EU divided over whether it’s time to talk Turkey

Irish Independent
Dec 17, 2004

THE vote this week of the European Parliament in favour of starting
membership talks with Turkey should presage a decision by the EU
leaders today to start the whole process rolling.

One says “should” partly because one can never be quite certain in
Europe that its leaders will do what is required of them – witness the
extraordinary about-turns over the European constitution and the rows
over keeping to the rules of the economic stability pact. The major
players, including French President Chirac, with important caveats,
and German Chancellor Schroder and British Prime Minister Tony Blair,
more enthusiastically, have all said that they will give it the green
light. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern is fully supporting the membership bid.

But there’s a lot of bad politics about the Turkish application at the
moment, especially in Austria, Germany, France and the Netherlands
where the right-wing anti-immigration parties are rearing their
head. Even Chirac has had to promise a referendum to let the French
people decide when negotiations finally come to fruition.

Such hesitations are understandable, but miss the urgency and
importance of the moment. To say no at this stage, or to fob Turkey off
with a “country membership” or something less than full conjunction
would be an act of religious prejudice and historic recidivism of
the worst and most parochial sort. Europe has an opportunity to reach
out to a whole new world of a bigger, wider and more diverse Europe.

All the objections and the last-minute hurdles being put forward
against Turkey – the demands that it admit to the Armenian genocide,
the imposition of additional rules on labour movement, the proposal
for a “privileged partnership” instead of membership – are little
more than masks for a much more fundamental fear and dislike, and
that is of Turkey as a Muslim state.

If anything, Europe should be wanting Turkey in precisely because it
is a liberal, modernising country of Muslims (officially it is still
a secular state, although it is now headed by an Islamic party).

In that sense Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minster, is quite
right to insist that Turkey will not accept second-best, special
requirements, lesser membership or anything other than the straight
road to membership that every other country has followed. Anything
less would be an insult, not least to all those in Turkey which have
pushed, harried and argued for the huge changes that have been needed
to get Turkey to this point of even beginning serious negotiations. Of
course Turkey has a long way to go. Anyone who knows Turkey also knows
how very far it is from properly integrating its Kurdish minority,
accepting even a minimum standard for its workers and instituting the
kind of law that would bring it into line with Western Europe. We
are not talking here of a neat homogenous country like Sweden, but
a largely Islamic nation developed through four centuries of empire
and then dramatically wrenched away from imperial habit to modern
national state by Ataturk after the First World War.

The benefit of that change is to produce a formally secular state
which, at least among the elite, feels its future looking westwards
and its place in Europe. The price has been a state that is fiercely
nationalistic, with an army at the centre of its constitution and an
attitude to its Kurdish minority and to human rights that has more
in common with Moscow than Brussels.

Far from that being a bar to full membership, however, it is the
very reason we should be insisting on it. Joining Europe brings
with it stringent obligations in a whole host of fields, from equal
opportunities to civil rights and financial disciplines. Lock Turkey
in those negotiations, and keep absolutely firm on their requirements,
and you help all those in Turkey wanting modernisation. Accept it as
something less than an equal European and you accept it as a basically
different country with lesser standards for its own people. Which is
why so many Kurds and even Armenians want the negotiations to go ahead.

Voting today for negotiations to start does not mean immediate
membership. Talks could last a decade and there is no reason why
the EU should compromise its own principles. But there is equally no
reason to make Turkey a special case in negative terms, forcing on
it special obligations which are not true of everyone.

Of course politicians have to take note of their domestic opinion. At
a time when a leading Dutch documentary director has been murdered in
the Netherlands, 191 have been killed in the Madrid bombing and the
police forces of almost every European country are issuing warnings
about the dangers of attacks from Islamic extremists, now is not a good
time to talk of Turkey’s potential contribution to multiculturalism
in the Union.

But politics has to be about the promotion of causes in inconvenient
times as well as propitious ones. The Muslim aspect to Turkey’s
membership is important, not only because to turn it down would
be to send such hostile messages to Muslims within Europe as well
as its neighbours outside. Yet in some ways one can exaggerate this
aspect. Turkey has its own history and ethnic background which make it
quite separate from the Arabs and Iranians around it, or the Pakistani,
North African and Bangladeshi Muslims populations within Europe.

More profoundly, Turkey is important because it represents a whole
new leap towards regional integration in Europe. It brings with it not
just an Islamic background but a military force in Nato, a reserve of
labour and interconnections that spread out to Central Asia and beyond.

This year’s enlargement of the Union from 15 to 25 members was meant
to be the end of the story for the time being. But everywhere round
Europe – in Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey and now Romania – the older order
is collapsing and new democratic governments are coming to power who
see in the EU both a path to the future and a means of consolidating
change. Belarus and even some Arab states around the Mediterranean
could well follow in the coming years.

It’s a development most European politicians have been slow to grasp
and fearful of embracing. The EU was desperately slow to respond
to Viktor Yuschenko’s call for EU partnership, and to the change
in government in Bucharest. Even though they know that existing
enlargement has changed forever the tight, inward-looking club of
Western Europe, the instinctive response of EU governments is to look
inwards and backwards. In the nervy and uncertain days before the fall
of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, Chancellor Kohl
liked to quote Otto Von Bismark’s statement about clutching the cloak
of history (God, as he called it) as He swept by. Kohl took the chance,
and he was no Bismark. Today’s European leaders are arguably even less
statesmen than Kohl. But history is passing by and over the coming
months in Central Europe, they have the chance to touch its cloak.

Adrian Hamilton