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4 novembre 2004

By Alexandre del Valle. Editions des Syrtes, Paris, 2004, 457 pages

(NDLR : pour en savoir plus sur Alexandre del Valle, de son vrai Marc d’Anna, cliquez ici.)

During the 2004 campaign for the election to the European Parliament, both the Socialist Party, albeit in a moderate way, and the conservative Union pour la Majorité Présidentielle, president Chirac’s party, made known their opposition to Turkey joining the European Union. The extreme right, represented by the Front National and Mouvement National Republicain, made the issue of the admission of Turkey a major campaign theme, arguing that it would change the judeo-christian identity of Europe, which then would soon be submersed by mass immigration from a Muslim country ruled by what they describe as a “fundamentalist” government. Coming from far-right parties with a distinctly racist program, this is no wonder. But the arch-conservative and anti-EU slate led by former minister Philippe de Villiers under the name “Mouvement pour la France”, which pooled over 6% in the Euro-election, used the same rhetoric, contending that the entry of Turkey was in fact a move by the Muslim fundamentalists to take over Europe.

Since September 11th, 2001, Alexandre del Valle has emerged as one of the most influential of those French intellectuals who feed the conservative political parties with their less than academic expertise on Islam and the Middle-East. His last book, timely published shortly before the election, is a lenghty exposition of the aforementioned ideas, and has received applause in the ranks of the (growing) part of the French elite which sees Islam, not radical Islam or Islamism, as a new brand of totalitarian ideology which equates or supersedes National-Socialism and Fascism in magnitude and threat. Del Valle, who presents himself as an academic and a specialist of geopolitics, comes from the ranks of the extreme right and contributed to several publications of to the so-called “New Right”, such as Nouvelles de Synergies européennes and Muninn. He is also a contributor to the daily newspaper of the xenophobic Italian political party Lega Nord, La Padania. Recently, he switched his allegiance to the UMP, and is one of the founders of the “ la Droite libre” tendancy, a staunchly pro-American faction which advocates extreme free-market economics and was very vocal in calling for the participation of France into the US intervention against Iraq. He is also known for being very close to the most outspokenly hawkish groups within the French Jewish community, which align themselves with the rightist wing of the Israeli Likud party, or the parties of the Israeli far-right such as Ihud ha Leumi ( National Union). He is the one who coined the expression “ red-green-brown alliance”, that is, the supposed alliance of the extreme left, the Islamists and the Green parties, with the extreme right, which he thinks pursue the common goal of promoting antisemitism in disguise of anti-Zionism and de-legitimizing the right of the state of Israël to exist.

What is both intriguing and shocking with this book is not the author’s controversial past and personality, but the total lack of academic method he uses in unfolding his theory. It can be summarized as follows : the Turkish foreign policy , since the 15th century, follows a plan which aims at the “conquest of Europe and the world” ( page 224). While in the West, the liberals believe Ataturk and the Young Turks movement was a secular and modernist one, they were in fact ultra-nationalist and racists. Thus the astonishing revelation ( page 194) that “ the Young Turks and the kemalists have finally spilled more non-Turk and non-Muslim blood than all the Ottoman sultans”. Now, Del Valle argues, the goal of Turkey is to resume its expansionist foreign policy by gaining entry into the EU, which will then enable it to play a role in the Balkans, and later to ask for the extension of the European Union to the ethnically Turkish republics of the Caucasus, in order to gain control of the oil resources of this area. This scheme, the author writes, fits both the doctrine of pan-Turkism and that of Islamism. It also serves, he thinks, the world domination plan of the United States. Del Valle says the US have always ( at last until 2001) seen positively the rise of Islamism and used it as a tool to counter the emergence of a real European super-power.

Without going further on, it is now clear that this book is a militant pamphlet, not a scholarly study. This is also proved by the countless errors one can find by just browsing through it. For example, in the part devoted to the movement of Metin Kaplan, the author writes that Kaplan “met with Osama bin Laden in 1999 and after September 11th, 2001” ( p.258). This is indeed impossible, as Kaplan was jailed in Germany in 1999 and was released in March, 2003. Also in the author’s foreword, he thanks “ professeur Felipe de Veulle-Revenga” for his help. One would think this otherwise unknown Frenchman is an academic, but he is in fact a businessman who, on at least one occasion, was part of a Front National delegation led by Le Pen, when he met with Saddam Hussein in Bagdad.

The fact that this book is taken seriously by a part of the conservative French intelligentsia, that the author is a regular guest writer in the columns of the daily newspaper Le Figaro, and that he has achieved a real influence within the world of politics, confirms that many opponents of Turkey’s admission into the EU are only motivated by the fear of Islam and have a distinctly Christian, not secular, definition of the European cultural identity.

Jean-Yves Camus

Reproduction autorisée :
Insight Turkey n°6, volume 3. Juillet-Août 2004
revue du Ankara Center for Turkish Policy Studies