What ‘common European values’?

Another key finding of the survey is that while warmth among the Turks toward the EU remained at 33, and toward the US at 14 degrees, Americans viewed Turkey at 47, and Europeans at 43 degrees. These findings, which indicate the continued "coolness" of the Turks towards the US and the EU, also seem to make sense. It surely was inevitable that the US invasion of Iraq, which has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of fellow Muslims, and Washington doing nearly nothing until late 2007 to help Ankara to prevent the PKK from attacking Turkey from bases in northern Iraq would create a strong public reaction against the US in Turkey.

It would not have made sense at all if Turkish public opinion had remained indifferent to statements by certain European politicians who have started claiming that Turkey does not belong to Europe, when there was no doubt in Europe about the Europeanness of Turkey throughout the Cold War and when in 1999 the EU had declared that Turkey was destined to join the union on the same criteria as the other candidate countries. The "coolness" of the Turks toward the West can thus hardly be a measure of Turkey turning away from the West, but rather of the West turning away from Turkey in recent years.

Perhaps the most interesting finding of the "Transatlantic Trends" survey is that 57 percent of Europeans and 55 percent of Turks agree that "Turkey has such different values that it is not really part of the West." This reminds me of the findings of the World Values Survey that has been conducted for many years in over 80 countries by an international team of esteemed political scientists.

The World Values Survey suggests that the notion of shared European values may be a myth. The differences observed in values among European nations are so great that it is impossible to talk about a "common European culture" that is distinct from Asian, African and Northern American culture. It is, for instance, claimed that Christianity is a basic European value. When asked if they belong to "any" religion - let alone Christianity -- 96 to 99 percent of respondents in Malta, Romania, Greece and Poland confirmed that they did, whereas the proportion of those who so affirm is as low as 39 percent in the Czech Republic, 51 percent in Estonia and 53 percent in Sweden. Whereas the proportion of those who attend church at least once a month is as high as 87 percent in Malta and 78 percent in Poland, it is as low as 9 percent in Sweden, 11 percent in Estonia and 12 percent in the Czech Republic, France, Denmark and Norway.

Commitment to human rights and democracy among Europeans also displays considerable variance. The percentage of those who would like to be governed by strong leaders need not worry about parliaments and elections is very high (65 percent) in Romania, but also high in the three founding members of the EU (45 percent in Luxembourg, 35 percent in France, 33 percent in Belgium). Twenty-eight percent of Romanians and 17 percent of Poles prefer a military government to a civilian one.

A high degree of tolerance as a common European value also seems to be a myth. Respondents who do not like to have "Jews as neighbors" is no higher than 2 percent in Holland and Sweden, but as high as 44 percent in Hungary, 29 percent in Greece, 25 percent in Poland and 23 percent in Romania. Those who do not want "Muslims as neighbors" is even higher: 60 percent in Hungary, 33 percent in Lithuania and 31 percent in Greece and Romania.

Professor Yılmaz Esmer, who has analyzed the findings on European values, concludes: "The inescapable conclusion is that the only option for the EU, with or without new members, is to accept its cultural diversity and try to turn that into an advantage and richness in the true sense of the word, not merely in rhetoric." (See: "'European Values' and Democratic Development: Achieving Unity within Diversity," in Development and Conflict Prevention: Security as a Millennium Goal. Mellbourn, Anders, (ed). Anna Programme on Conflict Prevention (2005).