Europe can be seen as bracketed by Turkey to the south-east and Great Britain to the north-west. These two large ex-imperial countries – with very different (though inter-locked) histories, constitutional traditions and recently-elected governments – would seem to have some things in common. As the Ottoman Empire became the nation-state of Turkey, and the British Empire also became a nation-state, both countries had perforce to re-structure their relationships with the other nation-states of the world, and in particular with their immediate geographical neighbour, ‘Europe’.

While neither country is the dominant power it once was, both countries are large enough to feel they have some degree of choice in the ‘matter of Europe’:  Turkey is the 14^th. largest economy in the world, the UK being about the 5^th. Both maintain competent military forces: Turkey, having been neutral for most of WW2, was a founder-member of anti-Russia NATO and has 510,700 men in its conscript-based Armed Forces. Both countries have extensive varied trade and financial networks: Turkey is in the middle of a credit-based boom: retail loan growth (credit cards) is running at a predicted (unsustainable!) annual rate of 40%, and April’s monthly current account deficit, at $7.7 billion, is the second-biggest monthly gap since 1984. Britain, of course, is at the other end of this kind of financial escapade.

Both countries are, in their own ways, functioning democracies. Here, however, differences are in evidence: the turn-out in Turkey’s recent election for a unicameral Parliament was nearly 90%. ‘Minor’ parties have shrunk, in part because of an imposed ‘10%’ electoral support requirement, designed in part to undermine a Kurdish political movement. The ruling AKP and the CHP (the main opposition) together won 76% of the vote. The AKP, with 50% of the votes, won 327 of the 550 seats, this being Prime Minister Erdogan’s third successive win. Whatever the AKP’s original geographical base in the more traditionally religious parts of Turkey, it is now a genuinely national party, well attuned to both the religious and material interests and concerns of the average young Muslim Turk. A kind of public-sector mortgage facility has enabled thousands of Turkish families to become owner-occupiers of a unit in the hundreds of new blocks of flats. AKP election literature made much of the hundreds of new hospitals and local medical centres: and of the reduction, through state regulation, in the prices of medicines as well as of the provision of school books (free for millions) and of the very real extension of educational opportunity and of jobs in the semi-regulated industrial and commercial life of Turkey. While Turkish per capita income is about half that of Western Europe, AKP election literature, identifying and proclaiming the progress made over the last decade, very clearly looks forward to parity by 2023, the centennial year of the founding of the Turkish Republic.

Whether actually ‘in Europe’ (an option now favoured by a minority of the electorate) or ‘merely’ in NATO, or as the major power in its Eastern and Muslim hinterland, Turkey is a major geo-political player indeed in the dangerous world of Southern Europe and the Middle East. The AKP’s foreign policy is summed up in the slogan ‘Zero Problems’ by which PM Erdogan means that Turkey will pick no fights nor respond with aggressive intent to any action of its neighbours and near-neighbours  – Greece, Bulgaria, the Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Russia  – etc: This is an extraordinarily tall order! Indeed, at the time of writing the Turkish government is watching with great care the movement of Syrian troops and Syrian refugees in the border area of Hatay   – a province which became part of Turkey only in 1938: and it has quite clearly put pressure on would-be Gaza blockade-breakers to remove the Turkish element from whatever flotilla sails away later in the year. Turkey has also yet to settle the ‘Kurdish Problem’, being home to 12 million Kurds and (other minorities). Persistently, though, whether in its conversations or negotiations with Israel or Syria, Prime Minister Erdogan’s Government seeks to adhere to the ‘Zero Problems’ approach. This foreign policy is, of course, backed up by the very considerable power and strategic importance of Turkey’s armed forces, a power and strategic importance underlined by the major up-grade of NATO’s base at Izmir. It was this power, too, which led Israel’s Prime Minister to write a very prompt letter of congratulations to Erdogan expressing Israel’s concern to maintain good relations with Turkey, relations somewhat frayed by the affair of the Gaza Flotilla and the killing by Israeli troops of 8 Turkish activists on board the Mavi Marmara. While the stability and competence of the Armed Forces risks being fractured by the on-going prosecution of very senior officers for their alleged role in ‘conspiracies, Turkey’s foreign policy is further under-girded by a wide network of international cultural and commercial connections and promotional activities. At the time of writing, Turkey is playing host to a US-based association of Balkan émigrés to the USA; and to a ‘Language Olympiad’ in which over one thousand young people from over 130 countries demonstrate their competence in the Turkish language and culture, a competence derived in part from the schools opened in countries like Nigeria by the Gullen organization. Unlike Britain, Turkey seems proud of its broader or even imperial role. An Exhibition currently at the Istanbul Museum of Archaeology traces the nature and fates of several empires, concluding with ‘the Ottoman Dominion/Empire: 1299-1923’ – note the dates! – and, over-riding the several manifestations of this ‘empire’, concludes with the statement that ‘the cultural and artistic legacy of the Ottoman Empire is kept alive in the Republic period’, i.e. from 1923 onwards. An AKP election leaflet insists that Turkey in 2011 is liked and admired throughout the world. Opinion polls now indicate that most Turks are  indifferent to the blandishments (or to the contumely) of ‘Europe’. Turkey is, according to Mr Erdogan the ‘sick man’ neither of Europe nor of anywhere else in the world.

Even a government as well supported in the Grand National Assembly as is the AKP will find it difficult to create a world of ‘Zero Problems’. The ur-text of Turkish politics is a debate or dispute about the nature of Turkey’s inheritance from the founding father, Ataturk. Statues and pictures of Ataturk are ubiquitous – a kind of explicit and public obeisance to his life, example and policies. Turkish politics are in some sense a dispute about the nature of this inheritance. While early on his leadership, Ataturk clearly found it convenient to address the sensitivities of the predominantly Muslim and conservative population of the new Republic, by the time of his death in 1938 he had established, in the new state of Turkey, a secular Republic from which Sultan, Caliph, madrassas, the adhaan and the fez had been driven out and in which the potentially anti-secular forces of conservative Islam had been neutralized by a mixture of terror, repression and electoral manipulation. Although radical – women, for example, were progressively enfranchised in 1930, 1933 and 1934 – Ataturk’s Republic, while secular – was not (as it is now) democratic. To safeguard what was obviously a precarious polity, Ataturk gave what was in effect supervisory control to the Army and to the judiciary – both of these institutions stacked with Kemalist (i.e. Ataturk’s) supporters: and three times since WW2 the Army stepped in to ‘remedy’ what it saw as the excesses of democracy. The AKP’s success has rather reversed this way of defending secularism: and in presenting ‘democracy’ as the basis and guarantor of the Republic has perhaps put secularism at risk. It has certainly set about the Army: not a day goes by when yet another senior military officer is arraigned and arrested on charges of conspiracy, while journalists too join the soldiers in the long wait for a trial: at the moment the Turkish Air Force awaits a new commander, several of the best candidates being accused or suspected of involvement in one of two long-running ‘conspiracies’. Pro-Islamic policies such as re-opening the argument about female head-covering or the sale and consumption of alcohol are further evidence of the newly-released power of Turkey’s (and Ataturk’s) ‘democracy’ to temper Ataturk’s secularism. In the political controversies engendered by these struggles, a large clutch of journalists have found themselves in prison – they are/some of them are ‘terrorists’ said President Gul. The President later qualified this claim: but there are 10 000 court cases currently pending against journalists, making journalism in some parts of Turkey ‘impossible’, said a senior journalist (Hurriyet June 8 2011).

Prime Minister Erdogan plans to complete this re-structuring of the Republic by trying to change the constitution (itself derived from an earlier military coup) to a presidential system: and he is young, able and ambitious enough to be able to see himself as President in 2023, the centennial year of the Republic.

To liberals (including the liberal authors of a much-quoted anti-Erdogan piece in The Economist) this consolidation of ‘democracy’ may well be a vote too far: it may seem odd for liberals to be critical of a politician who has quarantined an over-zealous military, but he has also quarantined a busy and assertive Press. In seeking further limitations on the sale and availability of alcohol, for example, or in liberating the inherently restrictive prescriptions of religion, the ruling AKP may well be casting edging towards a totalitarian form of ‘democracy’, not unlike that practiced by Ataturk, but with the added legitimacy of being grounded in the will of the people. In this ‘tyranny of the majority’   - a formulation seemingly miles away from the evident progress and amiable prosperity of the country  – there might be little room for or tolerance of those minority rights which are now the staple diet of Western liberalism. Turkey’s economy is booming: but there are, in levels of indebtedness and in a growing current account deficit, signs of trouble ahead which may well restrict the publicly-subsidised consumer activity which has for some years provided the relative prosperity for which ‘democracy’ so handsomely rewarded the AKP in the June election. What would then be left of Turkish ‘democracy’ other than its inherent Islamic conservatism, coupled with an edgy sense of troubles on the march in the near East and the Arab Spring – already a serious concern on Turkey’s border with Syria  – and continuing issues with a determined Kurdish minority, currently threatening a boycott of the Assembly?  How helpful and co-operative would the Armed Forces be, given the level of pruning of its senior ranks – indeed, how competent would it be?

