This Salman Rushdie article would have had considerably more bite had Orhan Pamuk been awarded the Nobel Prize instead of Pinter. The EU would have found itself in a much stronger position to insist that Turkey drop the charges against Pamuk for having supposedly “blatantly belittled Turkishness”.
José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, says that Turkey’s entry into the EU is by no means assured, that it will have to win over the hearts and minds of the deeply sceptical EU citizenry. The Turkish application is being presented (most vociferously by Tony Blair and Jack Straw) as a test case for the EU. To reject it, we are told, would be a catastrophe, widening the gulf between Islam and the West. There is an element of Blairite poppycock in this, a disturbingly communalist willingness to sacrifice Turkish secularism on the altar of faith-based politics. But the Turkish application is indeed a test case for the EU, a test of whether the Union has any principles at all. If it has, its leaders will insist on charges against Orhan Pamuk being dropped at once — there is no need to keep him waiting for justice until December — and on further, rapid revisions to Turkey’s repressive penal code.
An unprincipled Europe, which turns its back on great artists and fighters for freedom, will continue to alienate its citizens, whose disenchantment has already been widely demonstrated by the votes against the proposed new constitution. So the West is being tested as well as the East. On both sides of the Bosphorus, the Pamuk case matters.
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