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The European Union, Turkey and Islam
The Netherlands Scientific Council for
Government Policy (wetenschappelijke raad voor het
regeringsbeleid-wrr) was established on a provisional basis in 1972.
It was given a formal legal basis under the Act of Establishment of
June, 30 1976. The present term of office runs up to December 31
2007.
According to the Act of Establishment, it is the Council’s task to
supply, in behalf of government policy, scientifically sound
information on developments which may affect society in the long
term, and to draw timely attention to likely anomalies and
obstacles, to define major policy problems and to indicate policy
alternatives.
The Council draws up its own programme of work, after consultation
with the Prime Minister, who also takes cognisance of the cabinet’s
view on the proposed programme.
This report was completed under responsibility of the seventh
Council (2003-2007), which at that time had the following
composition:
Prof. mr. M. Scheltema (chairman)
Prof. dr. W.B.H.J. van de Donk
Prof. dr. P.L. Meurs
Prof. dr. J.L.M. Pelkmans
Prof. dr. mr. C.J.M. Schuyt
Prof. dr. J.J.M. Theeuwes
Prof. dr. P. Winsemius
Director: dr. A.C. Hemerijck
This is a full translation of the Council’s report De Europese Unie,
Turkije en de islam, Rapporten aan de regering no. 69, Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2004 (isbn 90-5356-692-9).
Lange Vijverberg 4-5
P.O. Box 20004
2500 EA ’s-Gravenhage
Tel. + 31 70 356 46 00
Fax + 31 70 356 46 85
E-mail: info@wrr.nl
Internet: http://www.wrr.nl
Contents
Summary 5
Preface 13
1 Introduction 15
1.1 Background and motivation 15
1.2 Aims, core question and limitations 1 7
1.3 Research approach and structure of the report 18
2 The European Union and religion 25
2.1 Introduction 25
2.2 The values of the Union 25
2.3 Religion in the European member states 29
2.3.1 Mutual autonomy and safeguarding freedoms 29
2.3.2 A European model? 30
2.4 Conclusion 38
3 Turkish Islam and the European Union 45
3.1 Introduction 45
3.2 The secular state: historical foundations 45
3.3 Secular state and political Islam 49
3.4 State-Islam and freedom of religion 52
3.5 Democracy and political Islam 55
3.6 Constitutional state and political Islam 58
3.7 Violence and political Islam 62
3.8 Conclusion 64
4 Conclusions 67
Epilogue 73
Literature 77
Searching for the Fault-Line 83
Survey by E.J. Zürcher and H. van der Linden
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Summary
Officially, Islam does not play a role in the decision whether
to accept Turkey as a member state of the European Union (eu).
Yet many people wonder if a Muslim country such as Turkey would
really fit into the European Union. Is Turkish Islam compatible
with democracy, human rights and the separation of state and
religion? The central question of this report, therefore, is
whether the fact that the majority of its population is Muslim
forms a hindrance to Turkish accession to the European Union.
This report is a full translation of De Europese Unie, Turkije
en de islam, that was officially presented to the Dutch
government on 21 June 2004 by the Netherlands Scientific Council
for Government Policy. The Council is an independent advisory
body for the Dutch government which provides sollicited and
unsollicited advise on developments which may affect society in
the long term (see also: www.wrr.nl).
Reason
The question examined in this report is highly relevant, given
the decision to be taken by the eu under the Dutch Presidency in
December 2004. It will then be decided whether candidate member
state Turkey has made sufficient progress towards meeting the
so-called political Copenhagen criterion that accession
negotiations can commence. This criterion stipulates a stable
democracy and a constitutional state that guarantees the rule of
law, human rights and the rights of minorities.
Religion as such plays no role in this Copenhagen criterion. The
fact that the majority of the Turkish population is Muslim,
therefore, played no formal role in the decision taken in 1999
to grant Turkey the status of candidate member. However,
especially since the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the
concerns in member states about Islam and Muslims have
increased. This has contributed to growing doubts over the
question whether Turkey’s Islamic character is compatible with
the political achievements of the euand its member states.
Objections to membership, on cultural and religious ground, have
been increasingly raised, even in political circles.
Objective of the report
In light of these recent discussions, the Netherlands Scientific
Council for Government Policy (henceforth identified by the
initials of its Dutch title – the wrr) considers it important to
have a separate review of the question whether Turkish Islam is
compatible with the values upon which the Union is based. In
this way, the wrr hopes to contribute to the formulation of an
informed judgement .
In this report, the wrr offers the government no advice on the
question whether accession negotiations should now be started
with Turkey. The decision that will have to be made in December
will have to take full account of all aspects of the membership
question. This report makes no such comprehensive assessment; it
is confined exclusively to the relationship between Turkish
Islam and the democratic constitutional state.
Nonetheless, the wrr, at the end of this report, looks at the
possible implications of Turkish membership for the
deteriorating relations between the Muslim world and the West.
Religion in the European Union and its member states
In answering the question whether Turkish Islam forms a
hindrance to eu membership, we should first determine the
position of religion in the eu itself. Religion does not form
part of the common eu values. The Union has defined itself as a
system of values and actions based on the basic principles of
freedom and democracy, as well as a recognition of human rights,
fundamental liberties and the rule of law. The freedom of
thought, conscience and religion forms an integral part of these
basic rights, as does the respect afforded by the Union to
cultural and religious diversity.
Viewed from the perspective of the principles and fundamental
rights of the Union, there is no a priori reason to exclude a
country on the grounds of its dominant religion. However, the
question of the separation of church and state is another matter
altogether. Behind the principles and the political and civil
rights of the Union lies the assumption that its member states
have a constitutional state that recognises and guarantees both
the autonomy of church and state, and freedom of religion and
conscience. The principle of autonomy implies that religious
communities and the state each have separate areas of
competence. Freedom of religion and conscience means that
religious believers (including members of minority churches),
atheists and apostates face no restrictions in the exercise of
their rights. It is precisely in this area that people harbour
doubts about Islam.
Looking at the autonomy of church and state, the situation among
eu member states is extremely diverse. Even though all member
states are formally secular and recognise freedom of religion,
they do not always remain neutral towards religions or religious
denominations. For example, some states have a state church and
others do not. Even where there is no state church, one
denomination may in practice be privileged above others. On the
other hand, recognising a state church does not necessarily
exclude equal treatment of other churches. Each member state has
its own, often tense, history in the relationship between
church, state, politics and society, which has resulted in
specific arrangements. Thus, on the question the european union,
turkey and islam of the separation of church and state there is
no single European model against which to test the Turkish
experience. The most that can be done is to see whether Turkey
meets certain minimum conditions.
Characteristics of Turkish Islam
The next question is whether Turkish Islam has characteristics
that stand in the way of the country’s accession. In other
words, are there developments afoot in Turkey that would
negatively influence the attitude of Turkish Islam towards
essential eu values? The wrr’s answer to this question is
negative. The Turkish state is constitutionally protected
against religious influences. In this respect the country has
the same rigorous separation between the state and religion as
does France. Indeed, France’s so-called laicism provided the
model for the constitution of the Republic of Turkey. However,
unlike the French state, the Turkish state still exercises a
strong control and influence over religion.
These characteristics have a long history. The nineteenth
century was a period of modernisation following the West
European example. The French Enlightenment greatly influenced
constitutional thinking also in the Ottoman period. Not long
after West European states had done so, Turkey established its
first constitution and held elections for the first Ottoman
parliament (1876). This was followed, until the First World War,
by a period of highly religiously coloured nationalism, which
was accompanied by much government interference in the contents
and the propagation of religious beliefs. The Turkish Republic
was established in 1923, and it marked the beginning of the most
extreme banning of religious influences on the state. The
Kemalist movement, named after the founder of the Republic,
Mustafa Kemal Pasja (Atatürk), rigorously consigned religion to
the private sphere. It banned religious symbols from public
life, abolished religious organisations or placed them under
state control, and outlawed the popular mystical orders. This
period also witnessed the replacement of the last remnants of
Islamic law, namely family law, by secular law. Islamic criminal
law had already been abolished in the middle of the nineteenth
century. After the Second World War, Turkey introduced a
multi-party democracy and Islam gradually became a major
political factor, even in programmes of non-religious secular
parties. In addition, from the 1960s onwards, political parties
also emerged that explicitly identified themselves as Islamic.