Ataturk, in a most amazing way, turned a beaten and dissolving Empire, the ‘sick man of Europe’, into a viable and functioning secular (or secularizing) nation-state. He did this by manipulating ‘democracy’, creating what was in effect a coercive autocracy. The institutions which buttressed this autocracy have now, in the name of democracy, been demolished. What we now have is yet another experiment in nation-building, one in which a secular tradition (with a large if relatively small number of adherents) faces a democratic practice of uncertain provenance and disturbing future. Ubiquitously, over and above the hills and cities of this extraordinary country, fly huge and very visible banners, borne on steel flag-posts clearly built to last. Perhaps the evident cheerful pride Turks take in their accomplishments will see them through – probably more surely than the sad and shamefaced ‘patriotism’ with which the British face their equally dangerous world.

References:

Newspapers:  HURRIYET DAILY NEWS, and ZAMAN

AKP Party Literature

ATATURK, by Andrew Mango, John Murray, 2004

THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC MEMORY, edited by Esra Ozyurek, Syracuse University Press, 2004

The price of the tickets ignores the fact that Catholicism in the UK is shored up by a significant number of immigrants, such as from Africa and Eastern Europe. These Catholic immigrants often have limited disposable income, and the Holy Father’s visit is, for many, simply too costly to afford. It is no surprise therefore that there are still 10,000 tickets unsold as the Pope’s supporters cannot back up their enthusiasm with finance. The cost of the tickets is unfair on these worshippers, who had already contributed £1.1 million by mid-August to cover the Papal visit through donations. The British Catholic is having to stump up a total of £7 million for the Pope’s visit, despite the recession and the huge private reserves the Vatican could draw on.

A wiser manoeuvre would have been to charge less for the ticket so that demand would have risen to meet supply. A morally acceptable alternative would have been to give discounted tickets to poorer parishes. Requiring the purchase of tickets to be organised at the parish level has in itself been a problem, preventing those without strong local links from attending. As it is, the excess tickets will be serving no purpose at all, except that the empty seats may highlight the Church’s miscalculation.

The British taxpayer is also being asked to contribute £12 million to the visit, despite the fact that the vast majority of taxpayers are non-Catholic. This issue has already created a storm of debate, but the crucial point is that these non-Catholics have no access to see the Pope – they are effectively paying for someone else’s benefit. This divisive problem could have been allayed by selling the surplus ten thousand tickets on to interested non-Catholics who would pay for the privilege, sorting financial and diplomatic quandaries in one fell swoop. The excuse often used to prevent such a move is that it would raise ‘security issues’, but this is a non-argument given that the taxpayer is paying for the police and others to patrol the events. Why should they be prevented from enjoying the benefit of something they have paid for?

That this open ticket sale hasn’t happened, despite the fact that it would be easy to arrange, is effectively a snub to the majority of Britons and means that the chances to see the pope are few and far between. For those in London tomorrow for example, the only opportunity for the no-ticket buying public to see the pope will be an awkward 15 minute slot as he rides the ‘Popemobile’ through Millbank – not a particularly awe inspiring event.

There is an inherent contradiction in the Papal visit: he is coming as the head of the Vatican State (hence the public funding) but is only publically available as the head of the Catholic Church. The former implies a visit to all the people of Britain while the latter is to those of his faith. Such a balance could have worked if the Papal progress was open to all, but the closed off approach seems unreasonable given that his message of love and peace is normally universal in its approach. The claim that he comes as a head of state is also entirely overshadowed because Cameron, Clegg and Harman will only get just over half an hour to talk to the Pope. Perhaps this is unsurprising, but the point remains that the state angle is almost tokenistic.

The lack of acknowledgement of the non-Catholic British population in the preparations for the Pope’s visit risks overshadowing the whole four day visit and leaving a legacy of bitterness. Similarly, Catholics unable to see him may feel disappointed. Whatever the emotions: when, or now more possibility if, another papal visit to Britain occurs – it must be funded and organised in a very different manner to prevent another Split from Rome.

The British Humanist Association has been an outspoken critic of free schools, fearing that it will lead to a proliferation of faith schools able to select pupils on the basis of religious observance. Free schools will also be allowed more autonomy regarding their curriculum and ethos, which means they may add more religious instruction to their teaching timetable. Meanwhile, the Board of Deputies of British Jews has complained for opposite reasons. The new free schools will only be able to select up to 50 per cent of their pupils on the basis of faith, and they fear that it might now be ‘harder to set up any type of Jewish school, not just a free school, because of competition for sites and pupils’.

