389 “For many Europeans, integration with a large Muslim country of 70 million people with a lower level of economic development and a much faster-growing population seems a daunting prospect. Equally daunting, however, may be a Turkey cast adrift . . . . ” Turkey and Europe: Will East Meet West? M. HAKAN Y AVUZ AND MUJEEB R. KHAN T his December the European Union will make one of its most difficult decisions: whether to open final status negotiations with Turkey on full accession to the union. Turkey’s application presents Europe with unique challenges and opportunities. Muslims have had a long, illus- trious, and often tragic presence in southern and eastern Europe. With large-scale postwar immigra- tion from Turkey, North Africa, and South Asia, they also have become the second-largest and fastest-growing religious-cultural community in Western Europe. The challenge of successfully integrating this large population and stabilizing Europe’s relations with its vast and crisis-prone southern Islamic rim highlights just what is at stake with Turkey’s candi- dacy for EU membership. Without Muslim migra- tion and labor, European countries that face shrinking growth and aging populations will not be able to sustain acceptable levels of economic pro- ductivity. A Turkey that is a full member of the EU is also poised to play a pivotal role in the continent’s foreign policies, especially in the neighboring Mus- lim world. For the Turks, EU membership promises a resolu- tion of the “Eastern Question” and the crisis of national orientation that emerged in the nineteenth century and has continued to plague Turkish poli- tics and society since the formation of the Turkish republic on the ruins of the Ottoman Muslim empire. Turkish success or failure in this endeavor will also have a major impact on the broader com- munity of Islamic nations. For centuries Istanbul served as a political lodestar for surrounding Mus- lim countries. If Turkey is able to resolve the tension between its European and Islamic orientation, it may also be able to play a central role in once again pro- viding a model of leadership and stability for an Islamic world that emerged in the wake of the First World War badly fractured. HOW WESTERNIZATION WAS WON Turkey’s attempts to accommodate itself to Euro- pean norms and institutions predate the creation of the Turkish republic by nearly a century. During the nineteenth century, Ottoman Turkey increasingly undertook modernization and sought to be recog- nized as a member of the European society of states. It was during the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923, however, that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk equated Turkish modernization with the wholesale adoption of a Western identity. Atatürk wanted to create a modern, homogenous, and secular nation-state. He viewed Turkey’s Ottoman-Islamic heritage as the chief obstacle to achieving any and all of these goals. Unfortunately, his view of “Westernization” tended toward the superficial, concentrating on external appearances and manners while notably failing to appreciate the political basis of Western dynamism in the norms of representative government, plural- ism, and freedom of thought and expression. Atatürk undertook a drastic and authoritarian model of modernization by abolishing the Islamic caliphate; adopting the Western alphabet, dress code, and calendar; and, more positively, giving women the right to vote and enter all professions. This top-down modernization project, known as Kemalism, became the chief legitimating ideology of the republican elite. But this elite for decades did not attach much value to liberal-democratic norms, M. HAKAN Y AVUZ is an associate professor of political science at the University of Utah and author of Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2003). MUJEEB R. KHAN is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Cali- fornia at Berkeley. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/currenthistory/article-pdf/103/676/389/391923/curh_103_676_389.pdf by guest on 09 September 2020