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To: Haim R. Branisteanu who wrote (60656)	12/15/2006 7:47:29 PM
From: regli	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116555

Turkey’s loss will be another strategic defeat for west ft.com By Philip Stephens Published: December 14 2006 19:36 \| Last updated: December 14 2006 19:36 The US's mistake was to believe it could remake the Middle East with its military might. Europe's strategic error is to imagine it can shut out chaos beyond its borders. The US has stumbled in the armed attempt to plant democracy in the heart of the Muslim world. Europe is squandering its soft power by turning its back on just such a democratic Muslim nation. The US failure in Iraq is being mirrored by Europe's loss of nerve over Turkey. The former is an event suffused with gruesome drama, given bloody expression each day on the streets of Baghdad. The latter, played out behind closed doors in Brussels, is a process swaddled in dissembling euro-speak. Yet both in their different ways speak to a failure to engage with Islam. The long-term consequences are comparably dismal. On one level, the latest spat surrounding Turkey's accession talks with the European Union is a nasty squall in a Cypriot tea cup. Ankara has refused to open its ports to the Greek-controlled half of the island of Cyprus. Since Cyprus is now a member of the EU, Brussels feels obliged to retaliate by partially suspending entry talks with Turkey. There is more to it than this, of course. There always is. If Turkey is in the wrong, so too are the European governments that have reneged on a pledge to end the isolation of Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus. The real villain anyway is the Nicosia government. Backed by its sponsor in Athens, since 2004 it has wrecked successive efforts at compromise. The Turkish side has accepted a balanced United Nations plan for reunification of the island. The Greek Cypriots have rejected it, seeking added advantage by threatening to hold the rest of the EU to ransom. All in all, it is evident now, and it should have been then, that the Union made a grievous mistake in admitting Cyprus before agreement was reached. That is as it may be. Sadly, the rupture with Turkey is about more than the obduracy of the politicians in Nicosia. They serve as a convenient alibi for those elsewhere in Europe who have their own reasons for derailing Turkey's entry talks. These are the leaders at today's EU summit in Brussels who want a new definition of what it means to be European a definition that would exclude Turkey. They will not say as much. Officially, the summit will merely endorse a decision by foreign ministers to suspend eight of the 35 so-called chapters in the negotiations with Ankara. Thus a strategic foreign policy blunder can be concealed beneath eurocratic gobbledygook. The leaders are due to focus instead on how much further the Union might expand elsewhere. The answer is not very far. The plan is to change the rules of the game. The treaty says that any European state is eligible to join. But several governments the French, Dutch, Austrians and Angela Merkel's half of Germany's coalition want more stringent criteria. In future Brussels will take account not just of the suitability of supplicants (sorry, applicants) but also of something called the "absorption capacity" of the Union itself. Croatia might sneak in, as might, eventually, others in the western Balkans. But Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and, above all, Turkey, can forget it. This discussion among small-minded politicians blithely ignores the success of enlargement. It forgets the achievement that has seen the former communist states of eastern Europe become stable, if occasionally awkward, democracies. It denies the force of the Union's gravitational pull and its success in projecting stability. It frets because the founding fathers' original design drawn when Europe was still divided no longer fits the realities of a united continent. These leaders have their excuse, of course. It is called public opinion. Enlargement has not been popular with voters, they grumble. What they really mean is that they have failed to explain to their electorates that we live in an era of falling frontiers. They have ceded the ground to narrow nationalism rather than trumpet the benefits of openness and the costs of isolationism. They huddle in the slipstream of popular opinion when they might be leading it. There are exceptions. Britain, Sweden and Spain have governments that seem to understand Europe cannot be defined by an arbitrary line on a map and the exclusively Christian values of the Vatican. The prevailing mood, though, is one that seeks to shutter the Union against its neighbours. Thus Nicolas Sarkozy, mis-labelled as a "moderniser", calls for a definition of Europeanness that would close the door forever against Turkey. Geography would be the excuse, religion the reason. Mr Sarkozy, we must understand, needs the votes of the right in France's coming presidential election. The firmest supporters of Turkey's eventual admission must admit that it will be a long, difficult process. The Ankara government will have to abandon many more of the relics of an authoritarian past and accept higher standards of democracy, human rights and judicial process. Economic and social change will have to accompany political reform. But that is the point. Turkey is emerging as a modern, pluralist state precisely because such a course offered the prospect of entry to Europe's democratic community. It has become an exemplar for the proposition that Islam can sit comfortably with European values. A stable Turkey as Europe's bridge to the Middle East is the strategic prize. Opponents of Turkey's accession know this. That is why they will not take the honest course and insist that the Union's door be slammed shut immediately. That might be to admit a visceral reluctance to allow 70m Muslims into a largely Christian club. Let Turkey reform and modernise, they whisper, and we can give them the bad news later. We can always sweeten the pill by offering privileged associate status. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made mistakes, sometimes undermining its own cause. But it is not stupid. Turkey has other options and interests. It can look eastwards to its Muslim neighbours, northwards to Russia. The Union's sometimes scolding, sometimes patronising, attitude is already turning opinion in Turkey away from Europe. At some point Ankara will say enough is enough. That would represent a strategic defeat for the west every bit as large as the war in Iraq. The divide with Islam would widen further. America thinks it can change the world by force; Europe that it can ignore it. Both are wrong. If Turkey is lost, Europe's crimes of omission will in due course take their place alongside America's sins of commission.