Mr. Obama is something of a poster boy for a nation's ability to own up to the skeletons in its cupboard, and it verges on the ironic that the great fear his election once evoked in Ankara was that he would force Turkey to do the same. His remarks appeared designed, however, to reassure the serried ranks of Turkish lawmakers that he would not be forcing anytime soon the issue of exactly what happened to the Armenian population at the time of the demise of the Ottoman Empire. He later told a press conference that his own views of 1915 had not changed, but that his address to Parliament consigned the recognition of genocide to the more immediate problem of getting Turkey and Armenia to normalize relations. At the same time, he warned against the dangers of letting the wounds of history fester. "Reckoning with the past can help us seize a better future," he said, and certainly the implication was that Turkey's allies would be much relieved not to have to bob and weave and politically maneuver every time the subject of Armenia came up.
Turkey's enthusiasm to confront its past is a subject this column will return to again (and again). Arguably it is working its way backwards, beginning with the current Ergenekon trial and the recent efforts of an unelected few to commandeer the elected government. But there is little doubt that the country's capacity to deal with its own history is an intrinsic part of the way it is itself perceived by the world in general and Europe in particular. The ability to face the past, and more importantly to purge past sins, is not incidental to the entire idea of Europe. Once upon a time the axis of evil was not Iran, North Korea and Iraq but Germany, Italy and Japan. Germany's shedding of its fascist past is a historical act fundamental to the founding of the European Union. Greece, Spain and Portugal were similarly rewarded for discarding their dictatorships. At the rhetorical level, the last wave of enlargement candidates were not so much admitted to Europe as welcomed back after emerging from the Soviet night. It is a process of redemption.
The rhetoric of Turkish admission is very different. The arguments in favor are at best a practical decision to expand the European market and at worst an attempt to impose discipline on a potentially unstable neighbor. Neither argument has much sex appeal. A more persuasive line of reasoning is that Turkey's admission would provide confirmation that a Muslim majority nation can share European values, and this is a view purported by the Left. German Greens have gone one further and see Turkey's accession as a way of atoning for their own mistreatment of Turkish guest workers. Many were quick to draw the Obama parallel after Cem Özdemir, the son of a Gastarbeiter, was elected to co-lead the party. Yet it is not Turkey, but Germany itself, that is called upon to change. To others that change is logically impossible. Indeed, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the current pope, once lobbied for the Christian character of Europe to be enshrined in its constitution. The inescapable logic of this is to forever deny Turkey a European identity.
One could argue that the historical reality is very different and that if there is such a thing as a unitary history of Europe, then Turkey and the Ottoman Empire are a part of that history. Conflict within Christian Europe was far more intense than conflicts between Christians and Muslims. So while it is true that Turks have yet to come to terms with their past, they also have to come to terms with the fact that their own past represents a challenge for Europe itself. Turkish nationalists and European exclusionists remember a history of incompatibility.
