Jay Currie

Austria will be given a blunt warning tomorrow that it will be blamed for rupturing 40 years of relations between the European Union and Turkey if it scuppers membership talks. In a sign of widespread irritation with Vienna, which wants to downgrade Turkey’s links with the EU, Britain’s foreign secretary, Jack Straw, has summoned his Austrian counterpart for a one-to-one meeting tomorrow night.

As EU foreign ministers arrive in Luxembourg for emergency talks, Mr Straw will warn Ursula Plassnik that Vienna’s demands would prompt the Turks to throw in the towel. Austria was isolated 24-1 at a meeting of EU ambassadors in Brussels on Thursday after it demanded a clear indication that the talks would be open-ended; an undertaking that membership would depend on the EU’s ability to absorb such a large country; and a warning from the outset of talks that Turkey may be offered an “alternative” to full membership.
guardian

The idea of absorbing the, presently, secular nation of Turkey into the EU is not sitting well with the Austrians. Or, for that matter, any number of other, less vocal, EU nations. The big tent of Europe tends to run out of canvas at the Bospherous. Part of it is the historic emnity between Europe and the Islamic world. Part of it is the sheer economic imbalance as between Turkey and even the poorest nations in the EU.

But, I suspect, a good deal of the reluctance Austria and the rest of Europe has is rooted in something which the Eurocrats would prefer to forget: the idea of Europe as a world informed by the Western, Christian, tradition. A quaint notion to be sure and likely to die out in a few more years of purely secular, bureaucratic, euro democracy. However, for the moment, the linguistic differences between a Dane and an Italian can be bridged by their shared, if fuzzy, sense of what a good life – however defined – might be. That is not true as between a Dane and a Turk if only because there is an inherent difference between the Greco-Christian idea of a good life and the Islamic notion of a life devoted to and directed by Allah.

There are, of course, plenty of very devout Christians who see their lives as acts of devotion and who understand the world as directed by God; but they are a minority even within the world of Christian belief. And even religious whose lives are entirely given over to God are able to understand and accomodate people who make different choices.

Turkey is a secular society but Islamist politicians are making great strides. It is not at all obvious how long Ataturk’s great reformation will hold against Islam militant. From a European perspective, with growing Muslim populations in many of the leading European nations, about the last thing the EU needs is an increasingly radical Islamic state inside the EU.

The Austrians will be protrayed as bigots. And they may well be. But as the European economies begin to seize up and the Muslims already in Europe insist on remaining separate from the states which welcomed them it is a position which will gain support across Europe.

The Eurocrats would do well to remember the last time they asked people in Europe for a mandate – even the French rebelled. The great and the good may want Turkey in, however regular Europeans may be more inclined to remember 1683 when John Sobieski arrived at the Gates of Vienna in the nick of time with 60,000 Christian fighters. As he put it in his battle address:

“It is not a city alone that we have to save, but the whole of Christianity, of which the city of Vienna is the bulwark. This war is a holy one.”