Telegraph.co.uk, UK
Oct 10 2004
Why we must let Turkey into the EU
(Filed: 10/10/2004)
Last week a momentous decision was taken. The European Commission
recommended that the EU start negotiations over Turkish entry. The
final decision will not be taken until December. And even if the
go-ahead is given it will be 10 years at least before Turkey could
join. Nevertheless, I think the Rubicon has been crossed. So what
would be the effects of Turkish entry?
Turkish differences
Click to enlarge
Admitting Turkey would be a huge step because of its sheer size, its
culture, its location and its comparative underdevelopment. The
population is currently about 70m. As our top chart shows, that makes
Turkey the second most populous country in Europe. Moreover, because
of Turkey’s comparatively high birth rate and Germany’s low one, her
population is likely to exceed Germany’s within 20 years – and it
could be not far short of 90m 10 or 15 years after that.
Culturally, she is also radically different from all other EU
members. Most Turks are Muslims. Moreover, she has a history of
political instability, with the army seeing itself as the guardian of
the secular state, and being prepared to intervene in government
whenever it has seen this threatened, usually with widespread support
among the middle classes. To put it mildly, this is not the political
and cultural milieu of the burghers of Mitteleuropa.
Moreover, most of Turkey is in Asia, bordering Syria, Iraq, Iran,
Georgia and Armenia. Turkish entry would therefore put the EU’s
borders right in the firing line of some key Middle East hotspots –
literally.
Turkey is also extremely poor. As our lower chart shows, her per
capita GDP is in a different parish even from Greece, which is among
the old EU’s poorest countries, and is significantly lower even than
Poland’s. Levels of education, social services and infrastructure all
put Turkey in the developing country league.
Macro-economically, Turkey’s performance makes her seem like a banana
republic. Over the past 16 years, interest rates and inflation have
averaged over 60 per cent. There have recently been some big
improvements, but inflation is still running at 9 per cent and
interest rates at 22 per cent.
Admittedly, economic growth has averaged 4.5 per cent over 30 years.
But the fluctuations have been extraordinary. At times the economy
has grown by 8 per cent in a year. At other times, though, it has
contracted by 8 per cent in a year.
For or against?
Given all this, it should be obvious what an economist like myself
should think about Turkish entry. I am, of course, in favour of it.
There are two reasons. First, EU entry will be extremely good for
Turkey. History shows that the EU has brought major advantages to
poor countries with troubled political histories. Spain, Portugal and
Greece all gained from EU entry. Perhaps the greatest gains have come
not from entry itself but rather from the improvements made necessary
by the attempt to join.
Improvements extend beyond the narrowly economic into the fields of
politics and human rights. But these have economic consequences as
well. Full democracies bound by the rule of law rarely if ever
descend into the blatant incompetence and kleptocracy that is the
fate of so many dictatorships.
Much as I like and admire the Turks, though, my concern for the
Turkish interest is not purely altruistic. It is in our interests too
that Turkey should prosper. The narrow economic argument is that we
all gain by our neighbours being prosperous. This means that they
will be better able to supply us with goods and services and their
market for our exports will also grow correspondingly.
But more importantly, it is vital that a country as strategically
important as Turkey be kept in the Western ambit and that it does not
slide off towards the Islamic fundamentalists. Indeed, more
positively, if Turkey could thrive within a predominantly
post-Christian European Union, this would be a favourable model for
the secularisation and democratisation of the Middle East. In the
long run, this is of the greatest possible importance to both our
security and our prosperity.
The second reason why I am strongly in favour of Turkish entry is
quite different. In short, I think it would help to change the nature
of the EU. The fundamental narrative of the EU is the tension between
widening and deepening. Wild enthusiasts like to think that the EU
can do both, but it is becoming increasingly clear that we will not
be able to run even the current EU as an integrated political unit,
never mind a much larger union. With Turkey in, this would become
blindingly obvious.
The consequence would be that the forces pushing for a multi-level EU
would be strengthened. This would be no bad thing. Forget “slow lanes
and fast lanes”. If an inner core of countries comprising the
original six members wanted to go ahead and form a political union
then all well and good, but outside this core would be groups of
countries with different alignments on different issues – but all
under the broad umbrella of the EU, including what that means for
trading relationships and access to markets.
The EU’s achievement
Fanatical supporters of the EU believe that it is responsible for the
very good performance of the Continental economies for the first
quarter of a century after the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1956.
They are wrong. The countries of core Europe were set to grow
strongly without the EU. And more recently, its large members have
been held back by the EU’s emphasis on regulation and harmonisation
and its suppression of competition. Whatever they have achieved
recently has been despite the EU, not because of it.
But where the europhobes are wrong is jumping from this to the
conclusion that the EU has been a disaster. On the contrary, it has
been little short of a triumph. And here I do not refer to the
prevention of war in Europe – which, noble though this cause is, I
attribute primarily to other factors such as Nato and the Soviet
threat. No, the EU’s triumph has been helping the peripheral
countries of Europe to aspire to core European standards of living
and extending democracy and accountable government to countries that
had been plagued by dictatorships.
In this way, the EU has played the role that the great empires,
including the British, have sometimes played in the past, bringing a
measure of prosperity and stability to areas that might otherwise
fall prey to tinpot nationalism and bad government.
Historians will surely judge the success of the EU not by its
contribution to raising German living standards but rather by what it
has done for Spain, Portugal, Greece and the former communist states
of eastern Europe. Doing the same thing for Turkey would be an
enormous triumph.
• Roger Bootle is managing director of Capital Economics and economic
adviser to Deloitte. You can contact him at roger.bootle@capital
economics.com