AUSTRIA’S GAMES OVER TURKEY

The International Herald Tribune
October 6, 2005 Thursday

The European Union has finally cleared the way to opening membership
talks with Turkey, after wisely rejecting an attempt by Austria to put
unacceptable conditions on the negotiations. Jack Straw, the British
foreign secretary, should be congratulated on leading the rescue effort
in Luxembourg. And a reassuring phone call from Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey also
helped mitigate the Turks’ understandable bitterness over this process.

The debate over expanding the EU to include a huge, poor, Muslim
country has become the focus of a whole host of problems and
frustrations. But the way to accession negotiations had seemed
clear after the Union decided last December that Monday was to be
the starting date. Then came the crushing rejections of a proposed
European constitution in France and the Netherlands, leadership
crises in member states, and the “expansion fatigue” brought on by
the induction of 10 new countries.

As the deadline neared, Austria suddenly declared that it would agree
to open talks with Turkey only if alternatives to full membership were
declared a viable option. An overwhelming majority of the Austrian
public is opposed to Turkish membership, and Chancellor Wolfgang
Schlussel apparently thought he could wring some votes out of the
issue in a by-election on Saturday. (His party was trounced.)

With the Turks already feeling profoundly humiliated over the entire
process, going down that road would have been disastrous. Erdogan’s
reformist government, which has invested huge political capital in EU
membership, would have become vulnerable before Muslim and military
hard-liners, and Europe’s millions of Muslims would have felt even
more marginalized.

The effort to save the day included a phone call from Rice to Erdogan
to assure him that Turkey’s role in NATO would not be reduced,
as well as an EU agreement to start accession talks with Croatia,
something Austria is keen to do. The trick now is to move along the
tough process of these talks without further alienating Turkey from
Europe, and vice versa. Turkey still needs to make big changes in
its attitudes and practices on human rights, the role of women, the
rule of law, the slaughter of Armenians early last century and the
aspirations of its Kurdish minority. But Erdogan’s progress on many
of these issues has demonstrated a commitment to change. The ball is
rolling, and it was disgraceful of Austria to endanger the process
for petty domestic posturing. We hope those games are now over.