Friday is the date when the European Union is slated to decide whether to proceed with Turkey's application for membership. At this point, however, Turkey refuses to budge on the issue of recognition of the Republic of Cyprus, which will almost certainly have an impact on that decision. Victor Davis Hanson compares Europeans to J. R. R. Tolkein's complacent but moribund Ents for even considering Turkish membership. Writes Hanson:
Turkey's proposed entry into the EU has become some weird sort of Swiftian satire on the crazy relationship between Europe and Islam. Ponder the contradictions of it all. Privately most Europeans realize that opening its borders without restraint to Turkey's millions will alter the nature of the EU, both by welcoming in a radically different citizenry, largely outside the borders of Europe, whose population will make it the largest and poorest country in the Union — and the most antithetical to Western liberalism. Yet Europe is also trapped in its own utopian race/class/gender rhetoric. It cannot openly question the wisdom of making the "other" coequal to itself, since one does not by any abstract standard judge, much less censure, customs, religions, or values.
Can Islam become democratic? Can it facilitate the development of democratic institutions or is it an obstacle to these? Mustafa Kemal Attatürk took a secularizing approach to the Turkish Republic after 1923, relegating muslim belief to the private sphere. But it may be that strongarm tactics to keep traditional religions out of the public sphere will provoke an extremist backlash. This is acknowledged by Ian Buruma in "An Islamic Democracy for Iraq?", published days ago in The New York Times. Writes Buruma:
It may be useful to reflect for a moment on how the West itself has coped with religion. The separation of church and state was indeed a necessary condition for democratic development in Europe and the United States, but the separation has never been absolute. Britain's constitutional arrangements include organized religion: the monarch is the protector of the Anglican faith. This may now be nothing more than a formality, but in continental European politics Christian democratic parties are still the mainstream. The first such party, the Anti-Revolutionary Party, was founded in 1879 by a Calvinist ex-pastor in the Netherlands named Abraham Kuyper. His aim was to restore God (not the church) as the absolute sovereign over human affairs. Only if secular government was firmly embedded in the Christian faith could its democratic institutions survive. That is what he believed and what Christian Democrats still believe.
I do not believe this. It is always tricky for an agnostic in religious affairs to argue for the importance of organized religion, but I would argue not that more people should be religious or that democracy cannot survive without God, but that the voices of religious people should be heard. The most important condition for a functional democracy is that people take part. If religious affiliations provide the necessary consensus to play by common rules, then they should be recognized. A Sharia-based Shiite theocracy, even if it were supported by a majority, would not be a democracy. Only if the rights and interests of the various ethnic and religious groups are negotiated and compromises reached could you speak of a functioning democracy.
There is, of course, that neglected phenomenon of consociationalism, which was more discussed a generation ago than today but which retains its relevance for divided polities characterized by deep social cleavages along ethnic, linguistic, religious or ideological lines. The best recipe for political stability may not after all be to suppress differences in the interest of creating an artificial majority but to allow citizens to express these differences in peaceful ways through power sharing at the centres of government. Short of this, there may be no alternative to the authoritarian régimes which have plagued so many countries outside the western world.
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