Financial Times, UK
Sept 28 2005
EU voters uneasy over Turkey’s membership quest
By Daniel Dombey
Published: September 27 2005 20:23 | Last updated: September 27 2005
20:23
Earlier this year, some Turkish officials thought of a way of
increasing ordinary Europeans’ knowledge about their nation and its
culture. They planned to build on the success of `The Turks’, a
London exhibition of a millennium’s worth of Turkish artefacts, and
take the show to France. It did not work out. A little sounding-out
made it clear that, at a time when Turkey’s membership of the
European Union is on the agenda, the French public had little
interest in the artistic masterpieces of the country.
Not just in France but across the EU, Turkish accession inspires
little enthusiasm and plenty of downright opposition among
electorates. Yet next Monday, Turkey is set to begin membership
talks. The overriding question is whether the EU is really serious
about its plans for Ankara to join.
A last-minute diplomatic push by Britain, which holds the presidency
of the EU, has cleared most of the obstacles to the talks starting on
time, with Austrian reservations the main remaining hurdle. If the
negotiations succeed, no one doubts that both Turkey and the EU would
be transformed.
But the risk is substantial that something will go wrong during the
10 years of negotiations that lie ahead – particularly because France
has the final word on the country’s accession. A recent amendment to
the French constitution means all EU membership deals after 2007 will
have to be put to referendum.
The signs are not good. A poll released this month by the German
Marshall Fund of the US put support for Turkish membership at 11 per
cent in France, 15 per cent in Germany and 32 per cent in the UK,
with more than 40 per cent undecided in all three – countries.
`The unpopularity in France is due to the fact that Turkey is
perceived as not being European, not looking west and changing the
whole nature and identity of the European project,’ says François
Heisbourg, director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic
Research. `It serves as a proxy for – everything that is Arab and
Muslim, even though Turkey is of course a non-Arab country with a
deeply ingrained separation between the mosque and the state.’
Opposition to Turkish membership has risen at a time when the EU is
itself in crisis after the failure of the European constitution in
French and Dutch referendums, and when national leaders are at
loggerheads over the EU budget. In such circumstances, politicians
are loath to ignore the preferences of their electorates.
That unease is reinforced by concern about some of the news from
Turkey this year, such as the imminent trial of novelist Orhan Pamuk
for denigrating the state. After an extensive series of reforms in
2003-2004, the pace of legislative change in Turkey has also slowed
dramatically this year. `We have a vicious cycle at the moment, so
that negative public opinion in Europe has an impact on political
leaders,’ says Olli Rehn, EU enlargement commissioner and a champion
of opening the talks. `That in turn erodes the credibility of the
accession perspective in the eyes of the Turks and has a negative
impact on the reform process. In order to break this cycle, leading
politicians should make the case why negotiations are important for
the security and stability of Europe.’
Last December, the leaders of the EU’s three most powerful states –
Gerhard Schröder, Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair – championed Turkey’s
cause at the Brussels summit that fixed October 3 for the beginning
of the talks. Today, Mr Schröder is struggling to hold on to power in
Germany, having lost an election, Mr Chirac is distracted by the rise
of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French presidential hopeful who opposes
Turkish membership, and only Mr Blair’s government is left actively
campaigning for Turkish entry.
In a speech this month, Jack Straw, UK foreign secretary, argued that
`by welcoming Turkey we will demonstrate that western and Islamic
cultures can thrive together as partners in the modern world’. He
added that continued enlargement helped the EU deal both with
economic challenges from India and China and international issues
such as terrorism, crime and climate change. `Turkey’s geographical
position makes it of vital strategic importance in every way,’ he
said.
Sometimes, however, such arguments do not ring true. In a
conventional sense, Turkey was most important to the west during the
150 years before the fall of the Berlin wall, when it served as a
check on Russian expansionism. Indeed, when EU leaders made their
decision last December to begin talks, they were motivated less by
strategic considerations than by a desire not to renege on four
decades of promises of closer ties to Ankara.
EU membership could well fail to cement relations with the wider
Islamic world, since Turkey is non-Arab, close to Israel and has a
difficult relationship with much of the Middle East because of its
secularism and record of empire. Turkish diplomats also insist that,
even if Turkey fails to become a member, it will still look west.
