France dips its toes in Turkey's so-called 'river of Islam'

Paris Letter: If a long, collective sigh rises over the Élysée Palace, National Assembly and Quai d'Orsay this morning, it will be the reaction of France's political class to the EU Commission's report recommending that membership negotiations begin with Turkey.

"The French public are not nearly as 'Turko-sceptic' as their politicians," Mine Kirikkanat of the Turkish newspaper Milliyet observes. Although 56 per cent of the French polled by Le Figaro last week said they opposed immediate entry for Turkey, 63 per cent said they would be ready to accept Turkey "in the future".

The former French president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, unleashed the unending debate on the wisdom of Turkish membership by declaring two years ago that Turkey was not a European country. Turkey's admission, he predicted, would mean the end of the European Union.

President Jacques Chirac is the only leading French politician to support Turkish membership. His own UMP party opposes him, and some prominent members predict the party could split if Chirac votes at the December 17th European Council to start negotiations with Turkey. Assuming a date is set, Chirac wants it to be as late as possible; at least until after his perilous referendum on the constitutional treaty.

Chirac gave the impression of evading the issue by announcing on October 1st that "the French people will have their say" in a referendum before Turkish membership takes effect around 2015 or 2020. The French leader promised to amend the constitution to ensure that such a referendum would take place - long after he leaves office.

"It's called foutage de gueule," the right-wing "sovereignist" politician Philippe de Villiers commented, using a rude term to accuse Mr Chirac of mocking French voters.

Membership negotiations have never failed to result in entry for aspiring countries. Mr Chirac's opponents say the time for a referendum is now, not 10 or 15 years down the line when it will be too late.

One sometimes wonders why the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, doesn't slam the door and go home. Chirac established a blatant double standard for Turkey, since France will not require referendums for Romanian, Croatian or Bulgarian entry. The EU Commission, too, has already imposed more stringent criteria for Turkey.

Chirac has argued that "it's been more than 40 years, in 1963, that Turkey was offered the prospect of entering the European Union one day." In fact, 45 years have passed since Turkey first applied for an agreement of association with the European Economic Community.

French politicians including Giscard d'Estaing, the presidential hopeful and Finance Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, the pro-European centrist, François Bayrou (who is Turkey's most credible French opponent) and the former prime ministers, Edouard Balladur and Laurent Fabius, all advocate creating a special partnership status short of full membership for Turkey. The idea is supported by the right-wing German opposition party, the CDU.

The Greens are the only French party to officially support rapid Turkish entry on the grounds that "the Union is not a Christian club" and "Turkey is a secular country."

The situation is ironically similar to the 1960s, when President Charles de Gaulle dragged out Britain's membership application for more than a decade. France, de Gaulle argued, did "not want to change the character of their Europe . . . They would lose themselves; Europe would have been drowned in the Atlantic."

Just as de Gaulle feared that Britain would be a Trojan horse for Washington, Turkey is alternatively suspected of being a Trojan horse for radical Islam and Washington.

It would be politically incorrect for mainstream French politicians to tell the truth: they don't want Turkey in the EU because it's a big, Muslim country. "The dominant religion of this or that country has never been and is not one of the criteria for membership," says Michel Barnier, the Foreign Minister.

Bayrou comes close to admitting his Islamophobia when he says: "We'd be heading for a culturally divided Europe, with societies whose customs, traditions and cultures would be different."

So entrenched is French opposition to Turkish entry that Actes Sud is today publishing a collection of essays by Turkish intellectuals entitled "Letters to the Turko-sceptics".

In his introduction to the book the eminent sociologist, Edgar Morin, reminds readers that Christianity was originally a Middle Eastern - not European - religion, that the Ottoman empire was a European power for six centuries, and that the Renaissance King François I forged a powerful alliance with the Turkish Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, against the Habsburgs.

These are arguments the French government may use in a coming campaign to "educate" the French about Turkey's application and the constitutional treaty. The Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, might be well advised to start at home. "Do we want the river of Islam to flow into the riverbed of secularism?" he recently said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.