TURKEY AND EUROPE AGREE TO TALKS ON JOINING
By Craig S. Smith

New York Times
Oct 3 2005

LUXEMBOURG, Oct. 3 – Turkey and the European Union agreed late today to
formally begin talks on Turkey’s historic bid to join the organization,
setting into motion a process that will likely take a decade or more
but could end with the union extending its borders eastward into Asia
to embrace the predominantly Muslim country.

Turkey has worked for more than four decades to join the evolving
union, restructuring its legal system and economy to meet European
standards even as Europe added demands and refused to start formal
negotiations. The agreement to open the talks was a victory for the
country’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has staked his
political credibility on getting the talks under way.

“We reached an agreement and, God’s willing, we are heading to
Luxembourg,” said Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as he headed to the
airport in Ankara.

But the talks come at a difficult time for Europe, which is mired in
an identity crisis and whose consensus-based, decision-making process
is already bogged down by last year’s addition of 10 new members.

Many Europeans oppose Turkey’s membership, arguing that while the
country has a toehold in Europe, it is not European at its core. They
worry that because Turkey would be the largest country in the union by
the time it joined, it would skew the already complex European agenda.

The ceremony opening the membership negotiations was delayed until
late this evening as European member states haggled over an Austrian
demand that the talks include an alternative to full membership that
would ultimately give the union a diplomatically palatable option to
inviting Turkey to join.

The last-minute diplomacy kept the Turkish foreign minister, Abdullah
Gul, waiting in Ankara and frayed nerves on both sides. “Either it
will show political maturity and become a global power or it will end
up a Christian club,” Mr. Erdogan said of the European Union on Sunday.

In fact, it is just that question that is haunting Europe. The European
project, begun as a means to ensure peace among historic enemies,
has faltered since the end of the Cold War, which helped define
it. In the 15 years since German reunification, the union has grown
but weakened as it absorbed much of formerly Communist central Europe.

The deep differences within the union, particularly between incoming
and traditional members, broke into the open over the American-led
invasion of Iraq, which many of the new members supported but the
older members did not. The debate over Iraq was about a philosophic
view of the use of power as much as it was about Iraq. Many of the
older European Union member states, harkening back to their World
War II wounds, are wary of using military force to settle disputes.

“Building a consensus is difficult if you don’t have common values,”
said Constanze Stelzenmulle, of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin.

“There has been a loss of focus, a loss of the sense of commonality,
a loss of common interests in Europe.”

Many people worry that adding a country with such a vastly different
cultural and economic heritage such as Turkey to the mix will only
soften that focus further.

Meanwhile, economic malaise in much of Europe has made people wary
of the heralded “ever closer union” that for many simply means lost
jobs. Those fears helped defeat referendums on a proposed European
constitution in France and the Netherlands earlier this year,
stalling the union’s momentum and leading many opinion-makers to
openly question what it was that Europe wanted to become. Turkey’s
membership naturally became a focus of that debate.

Part of the problem is that the generation of leaders that had an
emotional attachment to the European project as a unifying ideal is
now mostly gone, replaced by politicians who regard the union more as
a practical arrangement to promote national interests. European-wide
restructuring of postwar welfare systems and questions about the role
that Europe should play in the world have taken a backseat to more
local issues of political survival and short-term economic goals.

The union hasn’t even be able to agree on a budget for the 2007 to
2013 period, which should have been set months ago.

“At the moment the solution to that crisis isn’t even on the horizon,”
said Marco Incerti, a research fellow at the Center for European
Policy Studies in Brussels.

The crisis has been made worse by faltering leadership in Germany
and France, the traditional engines of the European Union, which
are now consumed by domestic politics. Germany is distracted by
efforts to forge a coalition government there, while France has
lost steam since the May defeat of the constitutional referendum,
leaving President Jacques Chirac largely sidelined while his would-be
successors dominate the political stage.

“For the longest time you could rely on a couple of countries who were
more strongly invested than others getting together and laying out
a solution and getting the others on board,” Ms. Stelzenmuller said.

The lack of leadership has allowed smaller countries like Austria to
dominate the agenda, political analysts say, and has led even Turkey
to question the union’s viability in its current form.

“Everyone is aware of the identity crisis within the E.U.,” said Eser
Karakas, a political scientist at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul.

“The frustration caused by Austria in these past few days proves that
it is time to reform the European Union structure.”

He argued that Turkey should start focusing on what role it can play
in reshaping the union.

Turkey became an associate member of what was then the European
Economic Community in 1963 and formally applied for full membership
on April 1987. It was only officially recognized as a candidate in
December 1999, and it wasn’t until last December that the union agreed
to set a date for membership negotiations to begin.

As part of its campaign to meet European standards, Turkey has
abolished the death penalty, improved its human rights record and
allowed broader use of the Kurdish language among its large Kurdish
minority. But the country is still criticized for refusing to explore
the killing of Armenians in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire
and has refused to recognize the Greek-dominated Republic of Cyprus,
which became a European Union. member last year.

Supporters of Turkey’s membership argue that extending the union’s
single market to include Turkey’s vast Asian hinterland beyond the
Bosphorus Strait will help more than hurt the rest of Europe. They
also argue that bringing Turkey into the European club will help
spread democracy into the Middle East and increase regional security.

Critics, though, question whether that is true, pointing out that
Turkey, which has close ties to Israel, is still remembered in much
of the Arab world as a former colonizer under the Ottoman Empire.

They say that the union would have difficulty absorbing such a large,
poor country and complain that Turkey’s membership will open the
doors for a potentially huge wave of Muslim immigrants.

By the time it could be expected to join, the country’s current
population of 70 million people would likely have grown to outnumber
that of Germany, now the largest European state. Under current rules,
its population would also give it the most seats in the European
Parliament.