Newsday, NY
Jan 12 2005

Dangerous Alliance

by SELCUK GULTASLI

What the decision reached at the December 17 European Union (EU)
summit means will be clarified in the upcoming months. We will see in
a short time what kind of direction the Cyprus issue will take,
whether the screening process will begin before or after October 3,
and whether or not surprises like the so-called “Armenian Genocide”
will be included in the negotiations framework document or in the
updated accession partnership document that will be prepared by the
EU Commission.

We will be able to check how much Turkey will come to the agenda, and
how much opposition parties will exploit possible membership during a
referendum process on the EU’s Constitution approval, that will start
in Spain on February 20.

We will grasp them in time. As a matter of fact, a “constructive
ambiguity,” one of the consistent EU attitudes towards Turkey,
strongly marked the December 17 summit. It is “ambiguous” because the
summit produced a result that it could constantly find alternative
ways among several layers of ambiguity and does not bind itself to
any concrete target. It is “constructive” because Turkey was not
offended, and the ground for it to draw closer to European standards
with the goal of possible EU membership, was strengthened. It is
because of this ambiguity that the Turkey issue sometimes will be
seriously debated with good intentions on several fronts in Europe,
and sometimes it will be a source of populist altercations. These
signs have become immediately observable in Europe, which has
awakened to a new year.

For example, British Minister of State for Energy Mike O’Brien last
week criticized Michael Howard, the Jewish leader of the Conservative
Party, for not allowing British Muslims to support the party, and was
he immediately bombarded with a barrage anti-Semitic criticisms.
O’Brien sought the votes of British Muslims through the support for
Turkey’s EU membership by the Labor Party, of which he is a member,
in an article that he wrote to a Muslim weekly newspaper, and was
harshly criticized as a result of this.

Thank God there are no serious problems in Britain and the
conservative leader did not make any concessions on his support for
Turkey while lambasting O’Brien. As a matter of fact, all political
parties in Britain agree on Turkey’s future membership. On the other
hand, it is difficult to say the same for the two locomotives of the
EU, Germany and France.

If Cyprus will be an important front in EU-Turkish relations in 2005,
another front, where perhaps a long-term struggle will take place,
will be a dangerous alliance of the German Christian Democrats and
French conservatives. The alliance that they might call a “holy”
alliance is of a dissolute character in terms of Turkish and EU
values.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who is the new boss of French President Jacques
Chirac’s party, the Union for the People’s Movement (UMP), declared
last week that he is ” in complete agreement” with German Christian
Social Union Party leader Edmund Stoiber, who has turned his
anti-Turkey EU membership stance into one of the main principles of
his policy, that is, to block Turkey’s possible membership. News
agencies reported that French and German conservative leaders have
signed a memorandum of understanding, that is to say, they are bound
to cooperate on issues they agreed upon through their signatures.

Chirac, implying last week that he might run in the 2007 presidential
elections, increases the importance of the French front on Turkey
even more. Despite several drawbacks, the 2007 presidential race,
that most likely will be a contest between Chirac, who supports
Turkey’s future membership, and Sarkozy, who wants to halt Ankara’s
march towards the EU, is the harbinger of an intensive French debate
on the Turkey issue in the short and the medium term. When the fact
that a large part of the French people oppose Turkey’s membership is
taken into consideration, it could be foreseen that Sarkozy will use
this issue frequently against Chirac.

If Sarkozy comes to power in France in 2007 and the Christian
Democrats in Germany in 2006, Ankara might come up against a very
strong alliance. What is worse is that the alliance will easily find
the nucleus of a privileged partnership formula it demanded in the
final resolution at the December 17 summit.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress