urkey is slowly but surely drifting away from the West. The recent spat between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron is the latest example of this widening gulf.
Macron had declaimed a few weeks ago that ‘Islam was in crisis all over the world’ and had declared a war on ‘Islamist separatism’, saying that he wanted to reform Islam in France to correspond with French values. He escalated his rhetoric criticising Islam in the aftermath of the beheading of a French teacher by a Muslim radical for showing cartoons denigrating the prophet Muhammad. Erdogan reacted to Macron’s statement by remarking, ‘What is the problem of this person called Macron with Muslims and Islam? Macron needs treatment on a mental level.’ France has withdrawn its ambassador from Ankara in response to Erdogan’s statement.
The Turks sum up the main reason for their exclusion from the EU in one word: Islam. Statements made over the years by important European leaders, such as French presidents Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Nicolas Sarkozy, that emphasise the essential Christian nature of Europe as a reason to justify the denial of membership to Turkey have augmented the Turkish perception. The EU has used Turkey’s failure to fully meet its democratic standards as the reason to deny it membership. It is ironic, however, that by putting hurdles in Turkey’s path at a time when it was seriously attempting to meet these standards, the EU has encouraged the rise of authoritarianism and jingoism in Turkey and its turn towards a neo-Ottoman foreign policy that often clashes with Western interests.
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Tensions rise as Turkey and the West drift apart | The Strategist
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