The Turks and ‘Europe’: The Argument from History

Abstract

On 2 November 2002 Valerie Giscard D'Estaing made his now famous statement to Le Monde about the Turks' historical and cultural unsuitability for membership in the EU; he said it would be 'the end of the Union', as Turkey was 'a country that is close to Europe but not a European country'.' Inadvertently, Giscard D'Estaing did the Europhobes in Turkey and the Turcophobes in Europe a great service. By provoking the 'argument from history', he was merely voicing a feeling that many people in Europe and some in Turkey actually share. A British historian recently wrote: 'When in 1544 Francis I of France allowed the Turkish fleet to winter at Toulon, he was not merely giving assistance to the enemies of Christ (and more to the point, of Emperor Charles V). He was dissolving a centuries old antagonism. He was allowing Asia into Europe'.2 This certainly puts Giscard D'Estaing's statement into perspective. It looks as if 'Asia' advances into Europe in the shape of the Ottoman armies or navies. We have thus a sort of 'transportable Asia'. In a similar vein, when in 1791 the British Prime Minister William Pitt, during the OttomanRussian war of 1791, proposed sending British troops to help the Sultan against the Czar, he was reprimanded by Edmund Burke, who demanded: 'What have these worse than savages to do with the powers of Europe, but to spread war, devastation and pestilence among them?'3 Yet in the Crimean War the 'spreaders of pestilence' were to be supported in the very same theatre against the 'European' Russians. This article is an attempt to do two things. First, to put the Turkish/Ottoman relationship with Europe in a historical perspective, in a sense to respond to Giscard D'Estaing's argument from history; second to make some speculative remarks on how these might tie in with Turkey's present relations with the EU.