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10/02/2004:

"European Public Uneasy Over Turkey's Bid to Join Union"

by Elaine Sciorino
MSTERDAM, Oct. 1 - There are no minarets at the Ayasofya Mosque in Amsterdam, no marble atrium, no crystal-chandeliered prayer room. The biggest Turkish mosque here operates out of a dark, rusting hulk of a warehouse that was once a car repair and supply service.

It is a place more for meeting than for prayer. It sells subsidized groceries and meals, advertises jobs for pizza makers and factory cleaners, and offers its floors as temporary sleeping space for new migrants. It is, in other words, just the sort of place that makes many Europeans view Turks as truly foreign.

On Wednesday, the 25-member European Union is poised to take a small but important step toward deciding whether Turkey will be the first Muslim country to join its ranks. The organization's executive committee will vote on a report stating that Turkey has reformed itself enough to merit entry talks.

If the committee's recommendation is accepted unanimously by the member nations in December, there will begin a negotiating process that could drag on for a decade or more. Even then, it might not gain Turkey full membership in the union, the world's largest trading bloc.

But just the prospect of admitting a Muslim country of 71 million people - far larger than most members and with a per capita income much lower than any member - has set off a fierce, even ugly, debate over the nature of European identity.

Polls throughout Europe suggest that many share the fear first expressed by former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing of France that Turkey is not a European country and that Turkish membership would mean "the end of Europe."

Full Article: NY Times

Europe has always felt the need to define itself according to 'the other,' and really since the Crusades the great favorite has been 'the Orient,' defined first as the Muslim world, and then as colonial domination expanded, as India and East Asia. The Orientalists even split Egypt off from the rest of Africa. But since they fancied themselves the great definers, even to the point of insisting that only they could make the 'Orient' visible to itself, they did not feel they had to pay any attention to geography, much less to the people themselves. The early Orientalists, the linguists and historians, understood that this same Near Eastern Orient was the immediate source of much of their culture, their religious and philosophic and scientific traditions, but they regarded the people themselves as incapable of self-reflection, self-control, and certainly incapable of freedom. They needed the Europeans to mediate their own cultures for them, to bring them to 'modernity,' to offer them enlightened models of government. Sound familiar? It's because exactly the same things were being said about 'the Arabs' in 1800 as are being said today, and the beginnings are far earlier in the paranoid condemnation of Mohammed and Islam. The European 'problem' with the Muslim Orient has always had to do with religion, and GW Bush is the best representative we have today of that ancient European view.
So this fretting about 'the end of Europe' reflects a long tradition of xenophobia and racism. To acknowledge Turkey as part of Europe signals to the Europeans as some disastrous defeat, the Ottomans in Austria all over again. Just check the map: 'Europe' is this embattled little white bastion in the far northwest corner of a vast landform that ends at China in the east, and at South Africa. The ferocity, the aggressive attempts to expand its borders, the philosophic and scientific traditions that attempt to prove white superiority, these all stem in large part from the precarious geographical position of Europe. They view the lands and peoples outside their 'borders' as one monolithic 'them', intent on destruction. For many centuries, they used their words to convince themselves that they had the upper hand: later they used their great volumes of studies and judgements in the service of their aggressive interventions.
Edward Said's Orientalism is an indispensable text for anyone who wants to get a bigger view of American and US preoccupations. They are bigger, and deeper, than oil and gas.