place. The country has, of
    course, its problems, but the history of the Turks is about getting there in
    the end.

    It is true that in the 1970s there was a Third World demographic problem;
    Turkey added, every year, the population of Denmark to itself. Schools could
    not cope, hospitals were swamped, electricity failed for six hours every
    day, a smog fell across the cities. But Turkish birthrates have fallen to
    replacement-rate (though there are pockets in the east where the old ways go
    on).
    Nor is the country nearly as poor as legend would have it. Turkish males die
    on average at 70, Russian ones at 60. The growth rate is enormous and you
    can see the signs all around: the restoration of battered old parts of
    Istanbul, or the chains and chains of Central Europe-bound lorries on the
    main roads. (Kayseri, the old Caesarea, is now a key industrial town, and so
    is Antep, both of them making things that Western Europe no longer makes for
    itself.)

    If Western Europe opened up the agricultural market as well as the
    industrial one, you would see a similar process in the countryside of
    Anatolia. At the moment it is a very odd mixture: near-biblical villages,
    complete with donkeys and lines of men chewing the cud in teahouses, only a
    mile or so from a modern farm with irrigation sprinklers pumping away.

    Is there a European country of which the above might, easily within living
    memory, have been said? There is. It is Spain, under Franco. Not long ago
    the backwardness and cultural difference of Spain were held to be
    incompatible with EU membership. Turkey also has a Mediterranean culture,
    complete with clientelistic politics, a family sense of sometimes forbidding
    strength, and very good hot dinners. Once Spain joined Europe it rapidly
    `modernised'. Nor did poor Spanish ` guest workers' migrate in droves. In
    fact, as within Spain, the cultural differences within Anatolia are at least
    as great as those between Turks and Europeans.

    Comparison with Spain brings up another contentious question: minorities.
    Spain had a vicious civil war, involving them. The Catalans were ahead of
    the rest of the country, in much the same way as Greeks or Armenians were in
    old Turkey. Turkey's minorities had more and better schools; in fact the
    Turkish language had to be radically reformed in order for the masses to be
    at all literate (the old, Arabic-based, script could cater for four `z's and
    three vowels, whereas Turkish has one `z' and eight vowels).

    The problem in Turkey was complicated during and after the First World War,
    when the Western powers used local Greeks and Armenians to try to carve up
    Anatolia. Much massacre resulted, with whole regions being `ethnically
    cleansed'. In the Thirties roughly half the urban population of Turkey was
    made up of refugees and their descendants, and these can hardly be expected
    to take kindly to the European Parliament's resolving that one of these
    ethnic cleansings, and one only - the Armenian - should be recognised as
    `genocide'.

    The other minority question concerns the Kurds. They are like the Basques:
    mountaineers, in part religious-reactionary, in part bandit-revolutionary,
    in part successful migrants, with several different languages, none much
    developed. When Kurds move to the cities - two thirds have now done so -
    they do not vote for the nationalist parties. They do do so in the
    southeast, but that area has not flourished as the rest of the country has
    been doing because it is on the Iraqi and Iranian borders.

    Problems of `ethnicity' among the north-eastern Kurds are much less than to
    the south, where a tradition of tribal rivalry persists, making for a sort
    of civil war that the communist PKK exploited. The answer? Very obviously,
    an end to the unemployment that these circumstances have created. The
    southeastern Anatolian project, the GAP, should matter, though much will
    depend on whether the EU allows free movement of the resulting agricultural
    produce. That would do more for the Kurds than preaching about minority
    rights.

    The Europeans should forget their objections to Turkey. The country is much
    more of a prize than all the other new Eastern European countries put
    together: it has a tradition of hard work and honesty that was never
    destroyed by communism. It is a Spain in the making.

    The country has been doing so well that you wonder if it really needs to
    join Europe at all. At present the motivation for doing so is mixed: an end
    to visa queues (the British are gruesome), an escape from the puritanism of
    small-town Anatolia, a prospect of waves of foreign investment, a hope that
    `Europe' will mean an end to what the secularists see as religious takeover
    and what the religious see as a secularist takeover.

    But the Europeans arrive with health-and-safety regulations and much else
    that could just mean the end of much of what makes Turkey tick: those small
    shops and artisans working till all hours, ignoring silly rules in proper
    Mediterranean manner and keeping families together in a way that makes for a
    very healthy social atmosphere (if a handbag is stolen here, it makes the
    television news).

    Can Turkey stand the unemployment, bureaucracy and taxation that the EU
    really portends? Up to the Turks. But there are those of us who might think
    that they can carry out the beneficial changes on their own and who might
    even say that, if they really want membership of the EU, they can have ours.

    Norman Stone is Professor of History at Koç University, Istanbul
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