The New Old World (70 page)

A decade and a half later, the question 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 into the EU. A pocket still to be mopped up behind borders that already extend to the Black Sea, they will—no one doubts—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 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 with it 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 the 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. If the fall of the Soviet Union has removed the menace of communism, there is now—it is widely believed—a successor danger in Islamism. Rampant in the authoritarian societies of the Middle East, its tentacles threaten 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 at once 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 the value of a geopolitical bulwark against the wrong kinds of Islam, is now standard in European columns and editorials, it does not occupy quite the same position as in America. In part, this is because the prospect of sharing a border with Iraq and Iran is not altogether welcome to many within the EU, however vigilant the Turkish army might prove. Americans, at a greater distance, find it easier to see the bigger picture. But such reservations are not the only reason why this theme, central though it remains, does not dominate discussion in the EU as completely as in the US. For another argument has more intimate weight. Current European ideology holds the Union to offer the highest moral and institutional order in the world, combining—with all due imperfections—economic prosperity, political liberty and social solidarity in a way no rival can match. But is there not some danger of cultural closure in the very success of this unique creation? Amidst all its achievements, might not Europe risk falling into—the very word a reproof—Eurocentrism: too homogeneous and inward-looking an identity, when the advance guard of civilized life is necessarily ever more multi-cultural?

Turkey's incorporation into the EU, so the case goes, would lay such fears to rest. The greatest single burden, for present generations, of a narrowly traditional conception of Europe is its identification with Christianity, as a historic marker of the continent. The greatest challenge to this heritage long came from Islam. What then could be a more triumphant demonstration of a modern multi-culturalism than the peaceful intertwining of the two faiths, at state level and within civil society, in a super-European system stretching, like the Roman Empire of old, to the Euphrates? That Turkey's government is for the first time professedly Muslim should not be viewed as a handicap, but as a recommendation for entry, promising just that transvaluation into a multi-cultural form of life the
Union needs for the next step in its constitutional progress. For its part, just as the new-found or restored democracies of the post-Communist East have benefitted from the steadying hand of the Commission in their journey to normalcy, so Turkish democracy will be sheltered and strengthened within the Union. If enlargement to Eastern Europe repaired a moral debt to those who lived through Communism, inclusion of Turkey can redeem the moral damage done by a complacent—or arrogant—parochialism. In such dual atonement, Europe has the capacity to become a better place.

In this self-critical mode, a historical contrast is often drawn. Christian Europe was for centuries disfigured by savage religious intolerance—every kind of persecution, inquisition, expulsion, pogrom: attempts to stamp out other communities of faith, Jewish or Muslim, not to speak of heretics within the faith itself. The Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, tolerated Christians and Jews, without repression or forcible conversion, allowing different communities to live peaceably together under Muslim rule, in a pre-modern multi-cultural harmony. Not only was this Islamic order more enlightened than its Christian counterparts, but far from being a mere external Other of Europe, for centuries it formed an integral part of the European system of powers itself. Turkey is in that sense no newcomer to Europe. Rather its entry into the Union would restore a continuity, of mixtures and contacts, from which we still have much to learn.

Such, roughly speaking, is the discourse of Turkish entry into the EU that can be heard in chancelleries and chat-rooms, learned journals and leading articles, on platforms and talk-shows across Europe. One of its great strengths is the absence to date of any non-xenophobic alternative. Its weakness lies in the series of
images d'Epinal
out of which much of it is woven, which obscure the actual stakes in Turkey's suit to join the Union. Certainly, any consideration of these must begin with the Ottoman Empire. For the first, and most fundamental difference between the Turkish candidature and all those from Eastern Europe is that in this case the Union is dealing with the descendant of an imperial state, for long a far greater power than any kingdom of the West. A prerequisite of grasping this descent is a realistic understanding of the originating form of that Empire.

The Osmanlı Sultanate, as it expanded into Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, was indeed more tolerant—however anachronistic the term—than any Christian realm of the period. It is enough to compare the fate of the Muslims in Catholic Spain with that of the Orthodox in the Balkans under Ottoman rule. Christians and Jews were neither forced to convert, nor expelled, by the Sultanate, but allowed to worship as they wished, in the House of Islam. This was not toleration in a modern sense, nor specifically Ottoman, but a traditional system of Islamic rule dating to the Umayyad Caliphate of the eighth century.
²
Infidels were subject peoples, legally inferior to the ruling people. Semiotically and practically, they were separate communities. Taxed more heavily than believers, they could not bear arms, hold processions, wear certain clothes, have houses over a certain height. Muslims could take infidel wives; infidels could not marry Muslim women.

