SHOULD EU SUSPEND TURKEY’S ACCESSION NEGOTIATIONS? – ANALYSIS
Eurasia Review
December 18, 2014 Thursday
By William Chislett
The arrest of Turkish journalists, media executives and even the
scriptwriter of a popular television series, ostensibly for ‘forming,
leading and being a member of an armed terrorist organisation’,
brought a swift rebuke from the European Commission and raised the
question of whether Turkey’s EU painfully slow accession negotiations
should be suspended.
Federica Mogherini, EU Foreign Affairs chief, and Johannes Hahn,
Enlargement Commissioner, said the raids and arrests ‘are incompatible
with the freedom of media, which is a core principle of democracy’.
They said Turkey’s move towards membership depended on ‘full respect
for the rule of law and fundamental rights’.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded to the criticism in his
characteristically abrasive style, telling the EU to ‘mind its own
business and keep its opinions to itself’.
Those arrested, including Ekrem Dumanli, editor-in-chief of Zaman,
the country’s widest-circulating newspaper, are associated with
the influential Hizmet religious movement, led by the Muslim cleric
Fethullah Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in the US and runs
an extensive network of schools and businesses.
Erdogan, the former Prime Minister for 11 years and since August the
country’s first directly elected President, is locked in a power
struggle with Gulen, a former ally, whom he accuses of running a
‘parallel state’.
In December 2013, Erdogan accused the movement of being behind
prosecutors and police who tried to arrest dozens of his supporters
on charges of corruption. Erdogan transferred or fired thousands of
police officers and prosecutors and managed to derail the charges.
An Istanbul court rejected this week appeals to pursue the charges and
dropped the case, drawing further fire from the EU. In a statement on
Tuesday, EU Foreign Ministers said: ‘The response by the government
to the alleged cases of corruption in December 2013 cast serious
doubts over the independence and impartiality of the judiciary,
and demonstrated an increasing intolerance of political opposition,
public protest and critical media’.
Only one EU accession chapter (on regional policy) has been opened
since 2010, bringing the total number of areas under negotiation since
membership talks started in October 2005 to 14 (out of 35). And opening
that chapter in November 2013 was delayed four months as a result of
pressure from Germany, following the excessively harsh crackdown on
anti-government protests over a development project in Gezi Park in
the heart of Istanbul. Just one chapter (on R&D) has been opened and
provisionally closed.
The Council of Ministers suspended eight chapters in 2006 because
of Ankara’s refusal to extend the EU-Turkey Customs Union to Cyprus
(an EU member since 2004). Cyprus, the northern third of which has
been occupied by Turkey since its invasion in 1974, has unilaterally
suspended another six chapters and France (during the presidency of
Nicolas Sarkozy) has blocked four unilaterally. Talks to reunify Cyprus
broke down yet again last October when Ankara said it would search
for oil and gas in waters where Cyprus has already licensed drilling.
Erdogan’s latest outburst comes at a time when Euroscepticism is on
the rise, and with it opposition to Turkey’s EU membership. Last May’s
European elections produced stronger results for anti-EU parties in
France, Denmark, Hungary and, in particular, the UK. Furthermore,
David Cameron, the British Prime Minister and the most active
supporter of Turkey’s EU membership, has raised the prospect of
the UK leaving the EU if it does not get its way on issues such
as immigration. Furthermore, the EU is suffering from ‘enlargement
fatigue’: Jean-Claude Juncker, the new European Commission President,
sees no country joining the EU before 2019.
Andrew Duff, a former MEP and president of the Union of European
Federalists, believes Turkey’s negotiations are ‘at best useless and at
worst fraudulent: they should now be suspended’. Duff, a self-confessed
Turkophile, now says in public what many believe in private.
Erdogan began well when his centrist Islamic Justice and Development
Party (AKP) was swept to power in 2002, producing the equivalent
of a tsunami for the Kemalist political establishment (the secular
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the modern Turkish state in 1923 on
the ruins of the Ottoman Empire). The AKP revived Turkey’s moribund
EU accession process (which dates back to 1963 when it became an
associate member), introduced much-needed reforms, including placing
the military, the arbiter of political life, under civilian control,
broke nationalist taboos by acknowledging, to some degree, the 1915
Armenian massacres, pursued a solution to the division of Cyprus,
which was unsuccessful, and reached out to Kurds by recognising
cultural rights and approving a legal framework for peace talks with
the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Per capita income has
doubled in the last 12 years, reflecting economic reforms that have
unleashed a dynamic private sector.
But the longer he has been in power -winning just under 50% of
the vote in the 2011 general election- the more authoritarian
he has become. In Duff’s words, ‘Erdogan knows how to be elected
democratically, but not to govern so’. Opponents are treated with
disdain, if not persecuted. His majoritarian understanding of democracy
a la Vladimir Putin was epitomised when he told the Gezi protestors:
‘If you don’t agree with my decisions, win an election’.
When he was mayor of Istanbul (1994-98) he stated that democracy
was like a bus: ‘You ride it until you arrive at your destination,
then you step off’. Erdogan would appear to be getting off.
The disregard for the rule of law is hard to square with the
government’s so-called ‘new’ EU strategy as set out in the policy
document published by the Ministry of EU Affairs last September,
shortly after Erdogan became President, which aims to eliminate the
obstacles to Turkey’s full membership. The political reform process,
according to the document, ‘will be based on advancing the reforms
of the last 12 years in rule of law, democratisation, human rights,
civilisation, freedom and security’.
The repeated warnings to Ankara by Brussels about Turkey’s slippage
in the EU accession process are falling on deaf ears. For how much
longer can the EU allow this to happen without losing credibility? Its
patience is wearing thin. Neither side, however, wants to throw in
the towel. For geostrategic reasons, Brussels wants to keep Turkey on
board -it has been a NATO member since 1952- and the business class
wants EU membership.
One way to get the EU negotiations back on track and for Brussels to
regain the influence it has lost in Turkey’s accession process -as
suggested in a recent report for Carnegie Europe by Marc Pierini, a
former EU ambassador to Turkey, and Sinan Ulgen- would be to exempt
chapters 23 and 24 from the current blockade of negotiations. This
would allow for an in-depth discussion of judiciary and rule-of-law
issues, of central importance for Turkey and the ones that raise the
most concerns among EU member states. Erdogan would be then put on
the spot.
About the author
William Chislett is Associate Analyst at the Elcano Royal Institute
@WilliamChislet3
Source:
This article was published by the Elcano Royal Institute.
From: A. Papazian