Turkish Daily News
March 3 2005

Gündüz Aktan: The second biggest obstacle
Thursday, March 3, 2005

I have written on various occasions that I considered the liberal
intellectuals to be the biggest obstacle blocking our country’s path
to European Union membership. Their attitude is paradoxical. In the
past these intellectuals had a leftist vocation. Yet now they
advocate Turkish membership in the EU more vigorously than any other
group of people in the country. They are supported by big capital and
media. Like everybody else who wants EU membership, they too aim to
ensure the development of Turkey, a country with chronic problems,
via EU membership. However, their basic aim is to `tame’ the state
that had made them suffer in the past — by means of the radical
democracy to be built with the EU’s help.

This existentialist aspiration is very strong. In fact, it seems
there is no price these liberals would not be willing to pay in order
to ensure that we become an EU member. In Cyprus they supported the
Annan plan, including its initial version. And now they have a warm
reaction to Papadopoulos’ demand for recognition. Tomorrow they may
welcome the potential caprices of Greece, who is no longer willing to
take the Aegean conflicts to the International Court of Justice in
The Hague. They believe the demands the EU is making in the name of
minorities should be met in full. They have already started
indirectly accepting the Armenian genocide claims.

It is in the nature of foreign policy that such conflicts are in
the eye of great struggles and form the subject matter of tough
negotiations. If, in such cases, the views of the other side were
accepted with the `EU membership at any cost’ kind of mentality, the
other side would inevitably toughen their stance. The attitude of the
liberals, for whom no price is too high for EU membership, is the
most serious obstacle on the path to EU membership because that
stance is causing the other side to demand that Turkey pay the kind
of price that simply cannot be paid.

Let us assume that, miraculously, we have managed to overcome the
Cyprus and Aegean issues, the Armenian problem and the minorities
issue and that the technical talks with the EU have begun. This time
we will encounter an equally important obstacle, one we have not
thought about: the state of our bureaucracy.

Most of the work that must be done for EU membership falls on the
shoulders of the bureaucrats. They would be implementing the measures
called EU standards, measures that would extend into all segments of
our socioeconomic structure. And the judiciary would be resolving the
conflicts involving these standards. From this angle, selecting the
chief negotiator and conducting negotiations with the EU in the best
manner, seem lesser problems.

These standards evolved in countries over the centuries in
countries that are much more advanced than we are. It took centuries
of accumulated information and struggle to formulate these standards.
These standards would enable society to step into a new age, but how
would our bureaucracy and our judiciary manage to implement and check
these standards, which entail an extraordinary amount of cost for an
economy that is not yet fully developed? In the context of
criticizing the `state’ the liberals ignore this problem altogether.

It is true that in the course of the membership process that began
with the 1999 Helsinki summit we have received very little EU aid in
the form of grants. However, it is also true that we have not made
full use of EU facilities. This is because our bureaucracy does not
have the ability to prepare projects. That was a problem when we
entered into the customs union. Adequate capability has yet to be
created.

The prime minister often complains about the `bureaucratic
oligarchy.’ His complaints primarily involve the privatization
process. The main problem is that since we embraced the democratic
system, the bureaucratic positions have been filled and used in a
partisan manner. The current government has made mistakes of its own
in this regard. We have seen what the bureaucrats appointed have done
in such fields as rapid trains and energy. You can imagine the things
we haven’t seen.

Those suggesting bureaucratic reforms seem to be missing the basic
problem. No reform can be a substitute for improvement of the quality
of civil servants. The Japanese, who launched their modernization
drive in 1868, in the 1890s passed two laws that have basically
remained the same until now. One of the two laws in question bans
recruiting civil servants without an examination, and the other bans
politicians’ attempts to influence the bureaucracy. It is thanks to
these bureaucrats who are barely short of genius that the Japanese
economy has developed. The Japanese political class accepted as a
basic rule that politicians should not influence the work of these
bureaucrats. Over there, no abstract debates on the `state’ and the
`bureaucratic oligarchy’ have taken place.

Unless we, too, make a similar bureaucratic reform, albeit with a
two-century delay, we will not be able to enter the EU.

So, there is no reason for Sarkozy and Merkel to be worried.