Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (152 page)

But there the resemblance ended. Post-Soviet Russia was a Eurasian empire rather than a European state. Preoccupied with violent rebellions in the Caucasus, it was maintained at a distance from the rest of Europe by the new buffer states of Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova as well as by its own increasingly illiberal domestic politics. There was no question of Russia joining the EU: new entrants, as we have seen, were required to conform to ‘European values’—with respect to the rule of law, civic rights and freedoms and institutional transparency—that Vladimir Putin’s Moscow was very far from acknowledging, much less implementing.
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In any event, Russian authorities were more interested in building pipelines and selling gas to the EU than in joining it. Many Russians, including residents of the western cities, did not instinctively think of themselves as Europeans: when they traveled west they spoke (like the English) of ‘going to Europe’.

Nevertheless, Russia had been a ‘hands-on’ European power for three hundred years and the legacy remained. Latvian banks were the target of takeovers by Russian businessmen. A Lithuanian president, Rolandas Paksas, was forced out of office in 2003 under suspicion of close links with the Russian mafia. Moscow retained its Baltic enclave around Kaliningrad and continued to demand unrestricted transit (through Lithuania) for Russian freight and military traffic, as well as visa-free travel for Russian citizens visiting the EU. Laundered cash from the business undertakings of Russian oligarchs was funnelled through the property market in London and the French Riviera.

In the short run, Russia was thus a decidedly uncomfortable presence on Europe’s outer edge. But it was not a threat. The Russian military was otherwise engaged and anyway in dilapidated condition. The health of the Russian population was a matter of serious concern—life expectancy for men especially was falling precipitately and international agencies had for some time been warning that the country had seen a revival of tuberculosis and was on the verge of an AIDS epidemic—but this was primarily a source of concern for Russians themselves. For the immediate future Russia was decidedly preoccupied with its own affairs.

In the longer run, the simple fact of Russia’s proximity, its sheer size and unmatched fossil-fuel reserves, must inevitably cast a shadow on the future of an energy-poor European continent. Already in 2004, half of Poland’s natural gas and 95 percent of its oil came from Russia. But in the meantime what the Russian authorities and individual Russians were seeking from Europe was ‘respect’. Moscow wished to be more intimately involved in intra-European decision making, whether in NATO, in the administration of Balkan settlements, or in trade agreements (both bilateral and through the World Trade Organization): not because decisions taken in Russia’s absence would necessarily be prejudicial to its interests but as a point of principle.

European history, it seemed to many observers, had come full circle. As in the 18th century so in the 21st: Russia was both in Europe and outside it, Montesquieu’s ‘nation d’Europe’ and Gibbon’s ‘Scythian wilderness’. For Russians, the European West remained what it had been for centuries, a contradictory object of attraction and repulsion, of admiration and
ressentiment
. Russia’s rulers and people alike remained markedly sensitive to outside opinion while evincing deep suspicion of all foreign criticism or interference. History and geography had bequeathed to Europeans a neighbour they could neither ignore nor accommodate.

The same might once have been said of Turkey. For nearly seven hundred years the Ottoman Turks had been Europe’s ‘other’, supplanting the Arabs who had occupied the role for the previous half millennium. For many centuries ‘Europe’ began where the Turks ended (which was why Cioran was so depressed to be reminded of Romania’s long years under Ottoman rule); and it was commonplace to speak of Christian Europe being periodically ‘saved’—whether at the gates of Vienna, or Budapest, or at the 1571 Battle of Lepanto—from the jaws of Turkish Islam. From the mid-eighteenth century, as Ottoman Turkey slipped into decline, the ‘Eastern Question’—how to manage the Ottoman Empire’s decline and what to do with the territories now emerging from centuries of Turkish rule—was the most pressing challenge facing European diplomats.

