Dissenting Views on Turkey's European Prospects

What the European societies seem to be worried about the most from Turkey's inevitable accession to the European Union is the emigration of Muslim masses to Europe. One does not have to belong to the xenophobic extreme Right to share the majority's concern about the probable changes to the European identity and culture.

Still, the Greeks seem to be provocatively casual and carefree about this issue, and they have become ardent supporters of Turkey's accession. But if one looks at the whole picture calmly and realistically, and without sentimentalism or fear mongering, Turkey's full accession to the EU and the ability of the Turkish masses to emigrate freely to Greece and Europe will most probably mean the end of Hellenism, as we know it.

Turgut Ozal, using simple logic and having no blinders, had foreseen that the Greek-Turkish problems about the Aegean Sea, Thrace, and Cyprus would be resolved by the demographics and with no extra effort. He had anticipated this without taking into consideration any future movement and emigration of Turks to Greece, a country that the Turks always had their eyes on.

After the devastating war of Asia Minor, when Greece was defeated by Turkey, and after the exchange of the Greek and Turkish populations at the time, Greece had 6.2 million people (1928 census), and Turkey had 13.6 million (1927 census). Today Greece's population is roughly 10 million people while Turkey's is 70 million. With population growth on an astonishing rise in Turkey and on a dramatically sharp decline in Greece, the ratio will be one-to-ten just twenty years from now. Turkey's population will be 100 million and half of those people will be under twenty-five years old.

Greeks are annoyed and upset with the few hundred thousand Albanians who live just about everywhere in Greece. Ever since Greece's independence from Turkey less than two centuries ago, Greeks have forgotten how to coexist with people of different ethnicity. The notion that a few million Turks might move to Greece and make it "their home" is unimaginable to them. Greeks totally dismiss the idea that Turks might emigrate to Greece, have their own schools, mosques all over the country, cultural and entertainment centers, coffee houses, and even bilingual signs for street names and public spaces. They consider it rather impossible that Turks, once in Greece, might become a big part of the Greek labor force and business world and will inevitably define Greek culture.

The problem does not lie only on the large number of Turks that would emigrate to Greece. It is mostly the huge cultural and religious differences that could turn the problem into threat. For the past forty years in Berlin and in every European city where there is a large number of Turks, they have not and still do not get assimilated. In some areas Turks even isolate themselves. They look and behave as if they were still living in the nineteenth century. A good example is Western Thrace in northern Greece.

There are no key channels that connect Europe with Turkey. When a European thinks of Turkey, rarely does an author, poet, artist, musician, or scientist come to mind. Still, while the EU refuses to accept Russia as one of its members, a refusal that is based on past feelings about the Cold War, it rushes to negotiate the accession of Turkey, a mostly Asian country. It is possible for one to think of Europe without invoking names like those of Mustafa Kemal, Izmet Inonu, or Nazim Hikmet, but it is totally impossible to think of Europe as an entity without names like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Kandinsky, and Sagal.

One would argue that Turkey has never felt inferior to Europe—it never had an inferiority complex about its culture, a complex that most of the Balkan countries have had for the past two centuries. Yet Mustafa Kemal who tried to...