Save Europe! Keep Turkey out of the EU
Since
1991, the
U.S. has enthusiastically supported Turkey joining
the European Union. The moment of decision is fast
approaching, with a report from the European Commission
due on October 6th on whether or not to invite Turkey to
begin "accession" negotiations.
If
negotiations begin, EU membership is widely viewed as
inevitable.
Yet
extending all the rights and privileges of EU membership
to
Turkey would be disastrous for Europe—which, despite
all the fashionable sniping heard in the U.S. these
days, remains the heart of western civilization.
And it
would be bad for America, Turkey, and the
Muslim world as a whole.
The
U.S. doesn`t have any direct influence on the issue. But
we do wield a lot of
politically correct suasion o f the kind that elite
European opinion is unfortunately susceptible to:
"You aren`t going to—horrors!—DISCRIMINATE against
Turkey just because 95% of its territory isn`t in Europe
and it`s populated by 69 million largely undereducated
Muslims, are you? C`mon, prove how unbiased and
multicultural you are by letting in Turkey."
Alec
Russell reported in the Daily Telegraph:
“President
George W Bush yesterday called on the European Union to
accept Turkey as a member and so expose the myth of the
`clash of civilizations` between Christianity and Islam.
… `Including Turkey in the EU would prove that Europe is
not the exclusive club of a single religion, and it
would expose the `clash of civilizations` as a passing
myth of history,` Mr Bush said.”
Bush says Turkey must be allowed its place in EU
June 30, 2004)
Of
course, Turks fought stoutly alongside Americans in the
Korean War, suffering the
most killed-in-action of all our allies.
That`s
more than
Mexico, or some other of America`s self-proclaimed
"allies" have done.
Turkey,
with its
impressive military
tradition, was a crucial link in deterring Soviet
aggression during the Cold War.
But
both wars, Korean and Cold, are
over.
It`s
simply not in America`s economic interest to encourage
Turkey to submerge into a trading bloc designed to
maximize trade within the EU while penalizing imports
from America.
Nor is
it in America`s strategic interest to make more feasible
Brussels` dream of a
European military force separate from NATO. So far,
such plans have largely foundered on the anti-martial
feelings of Europeans unwilling to sacrifice their
precious 1.3 children. But Turkey would make a separate
EU strike force much more feasible by providing cheap,
brave cannon fodder.
Whether it is in Turkey`s interest to join the EU is
doubtful, too.
Corruption is a huge problem in Turkey—revealed
whenever one of the frequent
earthquakes flattens hundreds of the shoddy
buildings whose developers
bribed safety inspectors. Massive subsidies from the
EU in the hopes of bringing up Turkish wage levels to
European levels would likely exacerbate the problem.
Nor is it clear that Turkey will be better off adopting
post-modern European laws, as the EU insists. For
example, the EU
demands the abolition of the
death penalty, yet the threat of execution
encouraged captured Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan
to call for peace, thus ending the 15-year-long
rebellion in which 37,000 died.
More importantly, the EU wants Turkey`s military to
get out of politics. But it has only been the threat
of a coup by the resolutely secular army that has kept
Islamic fundamentalism in check in Turkey.
For all
its problems, Turkey is, by
Muslim standards, a successful nation-state. And
that`s another argument against Turkey submerging itself
in the transnationalist
European Union: Turkish nationalism provides a role
model that should not be extinguished.
As a
political, rather than economic, unit, the EU supposedly
exists to solve the problem plaguing Europe in 1914:
aggressive, expansive nationalism. Ninety years later,
this concern seems
laughably out of date.
Yet in
the Muslim world, especially among Arabs, nationalism is
not the problem, it`s the solution. Transnationalism
may or may not be the wave of the future in the
postmodern West. But much of the
Islamic world has yet to fully extricate itself from
the
medieval dream of a
universal theocracy. Its evolution to nationalism
would be progress.
National borders work to quarantine chaos. The lack of
borders that Muslims
respect as legitimate exacerbates the region`s
instability.
Within the Muslim world, it has basically been the
nationalists who have been forces for international
stability—for example,
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the secular
Republic of Turkey in 1923;
Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who made
peace with Israel at
Camp David in 1978.
In contrast, the men who have spread anarchy abroad—such
as terrorist supremo
Osama bin Laden, Egypt`s
Gamal Abdul Nasser, Libya`s
Moammar Gadhafi, Iraq`s
Saddam Hussein—have tended to believe, as
ex-President Bill Clinton is reported to have said on
Sept. 10, 2001, that "the world will be a better
place if all borders are eliminated."
