intra-European decision making, whether in NATO, in the administration of Balkan settlements, or in trade agreements (both bilateral and through the World Trade Organization): not because decisions taken in Russia’s absence would necessarily be prejudicial to its interests but as a point of principle.
European history, it seemed to many observers, had come full circle. As in the 18th century so in the 21st: Russia was both in Europe and outside it, Montesquieu’s ‘nation d’Europe’ and Gibbon’s ‘Scythian wilderness’. For Russians, the European West remained what it had been for centuries, a contradictory object of attraction and repulsion, of admiration and
The same might once have been said of Turkey. For nearly seven hundred years the Ottoman Turks had been Europe’s ‘other’, supplanting the Arabs who had occupied the role for the previous half millennium. For many centuries ‘Europe’ began where the Turks ended (which was why Cioran was so depressed to be reminded of Romania’s long years under Ottoman rule); and it was commonplace to speak of Christian Europe being periodically ‘saved’—whether at the gates of Vienna, or Budapest, or at the 1571 Battle of Lepanto—from the jaws of Turkish Islam. From the mid-eighteenth century, as Ottoman Turkey slipped into decline, the ‘Eastern Question’—how to manage the Ottoman Empire’s decline and what to do with the territories now emerging from centuries of Turkish rule—was the most pressing challenge facing European diplomats.
Turkey’s defeat in World War I, the overthrow of the Ottomans, and their replacement by Kemal Ataturk’s ostentatiously secular, modernizing state, had taken the Eastern Question off the European agenda. Now governed from Ankara, the Turks had troubles enough of their own; and although their removal from the Balkans and the Arab Middle East had bequeathed a tangled web of conflicts and choices with momentous long-term consequences for Europe and the world, the Turks themselves were no longer part of the problem. Had it not been for Turkey’s strategic location athwart the Soviet Union’s sea route to the Mediterranean, the country might well have disappeared altogether from Western consciousness.
Instead, Ankara became for the duration of the Cold War an accommodating participant in the Western alliance, contributing to NATO a rather significant contingent of soldiers. American missiles and bases were established in Turkey as part of the
But the Ottoman legacy would return to haunt the new Europe. With the end of the Cold War, Turkey’s distinctive location took on a different significance. The country was no longer a frontier outpost and barrier state in an international geopolitical confrontation. Instead it was now a conduit, caught between Europe and Asia, with ties and affinities in both directions. Although Turkey was formally a secular republic, most of its seventy million citizens were Muslims. Many older Turks were not especially orthodox, but with the rise of radical Islam there were growing fears that even Ataturk’s ruthlessly imposed secular state might prove vulnerable to a new generation rebelling against their secularized parents and looking for roots in an older heritage of Ottoman Islam.
But Turkey’s educated professional and business elites were disproportionately located in the European city of Istanbul and identified enthusiastically with Western dress, culture and practices. Like other ambitious eastern Europeans they saw Europe—European values, European institutions, European markets and careers—as the only possible future for them and their ambivalently situated country. Their goal was clear: to escape out of history and into ‘Europe’. Moreover, this was one objective they shared with the traditionally influential officer corps, who identified wholeheartedly with Ataturk’s dream of a secular state and expressed open irritation at creeping Islamisation in Turkish public life.
However, Europe—or at least Brussels—was more than a little hesitant: Turkey’s application to join the European Union lay unaddressed for many years. There were good reasons for caution: Turkey’s prisons, its treatment of domestic critics and its inadequate civil and economic codes were just some of many issues that would need to be addressed before it could hope to get beyond a strictly trading relationship with its European partners. Senior European commissioners like the Austrian Franz Fischler openly voiced doubts about the country’s long-term democratic credentials. And then there were practical difficulties: as a member-state Turkey would be the second largest in the Union after Germany, as well as one of the poorest—the gulf between its prosperous western edge and the vast, impoverished east was huge and, given the opportunity, millions of Turks might well head west into Europe in search of a living wage. The implications for national immigration policies, as well as for the EU’s budget, could hardly be ignored.
But the real impediments lay elsewhere.[398] If Turkey entered the EU, the Union would have an external frontier abutting Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Whether or not it made geographical sense to take ‘Europe’ to within one hundred miles of Mosul was a legitimate question; in the circumstances of the time it was unquestionably a security risk. And the further Europe stretched its frontiers, the more it was felt by many—including the drafters of the constitutional document of 2004—that the Union should explicitly state what it was that defined their common home. This, in turn, induced a number of politicians in Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia and elsewhere—not to mention the Polish Pope in Rome—to try unsuccessfully to insert into the preamble to a new European constitutional text a reminder that Europe was once
Whatever else they were, Turks were assuredly not Christian. The irony was that precisely for this reason—because they could not define themselves as Christian (or ‘Judeo-Christian’)—would-be European Turks were even more likely than other Europeans to emphasize the secular, tolerant and liberal dimensions of European identity.[399] They were also, and with increasing urgency, trying to invoke European values and norms as a lever against reactionary influences in Turkish public life—a goal that the member-states of Europe itself had long encouraged.
But although in 2003 the Turkish parliament finally removed, at European bidding, many longstanding restrictions on Kurdish cultural life and political expression, the lengthy hesitation-waltz performed by governments and officials at Brussels had begun to exact a price. Turkish critics of EU membership pointed insistently to the humiliation of a once-imperial nation, now reduced to the status of a supplicant at the European door, importuning support for its application from its former subject nations. Moreover, the steady growth of religious sentiment in Turkey not only produced an electoral victory for the country’s moderate Islamist party but encouraged the national parliament to debate a motion to make adultery, once again, a criminal offence.
In response to explicit warnings from Brussels that this could definitively jeopardize Ankara’s application to join the EU, the motion was abandoned and in December 2004 the European Union at last agreed to open accession talks with Ankara. But the damage was done. Opponents of Turkish membership—and there were many, in Germany[400] and France as well as closer to home in Greece or Bulgaria—could point once again to its unsuitability. In 2004 the retiring Dutch EU Commissioner Frits Bolkestein warned of the coming ‘Islamisation’ of Europe. The likelihood of negotiations proceeding smoothly diminished still further—Gunter Verheugen, the EU Commissioner for enlargement, acknowledged that he did not expect Turkey to become a member of the Union ‘before 2015’. Meanwhile, the cost of future rejection or further delays—to Turkish pride and the political stability of Europe’s vulnerable edge—ratcheted up another notch. The Eastern Question was back.
That history should have weighed so heavily upon European affairs at the start of the twenty-first century was ironic, considering how lightly it lay upon the shoulders of contemporary Europeans. The problem was not so much education—the teaching or mis-teaching of history in schools, though in some parts of southeastern Europe this too was a source of concern—as the public uses to which the past was now put. In authoritarian societies, of course, this was an old story; but Europe, by its self-definition, was post-authoritarian. Governments no longer exercised a monopoly over knowledge and history could not readily be altered for political convenience.
Nor was it, for the most part. The threat to history in Europe came not from the deliberate distortion of the past for mendacious ends, but from what might at first have seemed a natural adjunct to historical knowledge:
