Mr. Cameron reserved his most telling criticism not for Israel but for his fellow Europeans. Without mentioning France and Germany by name, he expressed “anger” at those who were happy enough to accept Turkey’s contribution to the defense of Europe during the Cold War, but were now ever more inventive in finding reasons to drag their feet when accepting Ankara as a political equal. Part of his scolding was in defiance of his own party rank and file, who are not so much anti-Turkish as skeptical of enlargement or indeed anything at all involving Brussels. The British Conservative Party’s failure to take Europe seriously was often cited as the reason behind Mr. Cameron’s predecessors’ ringing endorsement of Turkish membership. An EU large enough to include Turkey, the argument ran, would be too unwieldy to function as a supra-national federal system. However, the last Conservative government fell in 1997, long before the Treaty of Lisbon or before the core 15 became the congested 27. Euroskeptics need no longer feel the need for a Turkish spanner in the works. So Mr. Cameron’s strong advocacy this week of a Turkish cause is not one that carries much resonance with mainstream British public opinion, let alone the hecklers within his own party, and should not be taken for granted.

It does, however, follow upon his recent visit to the White House and it is possible to speculate whether his decision to parachute into Ankara en route to a major trade mission in India was to deliver a trans-Atlantic message as much as a European one. It was US Defense Secretary Robert Gates who famously speculated whether Turkey’s new Eastward-looking foreign policy was not all the fault of Europe’s refusal to offer “the kind of organic link to the West that Turkey sought.” The growing Beltway consensus may be that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the new Muammar Gaddafi, but the Mr. Gates’ theory is that Turkey is not so much climbing off the Western bandwagon as being pushed. Mr. Cameron’s speech was an invitation to an increasingly isolationist Turkey to leap back on.

The British prime minister’s description of an imprisoned Gaza was rhetoric that no US president would dare use. In choosing those words, however, Mr. Cameron was not inflaming the situation but telling those protesting outside the Fatih mosque that criticism of Israel in itself does not put them in an anti-European camp. By emulating Turkey’s sense of outrage, he was trying to dull its edge. In the press conference that followed, Mr. Erdogan repeated his simile that the Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara was no better than the act of a Somali pirate. But his heart was not quite in it. Standing next to Cameron, his criticism of Israel suddenly made him look like a good European.

Mr. Cameron’s speech on Tuesday morning was in the form of a lesson to those in Europe who doubt Turkey’s entitlement “at the top table of European politics.” But of course it was an entreaty to Turkey to take the necessary steps to take that seat. Let us not exaggerate, Mr. Cameron’s pro-Turkish stand was not an act of political bravery, but it was statesman-like. It was a modest demonstration to his host that leadership is not always about pandering to the crowd but sometimes bucking the trend.


*Published in TODAY ZAMAN on July 29, 2010.