THREE OF THE greatest engineering projects of modern times are under way in Turkey. By the Maiden’s Tower, on the Bosphorus, a famous old landmark, two elaborate structures have appeared. They are the surface end of an enormous underwater enterprise, to link the European and Asian sides of the city by tunnel. It will widen the traffic bottleneck that so besets Istanbul, and do much to make it once again one of the great European cities. Already, huge areas of the old European part of the city are being restored, brought back to where they were in 1900, when the city was the heart of a Mediterranean empire.
Then there is the vast Baku-Ceyhan pipeline that brings oil from the Caspian to the Mediterranean; again a gigantic enterprise, negotiating its way through poor mountain country, to keep Europe going. It also brings life to towns such as Kars, in northeastern Turkey, where, with an endless winter, the inhabitants had to heat themselves with “straw bricks” — combinations of animal dung and straw, dried out in the open in the summer and then used to keep the people going in a cold that reaches well below zero. These things — tezek — were used in Alpine Europe until the Fifties, and then, not. Turkey is following that path.
The greatest of these engineering enterprises is the GAP, the “southeastern Anatolian project”, by which great dams are to be placed on the biblical rivers Tigris and Euphrates, flooding an area the size of Belgium and turning what, for centuries, has been a dirt-poor area back into “the fertile crescent” that it used to be. If you go to that mainly Kurdish part of south-east Turkey, you can see the green areas spreading, and towns such as Urfa, on the Syrian border, growing ever more prosperous.
These projects are the background to the debate about whether Turkey should be allowed to join the European Union. A stage army of Euro-Lilliputs has put up objections, humiliating for the Turks in general: too many of them, too poor, too Muslim, too nasty to their minorities, too likely to migrate in droves and set up kebab houses all over the place. The country has, of course, its problems, but the history of the Turks is about getting there in the end.
It is true that in the 1970s there was a Third World demographic problem; Turkey added, every year, the population of Denmark to itself. Schools could not cope, hospitals were swamped, electricity failed for six hours every day, a smog fell across the cities. But Turkish birthrates have fallen to replacement-rate (though there are pockets in the east where the old ways go on).
Nor is the country nearly as poor as legend would have it. Turkish males die on average at 70, Russian ones at 60. The growth rate is enormous and you can see the signs all around: the restoration of battered old parts of Istanbul, or the chains and chains of Central Europe-bound lorries on the main roads. (Kayseri, the old Caesarea, is now a key industrial town, and so is Antep, both of them making things that Western Europe no longer makes for itself.)
If Western Europe opened up the agricultural market as well as the industrial one, you would see a similar process in the countryside of Anatolia. At the moment it is a very odd mixture: near-biblical villages, complete with donkeys and lines of men chewing the cud in teahouses, only a mile or so from a modern farm with irrigation sprinklers pumping away.
Is there a European country of which the above might, easily within living memory, have been said? There is. It is Spain, under Franco. Not long ago the backwardness and cultural difference of Spain were held to be incompatible with EU membership. Turkey also has a Mediterranean culture, complete with clientelistic politics, a family sense of sometimes forbidding strength, and very good hot dinners. Once Spain joined Europe it rapidly “modernised”. Nor did poor Spanish “ guest workers” migrate in droves. In fact, as within Spain, the cultural differences within Anatolia are at least as great as those between Turks and Europeans.
Comparison with Spain brings up another contentious question: minorities. Spain had a vicious civil war, involving them. The Catalans were ahead of the rest of the country, in much the same way as Greeks or Armenians were in old Turkey. Turkey’s minorities had more and better schools; in fact the Turkish language had to be radically reformed in order for the masses to be at all literate (the old, Arabic-based, script could cater for four “z”s and three vowels, whereas Turkish has one “z” and eight vowels).
The problem in Turkey was complicated during and after the First World War, when the Western powers used local Greeks and Armenians to try to carve up Anatolia. Much massacre resulted, with whole regions being “ethnically cleansed”. In the Thirties roughly half the urban population of Turkey was made up of refugees and their descendants, and these can hardly be expected to take kindly to the European Parliament’s resolving that one of these ethnic cleansings, and one only — the Armenian — should be recognised as “genocide”.
The other minority question concerns the Kurds. They are like the Basques: mountaineers, in part religious-reactionary, in part bandit-revolutionary, in part successful migrants, with several different languages, none much developed. When Kurds move to the cities — two thirds have now done so — they do not vote for the nationalist parties. They do do so in the southeast, but that area has not flourished as the rest of the country has been doing because it is on the Iraqi and Iranian borders.
Problems of “ethnicity” among the north-eastern Kurds are much less than to the south, where a tradition of tribal rivalry persists, making for a sort of civil war that the communist PKK exploited. The answer? Very obviously, an end to the unemployment that these circumstances have created. The southeastern Anatolian project, the GAP, should matter, though much will depend on whether the EU allows free movement of the resulting agricultural produce. That would do more for the Kurds than preaching about minority rights.
The Europeans should forget their objections to Turkey. The country is much more of a prize than all the other new Eastern European countries put together: it has a tradition of hard work and honesty that was never destroyed by communism. It is a Spain in the making.
The country has been doing so well that you wonder if it really needs to join Europe at all. At present the motivation for doing so is mixed: an end to visa queues (the British are gruesome), an escape from the puritanism of small-town Anatolia, a prospect of waves of foreign investment, a hope that “Europe” will mean an end to what the secularists see as religious takeover and what the religious see as a secularist takeover.
But the Europeans arrive with health-and-safety regulations and much else that could just mean the end of much of what makes Turkey tick: those small shops and artisans working till all hours, ignoring silly rules in proper Mediterranean manner and keeping families together in a way that makes for a very healthy social atmosphere (if a handbag is stolen here, it makes the television news).
Can Turkey stand the unemployment, bureaucracy and taxation that the EU really portends? Up to the Turks. But there are those of us who might think that they can carry out the beneficial changes on their own and who might even say that, if they really want membership of the EU, they can have ours.
Norman Stone is Professor of History at Koç University, Istanbul