Coming from different perspectives on education, the common denominator amongst these complaints is a fear of parent choice. The Humanists want to deny parents the choice to educate their children in even a moderate religious environment. Instead, the Board of Deputies are concerned that additional choice might make it less likely that parents will choose the religious option for their children. This is actually one of the benefits of school choice: existing providers, including faith schools, should have to work harder to impress parents and keep pupils coming to their schools. The Board of Deputies should not be able to assume that they have a monopoly claim on Jewish pupils in areas where a faith school is established, and nor should the Humanists be able to restrict schools to following their preferred secular curriculum.

Prof. Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist, seems to get the idea. He has endorsed the idea of opening free schools that focus on ‘free-thinking’ and scepticism that will not teach any religious values at all. Rather than being a threat to secularism in the UK, free schools offer an opportunity to test out their pedagogical and ethical principles in a way that has never been possible before. Rather than having to persuade politicians to alter an entire school policy, atheists can appeal directly to parents and show them what kind of results (both in terms of knowledge and personal development) humanist ethics can achieve. Meanwhile, faith communities will have to do the same thing, or else lose their pupils to successful innovators.

Indeed, a Civitas report, Disunited Kingdom by David Conway, found that allowing communities to bring up children according to their own values does not represent a threat to social cohesion as the more aggressive secularists have been apt to claim. Instead, it is the compulsory association of communities in comprehensive schools that can more readily provoke inter-communal tension. Allowing schools to project a robust and particular ethos (whether religious or secular) is something to be praised rather than feared.

The condoning of homosexual activity might be thought, for example, to be necessarily being demanded of  a registrar called upon to conduct gay civil partnership ceremonies, or  a counsellor called on to provide a gay couple with sex therapy, as opposed to relationship counselling.

As things currently stand, the weight of judicial opinion seems to have come down firmly against religious believers who harbour such scruples. Currently, they are being required to discharge such professional duties or quit their posts.

Surely, there must be some more accommodating posture that the judiciary could assume in the face of current legislation?

Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, wishes to have the conundrum resolved by providing that in future only judges sympathetic to religion serve on employment tribunals dealing with such tricky cases.

Maybe, that might be a short-term answer to the conundrum, short of the unlikely prospect that one or other of the two parties giving rise to it undergoes something tantamoun to inner moral revolution.

Eventually, however, a more stable solution must be found. Surely, in a society as plural as ours has lately become, legal space must be created to allow both parties to be able to live and work in mutual toleration and respect, despite their manifestly incompatible creeds and life-styles.

Clearly, part of the problem that we as a society currently face is that we are in a transitional period in which devout believers may have taken up employment without fully knowing what changes in the law might subsequently call upon them to do in a professional capacity in the name of equality.

Perhaps, the immediate way forward is for judges involved in hearing such cases to appreciate better and make due allowances for this historically unprecedented situation.

After all, given how long it was in the making, not even the most gung-ho secular judge could reasonably expect for Rome to be un-built in a day.

While designed to prohibit employers from discriminating  on grounds of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, its fourth article expressly stated that ‘the Directive shall not prejudice the right of churches… to require individuals working for them to act in good faith and with loyalty to the organisation’s ethos.’

Last week, bishops in the House of Lords, together with other peers sympathetic to their outlook, defeated a series of government-backed amendments to the Equality Bill that, had they been  adopted, would have prevented churches from being able to employ personnel in the manner the directive said that they would be able to do.

The government may yet, however, decide to reinstate the removed clauses. Doubtless it was to dissuade it from so doing that yesterday Pope Benedict made an  unprecedented intervention in British domestic politics.

Addressing a group of visiting British Catholic bishops in Rome, he said:

‘Your country is well known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society. Yet… the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations in the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs. In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.’

With an upcoming general election and the Roman Catholic vote at stake, it was clearly the Pope’s intention to apply pressure upon Gordon Brown’s administration to induce it to refrain from antagonising the Church by reinstating the clauses it considered an unwarranted threat.

That intervention has understandably enraged those with little patience with the sexual ethics espoused by the Roman Church.

In the vanguard of those who have taken exception to the Pope’s intervention has been the National Secular Society which is planning to organise demonstrations when he visits Britain later this year. It all promises to get very ugly which is a great shame.

