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Kemalism
Perry Anderson
‘The greatest single truth to declare itself in the wake of 1989,’ J.G.A. Pocock wrote two years
afterwards,
is that the frontiers of ‘Europe’ towards the east are everywhere open and
indeterminate. ‘Europe’, it can now be seen, is not a continent – as in the ancient
geographers’ dream – but a subcontinent: a peninsula of the Eurasian landmass,
like India in being inhabited by a highly distinctive chain of interacting cultures,
but unlike it in lacking a clearly marked geophysical frontier. Instead of
Afghanistan and the Himalayas, there are vast level areas through which
conventional ‘Europe’ shades into conventional ‘Asia’, and few would recognise
the Ural mountains if they ever reached them.
But, he went on, empires – of which in its fashion the European Union must be accounted
one – had always needed to determine the space in which they exercised their power, fixing
the borders of fear or attraction around them.
A decade and a half later, the matter has assumed a more tangible shape. After the
absorption of all the former Comecon states, there remain the untidy odds and ends of the
once independent Communisms of Yugoslavia and Albania – the seven small states of the
‘West Balkans’ – yet to be integrated in the EU. But no one doubts that, a pocket still to be
mopped up behind borders that already extend to the Black Sea, they will enter it in due
course. The great issue facing the Union lies further east, at the point where no vast steppe
confounds the eye, but a long tradition has held that a narrow strip of water separates one
world from another. No one has ever missed the Bosphorus. ‘Every schoolchild knows that
Asia Minor does not form part of Europe,’ Sarkozy told voters en route to the Elysée,
promising to keep it so: a pledge to be taken in the spirit of the conjugal reunion on offer in
the same campaign. Turkey will not be dealt with in that way. Within the EU the official
consensus that it should become a member-state in full standing has for some time now been
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overwhelming. Such agreement does not exclude arrière-pensées in this or that government
– Germany, France and Austria have all at different points entertained them – but against
any passage of these to action lies the formidable barrier of a unanimity of media opinion
more complete, and more committed to Turkish entry, than that of the Council or
Commission itself. There is also the simple fact that no country that has been accepted as a
candidate for accession to the EU has ever, once negotiations were opened, been rejected by
it.
The expansion of the EU to the lands of the Warsaw Pact did not require much political
defence or illustration. The countries concerned were all indisputably European, however the
term was defined, and all had famously suffered under Communism. To bring them into the
Union was not just to heal an ancient division of the continent, anchoring them in a
common liberal-democratic capitalism, but to compensate the East for its misfortunes after
1945, relieving the West of a bad conscience at the difference in fates between them. They
would also, of course, constitute a strategic glacis against any resurgence of Russia, and offer
a nearby pool of cheap labour, although this received less public emphasis. The
uncontentious logic here is not, on face of it, immediately transferable to Turkey. The
country has long been a market economy, held parliamentary elections, constituted a pillar
of Nato, and is now situated further from Russia than ever in the past. It would look as if
only the last of the motives in Eastern Europe, the economic objective, applies – not
unimportant, certainly, but incapable of explaining the priority Turkey’s entry into the EU
has acquired in Brussels.
Yet a kind of symmetry with the case for Eastern Europe can be discerned in the principal
reasons advanced for Turkish membership in Western capitals. The fall of the Soviet Union
may have removed the menace of Communism, but there is now – it is widely believed – a
successor danger in Islamism. Rampant in the authoritarian societies of the Middle East, it
threatens to stretch into immigrant communities within Western Europe itself. What better
prophylactic against it than to embrace a staunch Muslim democracy within the EU,
functioning as both beacon of a liberal order to a region in desperate need of a more
enlightened political model and sentinel against every kind of terrorism and extremism? This
line of thought originated in the US, with its wider range of global responsibilities than the
EU, and continues to be uppermost in American pressure for Turkish entry into the Union.
Much as Washington set the pace for Brussels during expansion into Eastern Europe, laying
down Nato lights on the runway for subsequent descent by the EU, so it championed the
cause of Turkey well before Council or Commission came round to it.
But although the strategic argument, for a geopolitical bulwark against the wrong kinds of
Islam, is now standard in European columns and editorials, it does not occupy quite the same
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