`The strategic argument is more complicated to make today because
there is no Red Army on the border of Turkey,’ concedes Mr Rehn. `But
I don’t even want to think about the consequences of slamming the
door to Turkey as regards both the political development of Turkey
and the relations between Europe and Islam.’
However, one school of thought holds that opening negotiations as
they are envisaged only increases the risk of failure. Austria,
successor state to the Turks’ historic Habsburg rival, is alone among
the EU’s 25 member states in insisting that the negotiations
contemplate an EU-Turkey `partnership’ as an explicit alternative to
membership.
`Since December the attitudes in Europe and the developments in
Europe have confirmed our point of
view . . . We should take one step after the
other and try to be realistic,’ Ursula Plassnik, Austrian foreign
minister, said in an interview. `I think that is more honest than
turning the first referendum on Turkish membership into a test of the
absorption capacity of the EU.’
Angela Merkel, Germany’s potential Christian Democrat chancellor, has
proposed a similar idea of a `privileged partnership’ between Turkey
and the EU, though her coalition’s failure to score a clear victory
in this month’s elections will impede her ability to influence the
debate.
Turkey has rejected any such scheme, arguing that it is interested
only in membership. The country already has a customs union with the
EU, backs EU foreign policy decisions as a matter of course and
stations troops in Bosnia as part of a showpiece EU military mission.
But Ms Plassnik argues the two sides can still do much more to grow
closer to each other. `Look at the proposed negotiating framework and
look at the 35 chapters that we have to examine one by one during the
negotiations,’ she says, pointing at a list that ranges from `free
movements of goods’ to `judiciary and fundamental rights’. `This
proves the broad scope of issues where co-operation can be
reinforced.’
Other EU governments hope to overcome Austria’s objections in the
next few days. Britain argues that they would unpick last December’s
delicately crafted compromise and stop the negotiations before they
started. But, in any case, Turkey is unlikely to be offered the same
kind of membership deal as last year’s entrants from the former
Soviet bloc. The Commission’s proposed negotiating framework
contemplates `long transitional periods, derogations, specific
arrangements or permanent safeguard clauses’ on issues such as the
free movement of labour, EU subsidies and agriculture.
`It looks a little like a privileged partnership, doesn’t it?’ says
one Brussels-based ambassador. He thinks Turkey will be lucky to
secure even a relatively limited membership of the EU.
Europe’s fear of immigrant workers and the EU’s current,
inward-looking state of mind mean that Ankara’s membership bid could
break down halfway or, more dangerously, be rejected by European
electorates in the end. Against such a backdrop, European leaders
have hunkered down, content to get through a difficult year without
reneging on the EU’s commitment to begin talks on time. But once the
negotiations start, politicians on both sides will have to play a
more active part if Turkey is ever to join the EU.
A sour mood as Ankara stands on the threshold
Last Saturday morning, a few hundred protesters gathered outside
Istanbul Bilgi University and threw eggs and insults at a group of
– historians and human rights workers as they rushed between riot
police into the sanctuary of the university’s main building, writes
Vincent Boland. Amid the shouts of `treason’ and `lies’, it seemed
that, despite many indicators to the contrary, the battle between
progressives and reactionaries that has been such a notable
characteristic of modern Turkey has not yet been won.
The cause of the most recent outbreak of hostilities was a conference
on the mass killing of Armenians that took place as the Ottoman
empire broke apart in 1915. A court ruling banning the conference
forced its relocation and sparked a ferocious row over free speech at
an especially sensitive moment, barely a week before Turkey begins
the long and arduous process of joining the – European Union. It is
little wonder that Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s foreign minister, was moved
at the height of the controversy to observe that `no country can
shoot itself in the foot like Turkey can’.
The incident was revealing of the sour mood that Turkey is in as it
stands on the threshold of Europe. The country was desperate to be
asked to join the EU; now that the invitation has been extended, it
seems unsure whether to accept. In this, Turkey differs from the
former communist countries of eastern Europe. For Poles, Czechs and
Hungarians, accession to the Union was a moment of destiny, the
righting of a wrong caused by the second world war.