The wrr considers that the rise of Islam as a politically
relevant phenomenon should be seen in the context of its forced
marginalisation in the previous decades. This denial of Islamic
identity by the upper classes was never shared by the population
at large. At the same time, this rise was underpinned by
important socio-economic changes in Turkey, such as the
development of a substantial middle class in rural areas and in
the smaller towns, for whom Islam constitutes a normal part of
everyday life. Until now, Islamic parties have been met by
profound distrust from the establishment in and around
governmental institutions, who identify strongly with Kemalist
thinking. Both the Constitutional Court and the armed forces
have intervened on several occasions and banned such parties.
Since 1982, as a counterweight to the radical left and religious
views, the army institutionalised a form of ‘state-Islam’ which
still enjoys a privileged position today. This version of state
religion combines a strong emphasis on social conservatism and
nationalism with a moderate version of Islam and is propagated
through mosques and through compulsory religious education in
schools. This state-Islam, which is firmly embedded in a secular
state system and which reflects the beliefs of the majority of
the population and of conservative political bodies, has given
recognition to the importance attached to Islam by the broad
public.
Finally, the wrr notes that for the new Islamic political
parties that were created during the last decade, the principle
of the separation of state and religion was an important
conditioning factor. However, they attached different
consequences to it. Although they accepted the secular state,
they also wanted to increase the freedom of religion and
therefore opposed the strong government controls on religion.
Whilst supporting the existing democratic system, they have
fought to make it accessible to religion-based parties. They
still consider freedom of conscience and freedom of expression
as the basis of democracy and human rights. They have contested
neither the secular nature of the law, nor the principle of
equal rights for men and women.
While it is possible to view this emphasis on such freedoms as a
mere effort to enlarge the legitimate scope for one’s own views,
the current government party, the Justice and Development Party
(ak Party), which itself grew from a government banned Islamic
party, emphasises human rights even more strongly from the
standpoint of pluralism. The party intrinsically values
differences in religion, culture, and opinions and sees
secularism as the principle of freedom that makes their exercise
and expression possible.
Conclusion of the wrr
The wrr believes that the fact that Turkey is a country with a
majority Muslim population is no hindrance to its eu accession.
This conclusion is based on the following considerations.
First, the wrr has established, on the basis of the developments
described above and the current characteristics of Turkish
Islam, that the principle of the secular democratic state is
solidly rooted in Turkish society. Moreover, the european union,
turkey and islam the development of the secular state in Turkey
shows many parallels with West European history and it was also
more or less concomitant. The existence of Islam in Turkey did
not stand in the way of these developments but instead, right to
the present day, helped to encourage them. The fact that the
democratisation process after the Second World War should have
been accompanied by the emergence of Islam as an important
political force, is a normal phenomenon. When we see the
political role still played by religion in many European states,
it is not surprising that the Kemalist movement failed to ban
religion entirely from the political and public sphere.
However, from an eu perspective the issue of Islam in Turkey is
not so much a problem of the influence of religion on the state
as a problem of the influence of the state on religion. This is
because government intervention in religion is stronger in
Turkey than in eu member states, even though some eu countries
also recognise a state religion. Moreover, the constitutional
restrictions on the democratic process aimed at protecting the
secular state system, are incompatible with the principles of
the eu. This observation applies equally to the role of the
military as a guardian of this system. It is here that the
European Parliament and the European Commission would like to
see important changes implemented.
Nonetheless, the wrr considers that there is no indication that
Turkish Islam will lose its moderate character, and thus
endanger the secular democratic state, if state restrictions are
relaxed or if the military gradually withdraw from politics, as
advocated by the current Turkish government. The great majority
of the population wants nothing to do with fundamentalism and
religious intolerance and expresses a preference for moderate
political parties. They support the secular character of the
state and reject any introduction of Islamic law. For these
reasons, violent Islamic fundamentalism has few followers in
Turkey.
Structure of this report
The first section contains the report of the wrr to the Dutch
government. Chapter 1 presents the reason for and the key
question of the report. Chapter 2 examines the position of
religion in the eu and arrangements that exist within member
states governing the relationship between the state, religion,
politics and society. Chapter 3 describes developments in Turkey
that explain the Turkish position towards the eu’s essential
values. In chapter 4, the wrr presents its conclusions. This is
followed by an epilogue on the possible implications of Turkish
membership for the difficult relationship between the Muslim
world and the West. Part 2 of the report contains the survey
‘Searching for the Fault-Line’, commissioned by the wrr, in
which prof. dr. E.J. Zürcher and H. van der Linden present their
analysis on Turkish Islam and the eu.
