Deconstructing Giscard

 

November 20, 2002


Deconstructing Giscard

Eye on Europe
By MICHAEL GONZALEZ

Brussels

Listen to the silence. It's as if Valery Giscard d'Estaing had just set off a firecracker in the middle of a garden party and the other guests, after being momentarily aghast, are all now trying to make believe that they can return to their conversations. This newspaper and a few others such as the Times of London have written strong editorials condemning Mr. Giscard's remark that Turkey "is not a European country" and does not belong in the EU. But apart from that, the silence from "official" Europe has been deafening.

The 76-year-old Mr. Giscard is hardly an enfant terrible, however, and his comments should elicit a response, not just from politicians but from historians and others. His contention that Turks cannot be trusted to make decisions affecting "extremely sensitive points of a uniquely European daily life" is far from a prank. Dismissing it as another facet of LePenism would not do either, however, and a rebuttal should probe how well grounded his arguments are culturally and historically. Mr. Giscard is president of the convention tasked with proposing a constitution for the European Union, and he maintains that a majority in the EU agrees with him. Unless the air is cleared, the smoke from his explosion will hang in the air viciously.

We can start by going through all the criteria that the former French president may have meant when he spoke to Le Monde two weeks ago — geographic, linguistic, racial, religious, cultural, or economic — and see how strongly he stands on each. As John Stuart Mill said, you haven't won the debate until you have refuted your opponent's strongest arguments.

To start with the simplest, the linguistic argument can be quickly discarded. Turkish is indeed not an "Indo-European" language. But then again, neither are Finnish, Hungarian or Estonian, all of which, curiously, may be related to Turkish in the Uralic-Altaic family of languages. Neither is Basque Indo-European. Mr. Giscard can go and tell a Basque he is not a European if he wants to, but I wouldn't recommend it.

The racial issue is more complicated, but also a loser. There are always arguments as to what constitutes race, but advancements brought by the human genome project have allowed geneticists to isolate certain conditions that are more prevalent among certain peoples. These studies point to the existence of groupings whose members share some characteristics, but they only leave us with the large ones we learnt about in school: Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid and so forth. Turks are in the first, sharing broad genetic characteristics with Europeans.

Even if your criteria for "race" is the one used in diversity recruitment drives in Britain — whether someone is a "visible ethnic minority," or VEM — it isn't certain that Turks would constitute a different group. There are many blond, blue-eyed Turks, but even the swarthier ones could easily be Spaniards, Greeks, Portuguese, Italians or even compatriots of Mr. Giscard. In truth, Turkey is a complicated country racially, a legacy of the cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman empire. The Central Asian Turkish strain in the national genetic pool is much diluted by now.

"The Turks have a very heterogeneous gene pool," says Stanford University geneticist Peter Underhill. "Ultimately we're all Africans, anyway, as we all came out of Africa less than 100,000 years ago."

The geographic consideration, brought up by Mr. Giscard in his interview, would seem to be the determining one for a regional grouping, but it is also tricky. It is true that the majority of Turkey's territory lies in what the ancients used to call "Asia Minor." But there's also a European part. And even at the other end of its "Asian" component, Turkey is abutted by Christian, indubitably European Georgia, which gave the rest of Europe one of its strongest bonds, the culture of the vine.

On the matter of geographical dislocations, Mr. Giscard's own country also has integral parts of it that are in the Caribbean or on the South American continent. Again, Mr. Giscard is welcome to go and inform the good people of Martinique that they are no longer part of the EU. Or he can tell the peoples of Malta and Cyprus — the first off North Africa, the second wedged between the Turkish and Lebanese coasts — that, no, they won't make it into the EU in two years after all.

Economically Turkey is doubtless behind Europe, having a $6,800 GDP per capita, or less than a third of the EU average. But of course, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece also lagged the average when they joined. Three of them still do. Membership brought them up.

Historically, too, Turkey played a central role in Europe while other empires — China, Persia, India — were clearly foreign. Not for nothing was the Ottoman Empire known in the 19th century as "the Sick Man of Europe."

Indeed, the more one looks at Mr. Giscard's contention the more one realizes that it rests almost solely on the cultural-religious argument. Though many would want to quickly dismiss this line of reasoning, especially in today's secularized, increasingly de- Christianized Europe, it is here that one must battle the convention president.

The idea that Christianity formed Europe — more than geography, ethnicity and so forth — is of old pedigree and cannot so easily be discarded. Before Mohammed there was "Christendom" and little notion of Europe. It was the emergence of Islam from the Arabian sands that made Europe fold back unto itself. The eminent Belgian historian Henri Pirenne put it best when he wrote, "Charlemagne without Mohammed would be inconceivable."

Even Voltaire, amongst many others, spoke about Europeans all sharing "the same religious foundation." In our era, T.S. Eliot, in a radio broadcast to Germans in 1945, expounded about "the common tradition of Christianity which has made Europe what it is.

"It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe-until recently-have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true; and yet what he says and makes and does, will all... depend on [the Christian heritage] for its meaning." (my Itals).

Very well, then, does this mean that Mr. Giscard is ultimately right? No, not really. But it does mean that a response must address these issues. It could begin by noting that the notion of "Europe" has moved throughout the centuries and there's no reason it should remain static today. "We're building a new Europe in the 21st century not in the 16th century," I was told by the historian Norman Davies, who's delved in his books into the question of what it is to be a European.

"Turkey has been Europeanized by Kemal (Ataturk, father of modern Turkey) and it has been modeled on the European democracies," says Prof. Davies, bringing up the all-important political consideration. Turkey, geographically and historically in Europe, has made every effort to join up. What keeps it out, religion? But that would be most un-Christian. "The principle of Christianity is Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself," says Prof. Davies. "I see Europe as a very diverse continent, and Islam is very much a part of the diversity. Just go to London, or Paris," he adds.

There is, then, no clear definition of what is a European. (The Italian writer Luigi Barzini included Americans, and so would I sometimes). But Mr. Giscard has thrown down a gauntlet that must be picked up now by EU leaders and others.

I ran into a senior European official the other night at a hotel lobby here in Brussels, and the subject soon came up. "Giscard is a p***k," he said emphatically, adding that even if he had agreed with the convention president — which he said he didn't — this was the worst time to say it, for geopolitical reasons. It was all off the record, of course. But now is the time to start going on the record.

Write to Michael Gonzalez at mike.gonzalez@wsj.com

Turks are not Europeans. What constitutes a European? I am not sure, are Armenians European? Are we talking race, culture, mentality or what? I am white but I was born in Africa. Am I European? I have a friend from Birmingham who is Asian — is she a European? Turkey is the "Sick Man of Europe"— or do you mean the Sick Man of Asia?

Nick, a Briton, in a guestbook, responding to an Armenian who stated, "Turks are not Europeans." (11/23/1999)


'Europe for Westerners only’ is a monstrous and a most impolitic claim, for, if titles go by continents, what standing have we Westerners, who have colonised the four quarters of the world, to our holdings in America, Africa, and Australasia? This is not a line of argument which Australians would like to present to the Japanese, or South Africans to the Bantus.

Arnold Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, 1922