There is no comparable feeling in Turkey. The country was the vision
of one man – Mustafa Kemal Ataturk – who forged it from the ruins of
the Ottoman empire and who bequeathed an ideology of independence,
self-reliance, nationalism and modernisation. Turkey would love to
join the EU on its own terms. But the accession process is largely
non-negotiable and – Turkey is the only aspirant member country to
begin the accession process without an absolute understanding that it
will eventually join.
It is because so many Turks are suspicious of what the EU wants from
Turkey, and of what it is prepared to offer in return, that there
seems to be so little enthusiasm for the accession process. In a
public opinion survey published this month, the German Marshall Fund
of the US found that the proportion of Turks who believed that EU
membership would be a good thing had declined in a year from 73 per
cent to 63 per cent.
Onur Oymen, a veteran diplomat who is now a senior official in the
opposition Republican People’s Party, sums up the ambivalence of many
Turks. `The day Turkey joins the EU as a full member will be a
historic day,’ he says. `It would be premature to celebrate anything
before then.’ Ural Akbulut, rector of Middle East Technical
University, adds: `I believe the accession process will – succeed but
I am less optimistic now than I was a year ago.’
For many Turks, the experience of the EU since December 17 last year,
when the Union’s leaders invited – Turkey to join, has not been happy,
involving too many concessions for too little gain. Cyprus has
bedevilled relations between Ankara and Brussels throughout 2005, as
European governments put pressure on Turkey to recognise the Greek
Cypriot administration in the south of the divided island while, in
the eyes of many in Turkey, ignoring the isolation of Turkish
Cypriots in the north.
That has been a gift to opponents within Turkey of EU accession. Many
Turks also complain that Europeans put too much focus on the plight
of Turkey’s ethnic Kurdish minority. Amid an upsurge in Kurdish
separatist violence in recent weeks, these issues have fuelled a rise
in nationalism and euroscepticism. These were the sentiments that
Saturday’s protesters against the Armenia conference undoubtedly
sought to exploit.
According to Guler Sabanci, head of the Sabanci family conglomerate
and Turkey’s leading businesswoman, there has always been a segment
of Turkish society opposed to EU membership. `These people will find
a – reason, any time and anywhere, to be against this journey, and
they have reasons right now,’ she says. Still, she insists, they do
not represent the broad mass of Turkish society. `Now and in the
future there is a bigger consensus that they should not get away with
it any more.’
If the rise of nationalism in Turkey is behind the fall in support
for EU entry, the government must take part of the blame, according
to some commentators. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister,
returned from last December’s summit in Brussels in – triumph. Yet he
failed to follow through, they say, and lost the reform momentum that
led to significant political and economic modernisation in 2003 and
2004.
A certain amount of reform fatigue was probably understandable. But
Mr Akbulut believes the prime minister underestimated the chances of
success last December. `Erdogan and his team were not prepared for
the – success of December 17 and its – challenges,’ he says. `We can
see that they did not have the plans and people and programmes in
place to build on the momentum and this damaged his image in Europe.’
If Mr Akbulut is right, the EU has as much reason to be disappointed
with Turkey as Turkey has to be – disappointed with the EU. The
negotiating process will undoubtedly provide opportunities for mutual
misunderstanding, perhaps even the reason for one side or the other
to walk away. Nevertheless, for some observers, joining the EU is
less important for Turkey than the accession process and the pressure
it puts on Turkey to lose its inhibitions about the outside world,
recognise its democratic shortcomings, reform its institutions and
strengthen its still-shaky civil society.
Dogan Cansizlar, chairman of the Capital Markets Board of Turkey, a
financial markets watchdog, says: `The EU is a direction, an
indicator, a light that Turkey can move towards.’ Many Europeans, he
says, judge Turkey by the Turkish communities in their countries,
which are often more conservative and hidebound than Turks in Turkey.
Ms Sabanci believes the process of joining the EU will change Turkey
and make it fit better into the union that, she is convinced, it will
eventually join. She had a personal stake in the dispute over free
speech, because a university founded and funded by her family was one
of the organisers of the Armenia conference. She also believes the
dispute over free speech is symptomatic of a growing awareness of the
importance of such things, not just for Turkey’s EU aspirations but
for the country as a whole.
`This is a very long journey, and during this journey Turkey will
change,’ Ms Sabanci says. `The Turkey that will enter the European
Union is not the Turkey we have today.’