Continental Divides

AS THE LATEST CRISIS between Turkey and the European Union bubbled over last Sunday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a desperate call to Condoleezza Rice, asking Washington to throw its weight behind his country in its renewed painful dealings with the EU. The secretary of state duly responded by expressing yet again America's passionate support for Turkish admission to the EU.

The Turkish prime minister could scarcely have done anything more ill-advised. By now, Erdogan should have realized that nothing enrages Europeans so much as American interference in this acutely sensitive business. Chris Patten, the former European commissioner for external affairs, was speaking for every EU country when he said not long ago that it was very good of the Americans to keep offering Turkey membership in the European Union, but that this was a matter in which the Europeans might feel they themselves had some say.

Last December, President Jacques Chirac of France didn't bother with Patten's sarcasm, bluntly and angrily telling President Bush to stop demanding that Turkey should join the EU. ''He has nothing to say on this subject," Chirac snarled. ''It is as if I were to tell the United States how it should conduct its relations with Mexico."

This latest crisis in the infinitely protracted story of Turkey's attempt to join the EU took the form of a last-minute intervention by Austria as talks on Turkish admission were about to begin, suddenly raising the demand that some kind of subsidiary membership for Turkey-a second-class status Turkey has said it will never accept-should be on the table. In the end, the Austrians backed down. But the whole sour little episode showed just how skittish Europe is about Turkey-a skittishness which American pressure has only aggravated.

To grasp the intractability of the European-Turkish question, you have to remember just how long the unhappy and unconsummated flirtation has been going on. When ''talks about talks" first began between Turkey and what was then the European Economic Community, John Kennedy was in the White House and American teenagers had just discovered an English band called the Beatles.

Since then, there has been an exhausting switchback ride. While Europe widened, by acquiring new members, and ''deepened," by taking on more and more the appearance of a federation, Turkey's prospects rose and fell. They nosedived in 1974 when Turkey invaded and partitioned Cyprus and then again in 1980 when the military took power in a coup.

A cynic might wonder whether Europe didn't secretly view those events with a mixture of indignation and relief, since they allowed for endless delay. When parliamentary rule had been reestablished in 1989, the EU decided that Turkey was eligible to join, but not yet ready, and set further stringent conditions in terms of democracy and human rights. Then eight years ago, the EU agreed that East European applicants could join but Turkey could not because, in the words of Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg, ''There is no comparison between Turkey and the 11 other applicants. No one is tortured in these countries." After that, Ankara froze relations, though they were resumed in 1999.

In all this, many Turks see a residual anti-Muslim prejudice. Either the EU ''will show political maturity and become a global power, or it will end up a Christian club," Erdogan said last week, and his party chairman Mehmet Dulger accused the Austrians of ''behaving as if it's 1683 and the Muslim Turks want to seize Vienna."

Both of these men evince a complete misunderstanding of Europe today, which has long since ceased to be a Christian anything, and where memories are much shorter than Dulger supposes. Many Europeans no doubt have a good deal of sympathy for the Turks, if only because Turkey has become the Ever-Loving Adelaide of European politics, endlessly strung along and never hearing the longed-for wedding bells.

And yet no one should underestimate the profound cultural as well as political and economic difficulties. Less important than ''Cross and Crescent" is Turkey's checkered record over militarism, human rights, the treatment of the Kurds, and its economy. Like Brazil and South Africa, Turkey is ''First World" and ''Third World" all in one. In the north, there is a thriving modern industrial economy and an educated middle class, who are as lively and cosmopolitan as you could find in Paris or Rome. Eastern Anatolia, with its impoverished population, might be centuries away from Istanbul.

Nor have the Turks fully grasped just how unpropitious a time this is for their candidacy. In May of last year, the European Union admitted 10 new members. It was not only historic, it was genuinely moving, as countries which had been severed from their neighbors for more than 60 years by war and Cold War, National Socialism, and Soviet Communism, rejoined ''our common European home."

After the party, the hangover. The EU woke up to realize that its new members now comprised 25 percent of its population while providing 5 percent of its economic product. To admit a country like Turkey, which in 10 years' time will have outstripped Germany as the most populous country in the EU but which has a per capita income one-10th of the British and a child mortality rate 10 times higher than the French, would dwarf any difficulties of absorbing Poland.

Even the nature of the progress which has been made by Turkey is ambiguous in itself. Turkey is applauded for moving towards secularism and democracy, but both of those have had their costs as well as their benefits. The Ottoman Empire was ''despotism tempered by incompetence," within whose borders Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and many others could survive and even thrive as long as they kept themselves to themselves.

