Mary Dejevsky: When a vote against US is a vote for Europe

LONDON - Among the more tiresome fixtures of United States-European exchanges over the past decade have been the perennial requests from Washington to hasten Turkey's admission to the European Union.

Whenever a minister or official travels one way or another, you can guarantee that the European representative is read a lecture about the urgent need to anchor Turkey in Europe. Sometimes, the Americans even say "please".

Their argument is that Turkey, with its large and youthful population, its secular constitution, its crucial geo-strategic position and its impeccable record of loyalty to the North Atlantic alliance, deserves its place in Europe.

The US fear, usually left unspoken, is that if Turkey is not accommodated, and fast, there is a risk that it will ditch its secularism and fall into the Islamic camp.

The inescapable reality until very recently, however, was that Turkey fell very short of meeting even the most elementary criteria for membership of the European Union.

It still had the death penalty; its court system was highly suspect; its prison and punishment system even more so; and the weakness of its democracy gave the generals a whip hand, even when the appearance of civilian government was maintained.

Looming over everything was the philosophical question of Turkey's identity: is Turkey essentially European or Asiatic, and where should the EU's border run?

My view tended to be that Turkey was forever condemned to be a border state straddling two worlds, belonging fully to neither. European identity is one of those things that are hard to pin down; you just know it when you see it. Lithuania, Slovenia, yes; Bulgaria - maybe; but Turkey - no. For all the shocked condemnation his words elicited back in November, I doubt that I was alone in quietly agreeing with Valery Giscard d'Estaing when he said that Turkey had "a different culture, a different approach, a different way of life" and that Turkey's accession would spell the end of the EU.

Even with the recent constitutional changes, including abolition of the death penalty, and last year's satisfactorily democratic election, it seemed to me that Turkey was not EU material and would not be for a very long time, if ever.

The European Union, I felt, had to set its border posts somewhere, and the Bosphorus was as natural a dividing line as any.

The Turkish Parliament's vote at the weekend has changed my mind. In rejecting a string of US requests to station troops in Turkey for deployment against Iraq, Ankara demonstrated its sense of national identity and its democratic credentials. In voting as it did, Turkey's Parliament has done more than any institution in any other country to force a rethink in Washington, at least of means, if not of ends.

And even if Turkey's Parliament reverses its vote - or sees it overridden on economic or strategic grounds - that will not alter two striking facts.

Turkey's Parliament showed itself, perhaps for the first time, prepared to resist the will of its transatlantic patron. It also showed itself more in harmony with popular sentiment across Europe than with Washington's war plans.

A host of reasons, by no means all of them admirable, can be advanced to explain the Turkish Parliament's defiance.

Ankara may have been playing for more time or more money. Perhaps it did not trust US undertakings that it would preserve Iraq's territorial integrity (and so rule out the formation of a separate Kurdish state).

Turkey's new MPs may have been flexing their muscles in anticipation of a subsequent retreat. Or perhaps the Islamic element in this Parliament and Government meant that they heeded the anti-war sentiment that prevails in the Arab world more than they might have in the past.

Underlying all these reasons, however, is the reality that on Iraq, the interests of the US Administration and those of Turkey are rather different, if not actually in conflict. What is more, Turkey's priorities - an unthreatening, stable, unified and solvent Iraq - have more in common with those of what US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld contemptuously called "old Europe" and popular sentiment in Europe as a whole than they do with the calls for forced disarmament and regime-change coming from Washington and London.

Now that Turkey sees its future in the EU, and the EU and the US are increasingly at odds, it is gravitating towards the EU. My hunch is that it is only a matter of time before the same route is travelled by the "new Europeans", those central and east European countries so assiduously courted by Washington as allies against Iraq.

As the EU becomes their club of choice these "new Europeans" will tilt back towards the "old Europe" - where countries such as Poland and Hungary feel they have always belonged.

Any old Europe/new Europe divide will then be exposed as the malign, Washington-inspired stratagem it really was all along.

- INDEPENDENT