Which Turkey? Not everyone sees the country with the same eyes

Not everyone sees the country with the same eyes

EUROPEANS' perceptions of Turkey are often shaped by the Turks they know. In Germany, these tend to be the Gastarbeiter (guest workers) who moved there in the 1960s to take up low-grade jobs that the booming post-war economy could no longer fill from the domestic labour market. Over 2m Turks came, and they were mostly honest, hard-working and religious people. But they were economic refugees, poor villagers from the east, not model citizens of Ataturk's republic.

Many of their children, though, have moved on, to become anything from prominent European parliamentarians to star European footballers. One of them even married one of the sons of Helmut Kohl, a former German chancellor. It is just the sort of transformation that Ataturk would have wished for his countrymen.

Yet experience of the Gastarbeiter has left Germans in two minds about Turkish entry into the EU. Their main worry is about a massive further inflow of economic migrants. The Social Democrat-led government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroder is generally supportive, but the opposition Christian Democrats, led by Angela Merkel, have vowed to do everything possible to wreck Turkey's application. A federal election is due next year, with the outcome still wide open. Even Mr Kohl, the Christian Democrat chancellor who was voted out in 1998, has spoken against Turkish membership, saying that he is “convinced that Turkey will not fulfil the Copenhagen criteria”. These are the basic conditions for joining the EU, which lay down that “membership requires that the candidate country has achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities.”

France's perspective is very different. Many of Turkey's 19th-century reforms, the tanzimat, were based on French laws, and Turkey's early republican elite was educated in the French language in French schools. As with Iran, disaffected members of that elite, including members of the Armenian and Jewish minorities, headed first for Paris. It is no coincidence that France is the only European country other than Greece (which is particularly hostile to its eastern neighbour) to have officially recognised the slaughter of Armenians in the first world war as genocide. In 1998, the French National Assembly decreed as much - a judgment the Turks maintain can be made only by the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Britain's relationship with Turkey is less burdened by history and complexity. The British mostly meet bright young Turks who come to their country to study, or chirpy hotel staff on their holidays in resorts such as Bodrum and Marmaris. For them, Turkey is a young place, full of promise. They rarely see headscarves, or the darker side of Anatolia.

Britain's government looks on Turkey's entry into the EU as an opportunity. It sees the country as a potential role model for Muslim democracy, much as America's does. Not surprisingly, Britain and America have been among the staunchest supporters of Turkey's application to join the EU. Bringing economic and political stability to a country described by one analyst as “the most geo-strategically important piece of real estate in the world” is a grand goal, almost on a par with bringing democracy to Iraq. But in some parts of the EU America's support has not gone down well. When President George Bush last year said yet again that the EU should start talks with Turkey at once, France's president, Jacques Chirac, told him off for interfering in things that were not his business.

The common view of Islam

All across Europe, though, people are worried about Turkish membership. Many feel, like Mr Giscard d'Estaing, that Turkey is an alien place whose people's values are incompatible with Europe's. This concern is fed by all sorts of things: from schoolboy propaganda about the Crusades and the Ottoman siege of Vienna to the views of the Catholic Church and of historic Protestant leaders such as Martin Luther, who described the Turks as “the people of the wrath of God”.

That unease explains why relatively few people from northern Europe choose to spend their winters in Turkey rather than, say, in Greece or Spain. It also accounts for the defensive behaviour that Europeans often unpack the moment they arrive on Turkish soil. In a recent short story by Louis de Bernieres, “A Day Out for Mehmet Erbil”, the (British) author tells of a long-drawn-out haggle he witnessed in Gallipoli between a German tourist and a Turkish cafe-owner over the price of a cup of tea: “A sum”, says Mr de Bernieres, “that in Germany would not have bought a second-hand piece of chewing gum.”

In essence, Europeans are bothered because 99% of Turkey's population is Muslim. Benign ignorance of the youngest of the major religions turned to fearful ignorance after September 11th 2001. Some Europeans assume that all Turks pray five times a day, want to introduce sharia law (so they can chop off people's hands) and frequently violate their women.

The reality, of course, is that the vast majority of Turks practise their religion in much the same matter-of-fact way as do Christians in western Europe. Many can quote from the Koran and use it as a source of moral guidance in their everyday lives, just as many Europeans are familiar with Biblical texts and stories. For neither group does knowledge of the good books necessarily imply fundamentalist convictions, though in both groups there are people for whom it does.

Turkey is that rare thing, a democratic Muslim country, because Ataturk decreed that it should be so. Although he separated the church from the state, he was so suspicious of clerics of all kinds that he brought the church firmly under the state's control. He made the Christians' Sunday into the day of rest, and nobody has suggested that it revert to the Muslim holy day of Friday. The democratic republic's Directorate of Religious Affairs decides where mosques shall be built, employs their imams and on occasion tells them what to preach. It also lays down rules on the sort of religious education to be given in schools.

In recent years, Turkey has seen renewed interest in religion. Since the 1980s and early 1990s, when Turgut Ozal was prime minister and president, Ataturk's tight controls have been relaxed. Large numbers of new mosques have been built, and the Islamic headscarf has reappeared on the streets. In “The Turks Today”, Mr Mango argues that this resurgence of Islam parallels the resurgence of Christianity in Europe after industrialisation. “As in Britain after the industrial revolution,” he says, “the revival of piety is easing the pain and discomforts of Turkey's modernisation.” It is also proving to be a test of the monocultural republic's ability to accommodate diversity.

Article is part of an Economist survey on Turkey and discusses European's perceptions of Turkey.