What ruined those communities wasn't the old regime of the Porte Sublime and the Caliphate but the rise of modern nationalism. The steady disintegration of the empire saw the ''Bulgarian horrors" of 1876, and the far worse mass murder of the Armenians in 1915, which Turkey still cannot come to terms with, still less make amends for. When modern Turkey was born under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk after the 1914-18 war, it celebrated by driving the ancient Greek community of Smyrna into the sea amid rape and murder. Ataturk's successor was Inonu, who in 1945 expropriated those Jews still left in Turkey and ''encouraged" them to leave.

With its huge army and its strategic position on the southwest of the Soviet Union, Turkey soon became a player in the Cold War under American tutelage, which helped to sow the seeds of the present problem. In 1952, Turkey joined NATO, but this did not make it a more amiable country: In 1955 a brutal riot in Istanbul helped drive out the remaining Greek community. A recent exhibit in Istanbul to mark the 50th anniversary of those events only provoked more resentment from the Turkish nationalists.

Serious attempts have been made to improve the human rights record. Capital punishment has been ended, while Erdogan says he has ''zero tolerance for torture." And yet Ataturk's secular state is threatened by democracy itself. Behind the bland name ''Justice and Development," the democratically elected ruling party is strenuously Islamist. When Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul, he banned the sale of alcohol (not the way to endear himself to the man in the Lyons estaminet or Munich Lokal), the Ankara government has just moved to outlaw a gay-rights movement, and the Turkish parliament came close not long ago to criminalizing adultery. One may well imagine that there are eminent politicians in Paris and London with good reasons of their own to view such a law with alarm, but it also dismayed anyone in Europe well disposed to Turkey.

Almost more shocking is the trial scheduled for December of Orhan Pamuk, accused of discussing the fate of the Armenians and Kurds. Pamuk is the best-and best-known-Turkish writer of his age, and at a time when the country wants to be seen as European, such Turkish stubbornness is downright perverse, or worthy of a better cause.

In fact, there was a better cause. Given the astonishing inducements of scores of billions of dollars offered to Turkey by Washington if it would join the war on Iraq, the Turkish parliament's vote against the war was little short of heroic, expressing as it did the undoubted wishes of the Turkish people. But then, as we are learning in Iraq itself, democracy does have awkward consequences.

Nothing has clouded the question of Turkish admission to the EU more than American interference. Chirac's mention of Mexico has been sardonically echoed by German politicians and British columnists: Before Turkey is admitted to the EU, maybe Washington should set a good example by admitting Mexico to the United States. What Washington politicians, and New York newspaper pundits, really mean when they insist that Turkey be admitted is that Europe should make a huge sacrifice, economically, socially, politically, in order to gratify perceived American strategic interests.

In the eyes of Washington neoconservatives, and even American liberals, Europe will combat recrudescent Islamic fervor by embracing Turkey. Some Europeans have likewise thought in large geopolitical terms. Even Chirac has said that ''Turkey has a European vocation," and the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, speaks about Turkey as a bridge to the Arab world. No one is more grandiloquent than Tony Blair, who says that admitting Turkey will disprove the idea of a clash of civilizations between Christendom and Islam, and of course help spread democracy.

In some European countries, Turkey has thus become a shibboleth, supposedly dividing good progressives in favor of admission from xenophobic reactionaries against. But this is in truth more a question of rulers and ruled-which is to say of democracy as it already exists in Europe rather than as it might exist in the Middle East. Deep popular antipathy to further expansion of the union lay behind the French and Dutch votes against the European constitution last spring, which were as well votes against the elites who like to think they run Europe.

Nor are ''Turkish skeptics" always right-wing xenophobes. The late Roy Jenkins was a senior Labor politician before he helped create the Liberal Democratic Party, and also became Blair's mentor. A true liberal, he showed during his years serving as president of the European Commission that he was moreover a ''good European" by any standards. And yet Jenkins always said privately that he did not believe that Turkish admission was feasible or even desirable. I could almost see him smiling as the Turkish foreign minister greeted the breaking of the diplomatic impasse last Monday with the words ''Thanks be to Allah."

In the end, the most telling argument against Turkish admission is not cultural, religious, or economic, but simply geographical. For all its historical relic of a toehold in Europe, Turkey looks on the map very much like an Asian country, and one French politician has asked a question that haunts many others: ''Can we really have a Europe that extends to the borders of Iraq?"

This is precisely the big idea of the dreamers of ''spreading democracy." But Americans should ask themselves whether, in order hypothetically to spread democracy in Latin America, they would like their country to extend to the borders of Panama-or maybe Colombia.

They might consider that question in Washington. They could even ask themselves whether this Turkish issue is really any of their business, or whether it might not provide the White House and State Department with-in another of Chirac's favorite phrases-an excellent opportunity for keeping quiet.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft's books include ''The Controversy of Zion" and, most recently, ''The Strange Death of Tory England."