By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
ISTANBUL -- Markus Lehto's Turkey is a futuristic shopping complex with aerial bridges linking skinny-jeans shops to designer bag boutiques. In the attached apartment building, a pied-à-terre designed for the global jet-setter can cost up to $2 million.
While opposition to Turkey's proposed membership in the European Union is growing among governments and voters in Europe, Western businesses -- from Starbucks to Harvey Nichols to Louis Vuitton -- are embracing a nation of eager consumers armed with newly accessible credit cards.
"Turkey has been trapped between different worlds," said Lehto, the 33-year-old Canadian manager of Kanyon, the city's most extravagant new urban community. "Old Istanbul has nothing to do with modern Istanbul."
Across the hills of the city once known as Constantinople, sleek new office towers are rising as rapidly as the slender spires of new mosques in a country where both Western capitalism and Islamic sentiments are on the march.
In busy Taksim Square, teenage girls in miniskirts and winter tights share sidewalks with women draped in head scarves and ankle-grazing coats. On the European side of the Bosporus Strait, packed nightclubs blare music that carries to the Asian shore, where some religiously conservative communities have banned the sale of alcohol.
At a time when European relations with the Muslim world are at a low, Western governments are becoming increasingly estranged from the country that has long been considered a political bridge between the secular democracies of the West and the Islamic nations of the East.
On Monday, European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels reached a compromise over how to respond to Turkey's failure to open its ports and airports to traffic from the ethnic Greek zone of Cyprus. The E.U. wants that step as a show of good faith on Turkey's part.
The ministers agreed to slow down but not end talks over Turkey's efforts to become the first Muslim country to join the bloc. The process was already widely forecast to take another decade to complete, so Monday's decision to delay discussions on eight of 35 policy issues ranks as a relatively mild reprimand. Even so, an increasing number of Europeans and Turks believe Turkey will never become a member.
In recent days, Turkey has indicated that it will open one port and one airport to traffic from the southern zone of Cyprus. The island has been divided since Turkish troops invaded in 1974 after Greek Cypriots staged an attempted coup with backing from Greece. Cyprus was admitted to the E.U. in 2004, represented by the Greek Cypriot government. E.U. ministers on Monday agreed in principle to end the economic isolation of the Turkish zone, but delayed any specific action until next year.
"It's important to send this double signal that on the one hand, there should be no train crash," Spain's foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, said after Monday's closed-door meeting. But, he added, "there should be a slowdown."
The schism between Turkey, the only Muslim country in the NATO military alliance, and European nations comes as the countries on both sides of the divide struggle to define their national identities amid turbulent social and cultural change.
Some of the European governments most opposed to Turkey's entry into the E.U., such as France, are straining to cope with restive, growing Muslim populations. Turkey, meanwhile, is struggling to maintain a staunchly secular state even as its predominantly Muslim population is becoming more religious.
It is not so much European bureaucrats who want to torpedo Turkey's membership. Many of them believe Turkey could play a crucial role in making peace between the Muslim world and secular Europe.
Rather, the opposition comes from vulnerable political leaders who are responding to suspicious electorates, according to analysts and diplomats. European citizens increasingly fear a new influx of Muslim immigrants with the admission of a Muslim nation that would become the largest member of the E.U.
"If you polled the foreign ministries of Europe, every one would say they want Turkey in the E.U.," said one U.S. diplomat based in Europe. "If you polled the people, they would all say keep them out."
Last week, on the same day that President Bush rejected the Iraq Study Group's proposal to open talks with Iran and Syria to try to calm crises across the Middle East, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had just returned from talks in Tehran and Damascus and was preparing to board a plane for a return visit to Damascus.
"This is not to show that, 'Hey, we have options,' " said Mehmet Ali Birand, a prominent Turkish political analyst. "As long as he's having a bad temper from Europe, he's trying to concentrate on the Middle East more than ever. He fears Iraq, he fears Iran, and he's starting to move on those issues."
Birand and others fear that Europe's rejection of Turkey's membership request could strengthen a trend toward deeper Islamic sentiments in the country. In a poll conducted this past summer by the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, 46.5 percent of Turks surveyed described themselves as "quite religious," compared with 25 percent in 1999.
But the survey also showed that the number of women wearing head scarves dropped from 53 percent to 49 percent and that the percentage of Turks who favor Islamic rule in the country dropped from 21 percent to 9 percent.
Last month, tens of thousands of mourners marched in the funeral of five-time prime minister Bulent Ecevit, chanting, "Turkey is secular and will remain secular," a slogan that opposition political leaders said was aimed at Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party. The party has attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to abolish some of the country's more secular laws, including one that bans women from wearing head scarves at universities or in government jobs.
Ihsan Aknur, an Istanbul taxi driver-turned-entrepreneur who uses a Web site to attract foreign tourists to his guide services, said Europe should recognize the paradoxes in Turkish society. "As long as the economy is good, Turks look toward the West," Aknur said, navigating traffic on a clogged city street. "But if the economy becomes bad, they turn to prayer, then become more religious."
Turks are increasingly angry with the growing anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe. That is fueling support for religious leaders who oppose E.U. membership.
"Turkey is used by the West, the West isn't sincere," said Saadettin Ustaosmanoglu, editor of Yeni Furkan, an Islamic magazine. "Since Turkey is a bridge between East and the West, according to the Western mind, Turkey can play an important role to smooth the waters when the time comes for the West to account for its wrongdoings against the East."
Special correspondent Yonca Poyraz-Dogan contributed to this report.
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