The Ottoman state that inherited this system arose in fourteenth-century Anatolia as one Turkic chieftainry competing with others, expanding to the east and south at the expense of local Muslim rivals and to the west and north at the expense of the remains of Byzantine power. For two hundred years, as its armies conquered most of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, the Empire it built retained this bi-directionality. But there was never any doubt where its strategic centre of gravity, and primary momentum, lay. From the beginning, Osmanlı rulers drew their legitimacy from holy war—
gaza
—on the frontiers of Christendom. The subjugated regions of Europe formed the richest, most populous, and politically prized zones of the Empire, and the theatre of the overwhelming majority of its military campaigns, as successive sultans set out for the House of War to enlarge the House of Islam. The Ottoman state was founded, as its most recent historian Caroline Finkel writes, on ‘the ideal of continuous war'.
³
Recognizing no peers, and respecting no pieties of peaceful coexistence, it was designed for the battlefield, without territorial fixture or definition.

But it was also pragmatic. From the outset, ideological warfare against infidels was combined with instrumental use of them for pursuit of it. From the perspective of the Absolutist monarchies that arose in Western Europe somewhat later, each claiming dynastic authority and enforcing religious conformity within its realm, the peculiarity of the empire of Mehmed II and his successors lay in its combination of aims and means. On the one hand, the Ottomans waged unlimited holy war against Christendom. On the other hand, by the fifteenth century the state relied on a levy—the
devshirme
—of formerly Christian youths, picked from subject populations in the Balkans, themselves not obliged to become Muslims, to compose its military and administrative elite: the
kapı kulları
or the ‘slaves of the sultan'.
⁴

For upwards of two hundred years, the dynamism of this formidable engine of conquest, its range eventually stretching from Aden to Belgrade and the Crimea to the Rif, held Europe in awe. But by the end of the seventeenth century, after the last siege of Vienna, its momentum had run out. The ‘ruling institution' of the Empire ceased to be recruited from the offspring of unbelievers, reverting to native-born Muslims, and the balance of arms gradually turned against it.
⁵
From the late eighteenth century onwards, when Russia inflicted successive crushing defeats on it north of the Black Sea, and revolutionary France took Egypt in a trice, the Ottoman state never won a major war again. In the nineteenth century its survival depended on the mutual jealousies of the predator powers of Europe more than any inner strength of its own: time and again, it was rescued from further amputation or destruction only by the intervention of rival foreign capitals—London, Paris, Vienna, in one memorable crisis even St Petersburg—at the expense of each other.

But though external pressures, potentially ever more ominous as the technological gap between Ottoman and European empires widened, might in principle have continued to neutralize one another long enough to allow for an effective overhaul of state and society to
meet the challenge from the West—the example of the Porte's rebel satrap in Egypt, Mehmet Ali, showed what could be done—the rise of nationalism among the subject Christian peoples of the Balkans undermined any diplomatic equilibrium. Greek independence, reluctantly seconded by Britain and France from fear that Russia would otherwise become its exclusive patron, shocked the Sultanate into its first serious efforts at internal reform. In the Tanzimat period (1839–76), modernization became more systematic. The palace was sidelined by the bureaucracy. Administration was centralized; legal equality of all subjects and security of property were proclaimed; education and science promoted; ideas and mores imported from the West. Under successive pro-British viziers, the Ottoman order took its place within the European state system.

But the reformers of the time, however secular-minded, could not transform the religious foundations of Ottoman rule. Three inequalities were codified by tradition: between believers and unbelievers, masters and slaves, men and women. Relations between the sexes altered little, though by the end of the century preference for boys had become less frequent among the elite, and slavery was—very gradually—phased out. Politically, the crucial relationship was the first. Ostensibly, discrimination against unbelievers was abolished by the reforms. But disavowed in principle, it persisted in practice, as they continued to be subject to a poll tax, now disguised as payment for draft exclusion, rom which Muslims were exempt.
⁶
The army continued to be
reserved for believers, and all significant civilian offices in the state remained a monopoly of the faithful. Such protection of the supremacy of Islam was, however, insufficient to appease popular hostility to reforms perceived as a surrender to European pressures and fashions, incompatible with piety or the proper position of believers in the Empire.
⁷
Quite apart from unseemly displays of Western ways of life in the cities, unpopular rural taxes were extended to Muslims, while Christian merchants, not to speak of foreign interests, flourished under the free trade regime conceded by the reformers to the Western powers.