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Conclusion
The reader who has read the above chapters of this survey, will
not be surprised by the conclusions that are drawn below.
We first showed in chapter 2 that Turkish Islam has a long
tradition of symbiosis with the state, and that this tradition
has given ‘official’ Islam in Turkey a strongly pragmatic and
flexible character. Another important characteristic of Islam in
Turkey is its wide range of expressions. We have examined this
extensively, and have indicated the importance of Turkey’s large
Alevi minority, with its adherence to secular and humanist
values. We have seen how the large Islamic movements in Turkey
that are not tied to the state, overwhelmingly try to combine
their faith in modern science and technology with traditional
standards and values. This is true for both the classic Dervish
orders and for the neo-movements. The fact that these
traditional standards and values are seen and experienced as
‘Islamic’, does not mean those movements are fundamentalist.
There are truly radical fundamentalist groups in Turkey, but
these are marginal. Admittedly, the attitude of the Islamic
majority towards Turkey’s minute Christian and Jewish minorities
is problematic. However, the fact that religious prejudices are
diametrically opposed to the formal granting of equal treatment
to all citizens, is not unique to Turkey. The same can be said
of the attitude of Europeans to the Islamic minorities in
Europe.
In chapter 3, we first tried to answer the question as to what
extent Turkey is culturally a part of Europe. We began by
concluding that the concept of identifiable civilisation blocs
is not workable, and that the borders between civilisations are
diffuse and porous. At the same time we stated that Turkey’s
modernisation has in effect also amounted to a long period of ‘europeanisation’,
and that the legacies of Enlightenment and liberalism have also
taken root in Turkey. From this point of departure, we answered
the question whether Turkish Islam is compatible with political
democracy and with the concept of human rights expressed in the
European Convention and the United Nation’s Convention. Analysis
of core texts of both official state-Islam and of Islam-inspired
political mass movements show unambiguously that this is indeed
the case. The documents of the current governing party
explicitly refer to these conventions and use European practices
as a yardstick. Where propagated values conflict with European
values, this usually involves a glorification of the state and
the military, and of authority in general, which bears no
relation to Islam, even if Islam is used by the state to
sanctify such values. In an Islamic context, it is hard to
conceive of a complete separation of state and religion.
However, it will certainly prove necessary to readjust the
message of state-Islam into a more ‘civil’ direction.
It should come as no surprise that both state-linked and
non-state linked mainstream Islam in Turkey have a message that
is moderate, flexible, and reasonably tolerant. Sociological
research into the religious attitudes of the population confirms
this picture. If we combine this research with political data
such as election results and research into illegal
organisations, we can safely conclude that a maximum of 15 per
cent of the Turkish population feel attracted to (elements of)
fundamentalist thought. Support for such (illegal) movements
that also justify the use of violence, is probably very small.
In a religious and more general cultural sense, Turkey exhibits
a number of characteristics that closely correspond to those
present in some parts of Europe.
This is not only understandable from its long history of contact
with Europe and the deliberate ambition of the Turkish elite to
become European, but also from the characteristics of modern-day
Turkish society, with its large and mature urban middle class,
political pluralism and strong growth of prosperity. The fact
that Turkey’s dominant religion is Islam, not Christianity, does
not change this, nor does the fact that it tends to have more in
common with countries such as Poland or Greece than with, say,
the Netherlands or Denmark. To exclude Turkey on the basis of
cultural and religious criteria, as suggested by European
politicians and writers who allow themselves to be inspired by
Huntington’s ideas, is therefore wrong. Turkey’s alleged
un-European character is a construction, based on a very shaky
definition of a European or ‘Western’ civilisation, and on a
poor understanding of Turkish reality. This is not to say that
there are no objections against Turkey’s eu accession. Arguments
relating to poverty, migration and the decision-making capacity
of European institutions must be taken seriously. This survey
does not cover these aspects. It is merely concerned with the
argument (unfounded, in our view) that Turkey could not, or
should not, become a member because the large majority of its
population is Muslim.
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