Turkey’s defeat in World War I, the overthrow of the Ottomans, and their replacement by Kemal Ataturk’s ostentatiously secular, modernizing state, had taken the Eastern Question off the European agenda. Now governed from Ankara, the Turks had troubles enough of their own; and although their removal from the Balkans and the Arab Middle East had bequeathed a tangled web of conflicts and choices with momentous long-term consequences for Europe and the world, the Turks themselves were no longer part of the problem. Had it not been for Turkey’s strategic location athwart the Soviet Union’s sea route to the Mediterranean, the country might well have disappeared altogether from Western consciousness.

Instead, Ankara became for the duration of the Cold War an accommodating participant in the Western alliance, contributing to NATO a rather significant contingent of soldiers. American missiles and bases were established in Turkey as part of the
cordon sanitaire
ringing the Soviet frontiers from Baltic to Pacific, and Western governments not only furnished Turkey with copious sums in aid but looked benevolently and uncritically upon its unstable dictatorial regimes—often the outcome of military coups—and their unrestrained abuse of minority rights (notably those of the Kurds in the country’s far east, one fifth of the total population). Meanwhile, Turkish ‘guest workers’, like the rest of the Mediterranean basin’s surplus rural population, migrated in large numbers to Germany and other Western European lands in search of jobs.

But the Ottoman legacy would return to haunt the new Europe. With the end of the Cold War, Turkey’s distinctive location took on a different significance. The country was no longer a frontier outpost and barrier state in an international geopolitical confrontation. Instead it was now a conduit, caught between Europe and Asia, with ties and affinities in both directions. Although Turkey was formally a secular republic, most of its seventy million citizens were Muslims. Many older Turks were not especially orthodox, but with the rise of radical Islam there were growing fears that even Ataturk’s ruthlessly imposed secular state might prove vulnerable to a new generation rebelling against their secularized parents and looking for roots in an older heritage of Ottoman Islam.

But Turkey’s educated professional and business elites were disproportionately located in the European city of Istanbul and identified enthusiastically with Western dress, culture and practices. Like other ambitious eastern Europeans they saw Europe—European values, European institutions, European markets and careers—as the only possible future for them and their ambivalently situated country. Their goal was clear: to escape out of history and into ‘Europe’. Moreover, this was one objective they shared with the traditionally influential officer corps, who identified wholeheartedly with Ataturk’s dream of a secular state and expressed open irritation at creeping Islamisation in Turkish public life.

However, Europe—or at least Brussels—was more than a little hesitant: Turkey’s application to join the European Union lay unaddressed for many years. There were good reasons for caution: Turkey’s prisons, its treatment of domestic critics and its inadequate civil and economic codes were just some of many issues that would need to be addressed before it could hope to get beyond a strictly trading relationship with its European partners. Senior European commissioners like the Austrian Franz Fischler openly voiced doubts about the country’s long-term democratic credentials. And then there were practical difficulties: as a member-state Turkey would be the second largest in the Union after Germany, as well as one of the poorest—the gulf between its prosperous western edge and the vast, impoverished east was huge and, given the opportunity, millions of Turks might well head west into Europe in search of a living wage. The implications for national immigration policies, as well as for the EU’s budget, could hardly be ignored.

But the real impediments lay elsewhere.
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If Turkey entered the EU, the Union would have an external frontier abutting Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Whether or not it made geographical sense to take ‘Europe’ to within one hundred miles of Mosul was a legitimate question; in the circumstances of the time it was unquestionably a security risk. And the further Europe stretched its frontiers, the more it was felt by many—including the drafters of the constitutional document of 2004—that the Union should explicitly state what it was that defined their common home. This, in turn, induced a number of politicians in Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia and elsewhere—not to mention the Polish Pope in Rome—to try unsuccessfully to insert into the preamble to a new European constitutional text a reminder that Europe was once
Christian
Europe. Had not Václav Havel, speaking at Strasbourg in 1994, reminded his audience that the ‘European Union is based on a large set of values, with roots in antiquity and Christianity’?