While the Roman Church and the National Secular Society are unlikely to see eye to eye on the ethics of homosexuality, one might have hoped some form of modus vivendi might have been able to be reached whereby people with very different outlooks could tolerate each others’ ways of living despite considering them deeply misguided morally speaking.

Sadly, the autonomy the Church is claiming for itself seems more than the secular lobby is willing to allow.

While the European Union might possibly have helped curb the aggressive nationalisms of the past which erupted in war between member states, the intrusiveness of some of its directives has only served to exacerbate cultural conflicts that now threaten to turn very ugly.

Endorsing yesterday’s comments by the Pope, Peter Smith, Archbishop of Cardiff, said:

‘The Church, of course, upholds absolutely the equal dignity of every person… But there is a misunderstanding: sometimes in government legislation equality seems to mean that we are all absolutely equal, which we are not. We are equal in dignity.’

For the moment, however, the Pope’s intervention seems only to have led to equal indignity.

For those dismayed by all the acrymony, here is a pick-me-up.

Long after its controversial foreign policies have been relegated to mere historical footnotes, the deliberate demoralisation and deracination of the nation in which this government has so tirelessly been engaged will serve as its most abiding legacy.

As the Dean of York Minster remarked, when commenting on the government’s reluctance to fund the country’s cathedrals:

‘There’s such an anxiety about the role of the Christian religion (in particular) in the country’s life these days, that the state shows signs of wanting to keep us at arm’s length.

‘We are lumped together as “faith groups”, which are acknowledged as being valuable to the few who take part in them, but not as an intrinsic part of our common life and responsibility. This is nonsense.

‘Christianity, whether you love it, hate it, or are indifferent, is a structural part of our nation, from the Queen to a host of institutions, and the very stuff of our musical, charitable, artistic and architectural culture.

‘Cathedrals embody that, and it’s ludicrous that anyone should think of then as the concern of a “faith group”.  They belong to us all, and we need a more serious engagement with Government about it.’

In illustration of the studiously secular bias of the present government, consider the fact that, in 2005-6, while York’s National Railway Museum received a grant of £5.5 million from central government, that city’s cathedral received not one penny from it. This is despite nearly a million people having paid to visit the cathedral that year, and, of the £5.50 entry fee, nearly £1 having gone to the Government in the form of VAT.

It is (or should be) outrageous that, while the country’s museums and art galleries are so generously subsided by central government as to be able to grant their visitors free entry, the country’s cathedrals should be obliged to charge an entry fee of which the state receives a portion of which nothing is given back.

Just what a scandalous anomaly is this lack of support has lately been acknowledged by the Public Accounts Committee which has recommended that cathedrals receive a financial subsidy from the state in recognition of their heritage value.

The Committee’s chairman Edward Leigh has proposed that cathedrals be given an annual grant of £10 million. Commenting on the recommendation, Frank Field, chairman of the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England, remarked:

‘This is the first time parliament has asked the Government for some direct finding for cathedrals. At last Parliament sees the importance of cathedrals in earning money for the country, in expanding local employment and above all as part of the face we wish to show to the world.’

Well said, but I would go further. For me, the supreme importance of cathedrals is not what they tell others about this country, but what they tell us about ourselves as a nation. No one ever better explained that particular aspect of their significance than did the historian Sir Arthur Bryant when, quoting Eliot, he wrote:

‘England is a Christian land, and only by contemplation of her long Christian history can one comprehend her. Her cathedrals and parish churches mark the milestones of her passage through time. Stand at dusk in any English cathedral or parish church and remain there in the silence and gathering darkness, and our history as a people becomes plain.

‘Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

is England and nowhere… A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

‘This is why, to any lover of England and her history, the preservation of her cathedrals and parish churches matters so much… [O]ur civilisation was made by these churches, grew out of the arts, learning and creed which those which those who  raised and tended them taught, and, when they crumble or are destroyed, will perish with them. Their aisles and towers have witnessed our whole history as a nation… They knit us together as a people… “make us we”; without them ours would be a raw materialistic polity of concrete factories and offices and purposeless urban populations fast receding into barbarism…. [I]t is these… churches… in every corner of the land which link us to those who have gone before and give meaning and purpose to our lives as a continuing nation…’

As I said at the start, the neglect and state of disrepair into which the present government has deliberately allowed the country’s cathedrals to fall is a fitting symbol for the state of national disintegration over which it has knowingly presided and has done so much to engineer. It will remain its enduring legacy long after all the other minutiae of the public policy initiatives with which it has been preoccupied have long faded from memory, and when all that remains of this country’s once vibrant and glorious national culture are its cathedral ruins glinting in the sun,  just like Stonehenge.