“When Nicolas Sarkozy rejects accession for Turkey on the grounds of Europe's ‘natural borders,’ everybody know that he is speaking of ‘cultural borders’”, reads the article by Jean-Francois Bayart, the director of National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) published in French Libération. The article is titled “An Islam Compatible with the Republic”. NEWS.am posts the full text.

“And Turkey's culture is Islam: It would be incompatible with Europe, and even with the Republic [France].

Yet Turkey has been a republic since 1924. Islam has democratized in Turkey. It has appropriated the idea of the nation, republican institutions, the civil code (introduced in 1926 and modelled on Swiss legislation), the market economy, education, the mass media and scientific knowledge. It has adopted the political party as method of political participation and, because it is as theologically and ideologically varied as in the rest of the Muslim world, it has given rise to a pluralist education, the one rivaling the other to a greater or lesser degree. The believers have also themselves divided up their votes across the political checkerboard, while non-believers have voted for Muslim parties.

More than that, Islam has made a decisive contribution to the democratization of the Kemalist republic. By virtue of the parliamentary system, successive Muslim parties or conservative parties with a religious sensibility, close to brotherhoods, have incorporated within the republican institutions the religious masses that do not identify with the aggressive secularism of Kemalism and filled the space that could have fallen to the jidahist groups. They supported the move of the peasant farmers to the cities during the rural exodus. They lent a voice to those of the Kurds who sought to express their defiance of a centralizing state but without joining the armed struggle of the PKK [Kurdistan Workers' Party]. They also permitted the rise of the Anatolian elites that the Kemalist establishment was confining to the periphery.

On the other hand, Kemalist nationalism is less secular than it claims. It is ethno-confessional, like its counterparts in the Balkans and Caucasus. In the Kemalist republic nationals of Turkish origin or Sunnis of the Hanefite rite are implicitly more citizens than the Kurdish, Alevi, and Christian and Jewish inhabitants. But the origin of this implicit discrimination does not have much to do with Islam as a religion. It is political and is part of the unleashing of a cultural nationalism from the latter half of the 19th century as well as of the crossed operations of ethnic cleansing that followed, the genocide of the Armenians being its culmination. The same logic is found at work for the benefit of Orthodox, Catholics or Jews, or Shi'is or even Sunnis, depending on the Balkan, Caucasian, or Middle Eastern country in question. After all, an Arab Israeli is a little less Israeli than a Jewish Israeli and it is not so long ago that that religion ceased to be indicated on the identity cards of the Greeks.

The paradox of Turkey is due to the fact that the secular nationalists are the ones that hold this ethno-confessional conception of citizenship and the ruling Islamic party, the AKP [Justice andDevelopment Party], with the support of the conservatives, is questioning it. Closing the door to Europe on Turkey by claiming it is a Muslim country is clearly to play the game of this conception. There is, moreover, a certain coherence in hearing Nicolas Sarkozy, a man so concerned about &‘national identity,’ inadvertently assume the slogan of the Turkish far right: &‘France, you must like it or leave it!’ On the other hand, many Turks who are not necessarily believers but who vote for the AKP to oppose nationalist authoritarianism, say to Europe, along with the left-wing intellectual Murat Belge: &‘Do not allow us to become fascist!’

The Europeans have two reasons to be concerned about the future of Turkish democracy. It is not in their interest to see the development of an ultranationalist Moscow-Ankara axis. And they bear a direct historical responsibility for the development of these ethno-confessional nationalisms in the Eastern Mediterranean, which they fuelled ideologically and supported politically, even militarily, under cover of &‘protection’ — a self-interested one — of Christian minorities. We are still paying the price in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Iraq, in the Balkans, of the disastrous way the &‘Orient question’ was handled.The failure of negotiations between Turkey and the European Union would be a continuation of this disaster.”