Whatever else they were, Turks were assuredly not Christian. The irony was that precisely for this reason—because they could not define themselves as Christian (or ‘Judeo-Christian’)—would-be European Turks were even more likely than other Europeans to emphasize the secular, tolerant and liberal dimensions of European identity.
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They were also, and with increasing urgency, trying to invoke European values and norms as a lever against reactionary influences in Turkish public life—a goal that the member-states of Europe itself had long encouraged.

But although in 2003 the Turkish parliament finally removed, at European bidding, many longstanding restrictions on Kurdish cultural life and political expression, the lengthy hesitation-waltz performed by governments and officials at Brussels had begun to exact a price. Turkish critics of EU membership pointed insistently to the humiliation of a once-imperial nation, now reduced to the status of a supplicant at the European door, importuning support for its application from its former subject nations. Moreover, the steady growth of religious sentiment in Turkey not only produced an electoral victory for the country’s moderate Islamist party but encouraged the national parliament to debate a motion to make adultery, once again, a criminal offence.

In response to explicit warnings from Brussels that this could definitively jeopardize Ankara’s application to join the EU, the motion was abandoned and in December 2004 the European Union at last agreed to open accession talks with Ankara. But the damage was done. Opponents of Turkish membership—and there were many, in Germany
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and France as well as closer to home in Greece or Bulgaria—could point once again to its unsuitability. In 2004 the retiring Dutch EU Commissioner Frits Bolkestein warned of the coming ‘Islamisation’ of Europe. The likelihood of negotiations proceeding smoothly diminished still further—Günter Verheugen, the EU Commissioner for enlargement, acknowledged that he did not expect Turkey to become a member of the Union ‘before 2015’. Meanwhile, the cost of future rejection or further delays—to Turkish pride and the political stability of Europe’s vulnerable edge—ratcheted up another notch. The Eastern Question was back.

That history should have weighed so heavily upon European affairs at the start of the twenty-first century was ironic, considering how lightly it lay upon the shoulders of contemporary Europeans. The problem was not so much education—the teaching or mis-teaching of history in schools, though in some parts of southeastern Europe this too was a source of concern—as the public uses to which the past was now put. In authoritarian societies, of course, this was an old story; but Europe, by its self-definition, was post-authoritarian. Governments no longer exercised a monopoly over knowledge and history could not readily be altered for political convenience.

Nor was it, for the most part. The threat to history in Europe came not from the deliberate distortion of the past for mendacious ends, but from what might at first have seemed a natural adjunct to historical knowledge: nostalgia. The final decades of the century had seen an escalating public fascination with the past as a detached artifact, encapsulating not recent memories but
lost
memories: history not so much as a source of enlightenment about the present but rather as an illustration of how very different things had once been. History on television—whether narrated or performed; history in theme parks; history in museums: all emphasized not what bound people to the past but everything that separated them from it. The present was depicted not as heir to history but as its orphan: cut off from the way things were and the world we have lost.

In eastern Europe, nostalgia drew directly upon regret for the lost certainties of Communism, now purged of its darker side. In 2003 the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague mounted an exhibition of ‘pre-revolutionary clothing’: boots, underwear, dresses and the like from a world that had only ended fourteen years beforebut was already an object of detached fascination. The exhibition attracted many older people for whom the grey sameness of the shoddily-made items on display must have been a recent memory. And yet the response of visitors suggested a degree of affection and even regret that caught the curators quite by surprise.

Ostalgie
, as it was known in Germany, drew on a similar vein of forgetful remembering. Considering that the GDR—to adapt Mirabeau’s description of Hohenzollern Prussia—was little more than a security service with a state, it demonstrated in the glow of retrospect a remarkable capacity to evoke affection and even longing. While Czechs were admiring their old clothes, Germans were flocking to
Goodbye Lenin
: a film whose ostensible mocking of the shortages, dogmas and general absurdity of life under Erich Honecker was knowingly offset by a certain sympathy for its subject and more than a little ambivalence at its sudden loss.