A Brexit view from Mardin

Britain's putting its exit from the EU to a referendum, and the fact that during this referendum all the debates revolved around the refugee problem and Turkey, in fact showed how unattainable a claim the idea of the EU itself is. Undoubtedly it showed more than this. With Brexit, the shortcomings of a Europe whose charisma has been thoroughly scratched will be remembered far more from now on. Just let one fall.

Truth be told, one did not need a Brexit to understand how heavy a makeup the EU's discourse is, an EU that is the product of an undertaking of only sixty or seventy years, and that speaks of the values it rests on or raises as if they were the most important values the world has ever found and developed, even newly found values. It would have been enough, and more than enough, merely to look at the scale of the historical span, to look at history from a little distance. The history of Europe's adopting certain values it regards as its own property and has monopolized, and raising them together in a union, is all of sixty or seventy years.

On the plane of values such as democracy, freedom of expression and multiculturalism, Europe's distant and recent record has never been clean.

Its claims on multiculturalism, moreover, were never put to a serious test. Even the EU's being a secular union that could accommodate religious diversity has been a claim very hard to get accepted by the peoples of the member states.

Twelve years ago, Turkey had objected to the statement "The EU is a Christian Union" in the preamble of the constitution prepared for the Union, and had had the statement "the Union is secular" inserted.

Even so, this constitution was put to a popular vote in France and the Netherlands and rejected.

The idea of the EU, and especially the idea of multiculturalism it contains, has in fact not been fully embraced even by the peoples of the EU's founding members.

Had a referendum been held in any of these countries 12 years ago, there too the likelihood of leaving the Union would have been greater than the likelihood of staying. Viewed at the level of peoples, the EU is like a marriage that is kept going by force.

Although undoubtedly an important reason for this discontent among peoples toward the EU is economic, no one can say that this cultural reason is less effective. Indeed, looking at the cost Brexit has already brought to Britain's economy, it can even be said that opposition to the EU on economic grounds has no rationality at all.

So political attitudes and decisions may not always proceed on a rational-economic basis.

No one can say that Britain came out ahead from this decision, but from this point on it is also not possible to bring anything back to how it was.

Evidently, the severe incompatibility among European peoples will bring divorces within themselves. Beneath the happy togetherness that Brussels administration has been trying to project until now, even Christian peoples' intolerance toward one another depicts the togetherness becoming unsustainable.

But the last justification, the accepted discourse or argument put forward in this intolerance, against one another or against the Union administration, is that Turkey too will become an EU member, and the refugee-foreigner presence that makes itself felt more every day in fact.

Putting forward the presence of these foreigners as a reason for divorce is no different from the scapegoating practice in Christian culture.

It is a fact that the EU, one of whose most important claims is multiculturalism, has in fact failed in the first real test it has gone through on points such as multiculturalism and living together. Europe

cannot manage to live together with Islam as "a really different culture."

Neither its politicians nor its intellectuals can show a maturity capable of sustaining the great EU ideals or claims in the confrontation with Islam

. When it comes to Islam, Europe's intellectuals, going to great lengths with a thousand pretexts, keep displaying the Jacobinism, Orientalism and fascism within themselves.

I am writing these lines from Mardin, where we are for the AK Party's Gönül Köprüleri events that continued throughout the month of Ramadan.

Mardin, which, like the surrounding

Diyarbakır, Siirt

is a city of ours that has shown the world for centuries that multiculturalism, truly different cultures, can be made to live together. While Mardin displayed this real multiculturalism quietly for hundreds of years, there was no such thing as the EU; indeed, in the meantime, people in Europe were busy slaughtering different cultures. Even so, we advise those who see the EU as a guarantee of our togetherness, of the happiness and prosperity of our own people, of our own inner peace and our democracy, to take a tour of these provinces of ours for a rehabilitation of their historical consciousness.

Those who see Mardin, Siirt and Diyarbakır, where an ordinary person knows and speaks three or four languages, with this awareness will, I think, have no difficulty understanding the game being played in this region of ours and why European countries are so interested in this game.

They are trying to strike Turkey where it is strongest, to make it resemble themselves, that is all

. Through Kurdish nationalism, which has been supported for the last thirty years, the region is being subjected to a kind of ethnic cleansing, cultural cleansing, and an attempt is being made to turn it, like a European city, into something homogeneous, monocultural, soulless. They desire the mosaic, the strongest, most beautiful and most fertile aspect of this geography, as a uniform marble. And that marble will bear a Western color with its secular side distant from Islam. The glorification in the Western media of the PKK's female militants, and the fact that even the PKK's most murderous acts look excusable and cute through the European window, are due to that.

From above the Gönül Köprüleri, I can say with joy that their hopes are being dashed

. The people of the region are aware of the game. More than a hundred people, accompanying the Mayor, the provincial chairman and the deputies of Kocaeli and Minister of National Defense Fikri Işık from Kocaeli, crossed this bridge with the gifts they brought and arrived in Mardin and settled in the hearts of the people of Mardin.

From now on, I am sure we will have to think more about the possibilities that Mardin criteria could inspire for the EU.