Better late than never

Oct 4th 2005
The Economist Global Agenda

The European Union and Turkey have finally agreed on a negotiating
framework that will allow formal talks on Turkish membership of the EU
to begin. Within Turkey and outside it, there are questions about the
predominantly Muslim country’s readiness for Europe
WHEN the countries of the European Union agreed last December to grant
Turkey its fondest dream and begin formal talks on admitting the big,
predominantly Muslim nation as a member, it was no doubt envisaged, or
at least hoped, that the date pencilled in the diary for the start of
the process would be a time of ceremony and celebrations, not bickering
and brinkmanship. But the EU wouldn’t be the EU without those
last-minute panics, replete with desperate horse-trading and
just-good-enough fudges, and in this respect Monday October 3rd did not
disappoint. For much of the day, it looked like the love affair was in
real danger of ending in acrimony. But thanks to some frenzied
diplomatic activity, it ended instead in a firm-though hardly
warm-embrace.

The main sticking point had been the insistence by Austria’s government,
ostensibly isolated but perhaps tacitly backed by others in the EU, that
Turkey be given an explicit alternative to joining the EU: a “privileged
partnership” that falls short of full membership. As a result, by the
middle of Monday afternoon, European diplomats still had not agreed a
common negotiating framework for the accession talks, which had been
scheduled to begin officially at 5pm with a ceremony in Luxembourg
attended by EU bigwigs and Turkey’s foreign minister, Abdullah Gul. It
was finally conceded that, with the deadlock still not broken, there was
no way the event could be held on time. “We are on the edge of a
precipice,” said Jack Straw, Britain’s foreign minister and chairman of
the emergency talks.

A couple of hours later, the EU stepped back from the edge. A common
negotiating framework was finally agreed, after Austria had been
persuaded to step back in line. There followed further confusion, with
the spokesman for the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
having to dismiss reports that his country had accepted the draft.
Finally, several hours after the ceremony had been due to take place,
the Turks confirmed that they could indeed live with the document and
that Mr Gul would be heading off to Luxembourg.

It appears that Austria’s co-operation was bought by clearing the way
for Croatia to open EU membership negotiations of its own. Croatia is an
Austrian ally, and the government in Vienna had linked the Turkish issue
with the Croats’ stalled bid to start accession talks. The EU put its
talks with Croatia on hold in March because, it said, the country’s
government was not co-operating fully with the United Nations war-crimes
tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. But in a statement on Monday whose
timing was almost certainly not coincidental, Carla del Ponte, the UN
war-crimes prosecutor for the Balkans, announced that the Croats were,
after all, doing everything they could to locate and arrest a key
suspect, General Ante Gotovina.

Though Austria has been persuaded to drop its objection to Turkish
membership of the EU, it takes over the Union’s presidency in January
(for six months) and may use its position to try to revive its idea of a
partnership, instead of full membership. It is a view that plenty of
others find appealing. Nicolas Sarkozy, a popular Gaullist who is well
placed to win the French presidency in 2007, opposes Turkish membership.
So does Angela Merkel, who is favourite to take Germany’s chancellorship
following its recent elections, which ended in a hung parliament.
Overall, just 35% of EU citizens support Turkish membership, according
to a recent poll by Eurobarometer.

Some supporters of Turkish membership say it will help to strengthen
ties between the Christian and Muslim worlds. Others argue that failure
to agree terms would have deepened the sense of crisis in Europe after
the rejection of the EU’s draft constitution by French and Dutch voters
in May and June, and the continuing deadlock over the Union’s budget.
But many Europeans are queasy about the idea of taking in a
non-Christian member with a large population (currently 72m), and of
hordes of Turkish job-seekers overwhelming the EU’s current members. It
was precisely because Europe’s national leaders had failed to take
account of its citizens’ concerns that the constitution was voted down,
argue the sceptics; pushing ahead with entry talks for Turkey when the
majority is clearly opposed shows how little those leaders have learnt
from the summer debacle.

The suspicion is mutual
Turkey has doubts about the EU too. Indeed, it raised last-minute
objections of its own on Monday, insisting on clarification of a clause
in the draft negotiating framework that says Ankara may not block the
accession of EU states to international organisations and treaties.
Turkish nationalists and generals expressed concern that this might
prevent Turkey, a member of NATO, blocking Cyprus, which remains divided
into ethic Greek and ethnic Turkish republics, from joining the military
alliance. Turkish fears were only eased after America’s secretary of
state, Condoleezza Rice, telephoned Mr Erdogan to assure him that the
proposed negotiating framework had no relevance to NATO.

Indeed, now that the European club of nations has finally begun formal
talks with Turkey, the focus may shift to the resistance among the Turks
themselves to the legal, economic and cultural changes that the EU is
demanding. To get this far, Turkey has taken such dramatic steps as
abolishing the death penalty, accepting Kurdish as a language in
schools, scrapping state security courts, revising the penal code and
tightening civilian control over the army. Yet it still has a lot to do
on rights, democracy and more before getting in. It must adopt over
80,000 pages of EU law, divided into 35 so-called “chapters”. All 25 EU
members must agree that Turkey has met every condition in each chapter
for that bit of the negotiation to be closed. In other words, anyone can
hold up talks at any time. The Greek-Cypriot president, Tassos
Papadopoulos, has assured his voters that he has scores of vetoes up his
sleeve. After this week’s agreement, France’s President Jacques Chirac
said Turkey needed a “cultural revolution” to get in.

This seemingly never-ending list of required reforms irks Turkish
nationalists, whose influence has been growing since June 2004, when the
outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) ended a five-year truce. A
recent poll shows the jingoistic Nationalist Action Party, which failed
to enter parliament in the 2002 elections, would gain seats today. And
Mr Erdogan’s foes in the army fear that rapprochement with Europe will
reduce their power-and see in Turkey’s internal conflicts a chance to
restore that influence. But solving the Kurdish problem requires more
democracy, not repression, the prime minister insists. People close to
Mr Erdogan say he has pinned his political fortunes on further reforms,
with or without the EU. “He can’t compete on nationalism with the
ultra-nationalists, so it’s in his interest to keep on reforming,” says
a western diplomat.

Another challenge, in his dealings both with sceptical Europeans and his
own voters, is to honour his claim to be giving Turkey its first clean
government. Charges of irregularity in the sale of shares in the state
refinery, Tupras-and also in a tender for the operation of Istanbul’s
Galata port-have weakened that claim. Unless he deals with sleaze, Mr
Erdogan may lose the trust of his own citizens and his European
partners. That would be a pity, when the prime minister has risked so
much for Turkey’s European future