Ataturk`s Turkish
nationalism set the template that has kept Turkey (a
Muslim but not Arabic-speaking nation) out of the
international trouble that otherwise seems endemic to
the Middle East.
Of course, Turkey
recently won a long, brutal internal war with its Kurds.
(The unlucky Kurds are one of the larger nations without
a state.). But Western governments, before the issue of
EU accession arose, largely chose to ignore what Turkey
does within its borders, so long as it remains a good
neighbor.
The EU is designed to
smother nationalist feelings. For Turks, however, the
alternative to healthy nationalism would be Islamism,
which is much more dangerous.
Finally, Turkish accession would be very bad for
Europe.
Turkey`s population within a couple of decades will be
larger than Germany, currently the largest EU state.
Turkish Muslims would be the single largest voting bloc
within the EU. And it would be difficult to deny
Turks for long the right possessed by other EU members
to migrate anywhere within the EU.
How
many Turks would move to Europe if given the chance?
Well, about 1/6th of all people of Mexican descent in
the world live in the United States. But the more
realistic comparison would be
Puerto Rico, which has unlimited legal migration
rights with its rich neighbor, the U.S.
According to George Borjas, about 1/4th of Puerto Rico
moved to the US mainland in a couple of decades,
until the federal government started bribing Puerto
Ricans to stay home with
food stamps and the like. That would mean close to
20 million additional Muslims moving into
Europe proper—on top of the
15 to 20 million already
causing so much
trouble.
That
would be a cultural, political, and security
disaster—not just for Europe, but also for the U.S.
Think
about it this way: Admitting Turkey to the European
Union would be very like admitting Mexico to the United
States.
Indeed,
Mexican President Vicente Fox explicitly wants an EU-like
relationship with the U.S. and Canada. His former
foreign minister Jorge Castaneda told the
L.A. Times in 2001:
"That`s what Fox
essentially wants, the type of resource transfers that
occurred in Spain and, before Spain, in Ireland, and,
after Spain, in Portugal and Greece. The Germans were
willing to build highways in Spain. Somebody else has to
build our highways. We don`t have the money." [Jorge
Castaneda: Mexico`s Man Abroad, LA Times, August 12,
2001, By Sergio Munoz]
For comparison:
- Turkey`s population is 69 million compared to
Mexico`s 105 million.
- Turkey`s
per capita GDP is $6,700 compared to Mexico`s
$9,000.
- Turkey`s long term economic potential, while not
awful, appears limited by a mediocre national average
IQ. (A country`s average IQ is an absolutely crucial
datum in thinking about world affairs, but you won`t
see it cited many places other than VDARE.com).
Turkey`s IQ structure appears to be fairly similar to
Mexico`s. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in IQ and
the Wealth of Nations do
report one solid study of Turkey: the Raven`s
Standard Progressive Matrices was standardized on a
representative sample of 2,277 Turkish children in 1992.
The Turkish children averaged 90 on a scale in which the
British average 100. Two studies of Turkish immigrants
in the Netherlands reported averages of 88 and 85.
Lynn and Vanhanen`s
database contains only one study for Mexico, and
that from the less developed Southern Highlands, where
the average was 87. They also report three studies of
Mexican immigrants in America, with averages of 84, 95,
and 84. The authors of
The Bell Curve,
Richard J. Herrnstein and
Charles Murray,
gave 91 as their best
guess for the average IQ of Latinos.
All is
not lost in Europe. Some Europeans have got the message.
As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard recently reported in the
Daily Telegraph:
"A
European commissioner set off a furious row yesterday
after warning that Europe`s Christian civilization
risked being overrun by Islam. Fritz Bolkestein, the
single market commissioner and a former leader of the
Dutch liberals, said the European Union would `implode`
in its current form if 70 million Turkish Muslims were
allowed to join. "
"He
predicted that Turkish accession would overwhelm the
fragile system and finish off any lingering dreams of a
fully-integrated European superstate. In a speech at
Leiden University, he compared the EU to the late
Austrian-Hungarian empire, which took so many
different peoples on board in such a haphazard fashion
that it eventually became ungovernable."
[Muslim
millions threaten EU values, says commissioner
September 8, 2004]
Valery Giscard-D`Estaing, who was so weaselly about
the Soviet threat when he was President of France, has
surprisingly emerged as the
Defender of Christendom by publicly expressing
strong opposition to admitting Turkey. He says it would
be "the
end of Europe."
And
he`s right.
So why
is the Bush Administration pushing this dangerous step?
Haven`t
we learned lately that we don`t know enough about
foreigners in general—and Muslims in particular?
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]


