Turkey and EU face decisions crucial to Mediterranean world

World View: 'This tribe has always moved westwards and never looked back.' So said Vasif Kortun, director of the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre in Istanbul, about the Turks at a seminar on EU enlargement last weekend in Toledo.

He is not worried about being in Europe, since he is already there. But he believes Turkey can come to terms with its Ottoman past only with the help of the EU. Preparations for joining it have brought major reforms which have improved peoples' lives; but both Turkey and the EU face crucial decisions on this question in the coming months which will affect Europe's relations with the Mediterranean world and the Middle East for a generation to come.

Kortun was speaking before we heard about the bombings of two synagogues in Istanbul last Saturday and ahead of Thursday's lethal attacks on the British bank and consulate there. He dislikes the conventional description of Turkey as a bridge between east and west. A bridge is not a place, nor is an edge - and nor is Turkey's Cold War role as a buffer against Soviet access to the Mediterranean; these were strategic concepts applied in the tradition of the classic othering response to the Ottomans in Europe. Istanbul, and by implication Turkey, he sees rather as "a zone to bring people together".

This was especially appropriate spoken in Toledo, the Spanish capital until Philip II moved it 100 kilometres north to Madrid in the 1560s.

Medieval Toledo was a great multicultural centre, with vibrant Muslim and Jewish communities living with the dominant Christians until they were given the choice of converting or being expelled after Ferdinand and Isabella captured Granada in 1492.

The Jewish community found refuge in the Ottoman empire, many of them in Istanbul, where they have thrived ever since. That city's role in bringing people together faces one of its sorest tests after these atrocities committed in the name of militant Islam.

How will they affect the precarious balance of power in Turkey between the elected government of the moderate Islamic Justice and Development Party and a sceptical political and military establishment which resents the far-reaching reforms being introduced?

The military has always justified its powerful role as defender of the secular Kemalist state against Islamic forces. It will draw increased legitimacy from these attacks, which strike directly at everyday security.

Will it try to use them to freeze political reform and thereby prevent a date being set next year for Turkey to begin EU accession negotiations? Or will the attacks accelerate Turkey's move westwards?

The European Commission is to report on Turkey's preparedness for membership by June next year, in a recommendation which EU leaders will decide upon in December. A Commission representative insisted at the Toledo seminar that the evaluation would be on strictly political criteria, not on religious or civilisational ones which invoke Europe's exclusively Christian heritage. Already the reforms have reduced the military's power, introduced Kurdish broadcasting and educational rights, expanded other minority rights and curbed censorship.

The title of this seminar was "Beyond Enlargement: opening Eastwards, closing Southwards?" It is part of a series on "enlargement of minds" organised by the European Cultural Foundation which brought together artists, writers, researchers, cultural managers and policy-makers from north and south of the Mediterranean. They are convinced of the value of such inter-cultural dialogue, but well aware of the difficulties in preventing closure towards the south as new EU borders are introduced.

As one Spanish participant put it, Turkey's eventual EU membership would introduce a completely new European perspective on the Mediterranean world.

It is currently marked by an attitude of superiority, unwillingness to share identities that were historically entangled, and new racisms based on fears of immigration - exemplified in the disaster a couple of months ago when 35 Moroccans were drowned off the coast of Spain.

Unless negotiation and cultural dialogue is based on equality it will only reproduce dependence and increase alienation in the south, according to Ahmed El Atar, an Egyptian playwright.

We heard from Sami Zubaida, an Iraqi Jew who teaches in Birkbeck College in London, how political and economic changes in the last 100 years altered the previous cultural "family resemblances" across the Mediterranean in rural and urban life, from modes of dress to food and ideas about honour and group solidarities.

The south of the European countries was gradually absorbed into the north, becoming "European", while the "Muslim" shores were "increasingly peasantised and tribalised by massive migrations into the coastal cities from the interior.

The EU played an important role in this. Spanish living standards were twice the Algerian level in 1960 and are now six times as high. The Common Agricultural Policy, regional and cohesion funds had much to do with it.

Instead of growing tomatoes in Morocco and exporting them to Spain, Moroccan workers came to work in Spanish fields to produce crops that are exported to Morocco. Now there are moves to replace them with Lithuanian and Romanian workers on the grounds that they are more "European".

As the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo puts it: "Did Poles and Spanish Christians cohabitate on the Peninsula for 10 centuries? Were the mosques in Cordoba and the Alhambra the work of Romanian architects?

Does our language contain thousands of locutions of Slovakian origin? Was there a School of Translators for Czech in Toledo?"

Mr Chris Patten, the EU Commissioner for External Relations, said in an interview in Dublin this week that there is indeed a large question mark over whether the EU's relations with the south are closing. But, he said, "we can't afford a closure".

The Middle East and Mediterranean issues are the "biggest issues on the foreign policy agenda for us". This is "our closest neighbourhood", taking in Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Turkey, Arab and Middle Eastern states. The EU must recognise there is a "real sense of alienation in the Islamic world".

Political stability, demography, economics all feed into the policy, as is made clear in the latest draft EU security strategy.

Mr Patten hoped Turkey recognises the importance of securing a deal before the EU enlarges on May 1st next year, especially by pursuing a settlement in Cyprus.

Speaking to the Forum on Europe he urged that the problem of terrorism be recognised as complex and the response to it sophisticated and long term including preventive measures which reduce its appeal.

pgillespie@irish-times.ie