Jill Rees: Welcome Press

It’s a strange balance of situations when a country tries to become a developed nation and a player, finding its own place in the world.  Many countries today are searching for an identity, including the UK with its lost Empire and the USA whose Hispanic population is increasing in influence year on year. Searching for a sense of self is a result of sudden change.

Readers of this column will know that I tend to travel a lot, and I am writing this in Vienna, Austria, where there is no question about identity. This may be because Austria is in a very stable condition, being reasonably self-sufficient. The two issues looming on the future’s horizon for Austria are global warming, which threatens its key tourist ski industry with diminishing snowfall each winter, and the influx of foreigners, especially from Turkey, due to Austria’s low birth rate leaving gaps in the job market.

Like Austria, Turkey also used to be a great Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and mainly the two countries were at loggerheads. In Vienna you are continually bombarded with sites of decisive battles and heroic tales of great victorious generals who defeated the Turks at the last minute from the gates of Vienna. Austria is so far from Turkey that the Turks who come here are just proud to be counted. They too are aware of their history, and can’t be pushed around.

Back in Istanbul, an even deeper dichotomy is developing. The State wants more than anything to become part of the European Union. With the Bosphorus forming the boundary between Europe and Asia, it feels it should be the bridge between east and west, a role it has taken on many times throughout history. Unfortunately for Turkey, this history is one which is ignored in the West.

‘In your country’, said Memet, a thirty year old Istanbul man who spent some time in London as an enforced hospital patient, and had invited me for a ubiquitous glass of famous Turkish tea, ‘You think Turkish people are savages, when in fact all of your culture comes from us.’

I’m afraid it’s true: from left-handed shipping lanes, tea drinking in the afternoon, little tables with white doily tablecloths; everything we think of as typically British is indeed Turkish in origin. It’s even worse for Italy and France, which give the nod to tree-lined streets, al fresco dining, coffee, literature, mathematics, spices in cooking, astronomy, science, medicine, awareness of perspective and the architecture that makes up the Renaissance.

‘We know everything about your history,’ continued Memet, ‘We learn about your wars, I can recite all your Kings and Queens; yet you don’t even know where Turkey is on the map.’

Despite all this history and education, Turks lack a sense of unity and the attitude of strategic planning that the ignorant G2 nations are so good at. It may be even that the blinkered outlook the G2 nations insist on maintaining is in fact a tool of development. Development in the sense of global capitalism, after all, necessitates exploitation. While the British government is fully aware that its people will cough up millions each year to send aid to developing communities, it has to keep them somewhat ignorant of the causes of poverty in countries which the UK is exploiting. A tiny island, the UK is only able to insist on a voice in world politics because of its ill-gained oil purchases, a lot of which comes from the Nigerian Delta.

One of the main beliefs of the developed nations is that they are superior, when in truth they are merely more exploitative and ruthless. In Istanbul they may be fully aware of this, yet are possessed by a sort of cultural schizophrenia. Despising the West, which they deem to be corrupt as well as ignorant, and full of drunken youths and wanton women, they try to emulate it on a daily basis. While declining, in the main, to get drunk, or to ignore family values, they nevertheless try to live in a modern, obsessed with production kind of way.

This is epitomised in a sense by the headscarf issue. While Turkey has determined to be a secular nation, under pressure from a Moslem-hating West since George Bush made his notorious comments about ‘Rogue states’, most of the women want to wear the headscarf. Wearing it in their normal lives, they are obliged by law to remove it to go to work.  This they judge to be an infringement of their individual liberty.

This attitude, which has gone unheard in Europe, defines exactly what the issue is that so disturbs the European Union: the juxtaposition of traditional cultures and beliefs with the modern western concepts of individual liberty.

We have seen the same thing in China. Disturbed by western journalists’ insatiable appetite for muck-raking, they have been unable to explain to the European and American journalists that to refuse to publicly slag off their own country and to air their dirty linen is not seen by them to be an infringement of liberty.

Developing nations’ diplomats and artists continue to patiently explain to the West how they see things differently, and wonder at the West’s inability to get it, when it seems so straightforward. How can it be that Turkish people are able to so easily understand Western culture whereas this is never reciprocated? And yet it may be indeed these nations’ natural naivety and innocence which blocks this understanding. Turkey and other countries just don’t get it. It’s not that we can’t understand; we just don’t WANT to know. It suits us much too much to keep you down there my friend.

926 words ©Jill Rees 25 August 2008

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Tags: east and west, EU, identity, national identity, Turkey, Western Europe