Why Turks are growing disillusioned with Europe

The Financial Times
By Vincent Boland
Published: January 3 2007 22:52 | Last updated: January 3 2007 22:52

In 1933 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey, threw down a
tantalising challenge to his countrymen on the 10th anniversary of the
founding of the republic: `We shall raise our country to the level of the
most prosperous and civilised countries … we shall raise our national
culture above the level of contemporary civilisation,’ he said.

Atatürk, who died in 1938, bequeathed many exhortations to the Turks. Some
are pithy, some are apocryphal and one or two are even wise. They can be
found today in school textbooks and engraved on the walls of official
buildings. But the reference to `contemporary civilisation’ is more
ambiguous than most. It is generally assumed by Turks that he meant that
Turkey, once the heart of the Ottoman Empire, should become European. He
admired French republicanism and the British parliamentary system and under
his leadership Turkey adopted the weekend, western dress and an army on the
French model, beginning a journey westward that continues more than 80 years
later.
But the ambiguity of the remark, long overlooked, seems prophetic today.
Inside Turkey, the debate about `contemporary civilisation’ is as pertinent
now as it was in Atatürk’s time and this year will be critical in shaping
its outcome. Last year Turkey’s long-held ambition to join the European
Union suffered a head-on clash with reality. The negotiating process is now
partly frozen because of a dispute with Brussels over Cyprus.

Hostility in some EU countries to Turkey’s membership is increasing, while
support for membership among Turks is falling. This year, two events will
have a decisive impact on Turkey’s European ambition. Turkey’s parliament is
due to elect a new president in May in a process that could change the
country’s political dynamic, especially if Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime
minister, seeks the presidency (he has not ruled out such a move). Also,
parliamentary elections slated for November could usher in a coalition
government that lacks the singlemindedness with which Mr Erdogan’s ruling
neo-Islamist Justice and Development party has pursued EU membership.

By the end of 2007, Turkey’s relationship with Europe will not be decided
but it may be clarified. The elections will take place against a background
of a profound change in public consensus on the EU. When Turkey began its
accession process to join the EU in 2004, support for membership stood above
two-thirds. per cent, according to a recent opinion poll in Milliyet,
a Now it is about 35 daily newspaper. The decline is matched by rising
suspicion of the west more generally. The German Marshall Fund of the United
States, in its 2006 Transatlantic Trends survey, showed that Turkey’s
attitude towards the US, on a 100-point scale, declined from 28 in 2004 to
20 in 2006, and towards the EU from 52 to 45.

This about-turn in perceptions is shaking the faith of even the truest
believers in the country’s European destiny. Umit Boyner, a businesswoman
who heads a corporate initiative to promote Turkey in the EU, says: `Most of
us wanted to believe that the EU meant democracy and minority rights and
women’s rights and fighting corruption. Now we see this phobia about Turkey,
this feeling that we are not wanted by other Europeans, and we are asking
ourselves: `Is this really the Europe we believed in, or were we kidding
ourselves?”

The EU’s failure to honour a commitment to end the isolation of Turkish
Cypriots in northern Cyprus is the most obvious cause of this change in
sentiment. The recent vote in the lower house of the French parliament to
make it a crime to deny that the massacre of Armenians in 1915-16 was
genocide created much bitterness. It also led to a backlash against France,
perceived as the most formidable opponent of Turkey’s EU membership.

The EU’s constant focus on minority rights and the role of the armed forces,
mixed with the perception among large numbers of Turks of rising
Islamophobia in Europe, has added to the feeling that the EU is casting
around for an excuse to say a final No to Turkey’s membership. EU officials
insist, however, that the human and political rights of prospective members
are always closely scrutinised and that the door to Turkey remains open.

Cengiz Aktar, a professor and staunch pro-European at Bahcesehir University
in Istanbul, says the tone of the debate in some EU countries suggests that
Turkey is being made to address a question that no other member state has
had to address: whether it is a European country. `Nobody questions the
`Europeanness’ even of Cyprus, which is closer to the Middle East than
Ankara, but Turkey’s Europeanness is under question,’ he says.

Turkey is different from other aspiring EU member states in crucial
respects. Most of the formerly communist countries that have joined the EU
since the end of the cold war saw their destiny in Europe or were seduced by
Europe’s famed `soft power’ – its ability to persuade countries to transform
themselves, with the promise of membership, into stable democracies. This is
not the case with Turkey, a country with an embedded sense of identity based
on a distinctly hard nationalism inherited from Atatürk and the founders of
the republic through an ideology known as Kemalism.

Among its tenets are an unwavering belief in the soundness of Turkey’s
constitutional arrangements – which dictate a delicate balance between the
state and the citizen and parliament and the military – and fidelity to the
founding myths of the republic. These tenets are perceived, in some cases,
to be antithetical to European norms as set out in the Copenhagen Criteria –
a set of political objectives that aspiring EU members must achieve to get
in.

One of the most serious ideological clashes between Turkey and the EU
concerns the role of the military. Since 1923, Turkey’s armed forces have
seen themselves as the guardians of the republic and have staged four coups
d’état since the second world war (the fourth, in 1997, was a `post-modern
coup’ without actual tanks in the streets) as if to prove the point.

Turkey’s armed forces, a popular and monumentally self-important
institution, have agreed to greater civilian control of military affairs,
including budget supervision, as part of the EU process. But whether Turkey
is institutionally ready to accept a complete subordination of the military
to civilian authority, as the EU would require, is one of the central
ambiguities of the country’s European ambition. There are occasional signs
that the ostensibly pro-EU general staff is unconvinced that its vision of a
strong, centralised, sovereign Turkey is consistent with the country’s EU
membership.
If the military is undecided, so is the broad spectrum of public opinion.
For Turkey, joining the EU is a choice rather than a destiny. Because they
view it as a choice and see the decks increasingly stacked against them,
many are starting to rediscover their inner Kemalist. Turks are openly
questioning whether European norms or values are in any way superior to
those they already hold.
Kemalism may merely be a grander name for hard Turkish nationalism, suffused
with a strong sense of republicanism, sovereignty and self-reliance. But
whatever it is called, it is posing a direct challenge to the EU’s soft
power.

Sedat Laciner, director of the International Strategic Research
Organisation, a think-tank in Ankara, says Turkey’s experience of its EU
accession process is of a piece with its experience of other
western-inspired developments in Turkey’s neighbourhood in the past five
years – especially the invasion of Iraq, which remains hugely unpopular
among Turks, and the plight of the Palestinians. `All of these have changed
Turkish attitudes to the EU, with the result that the EU is losing the most
important tool in its arsenal, which is its ability to persuade Turkey to do
as it asks,’ Mr Laciner says.

Suat Kiniklioglu, director of the Ankara office of the German Marshall Fund
of the United States, sees a direct historical parallel between Turkey’s
most recent bout of suspicion of Europe and a similar attitude provoked in
the late 19th century by the agitation of foreign powers for minority rights
in the Ottoman Empire – which in practice would have given European citizens
living there almost colonial-style privileges.

The dynamic of Turkey’s relationship with the EU, where every aspect of its
modern identity and history appears to be a legitimate target for European
scrutiny and criticism, `is almost a replay of a time that invokes Turkey’s
worst fears about disintegration, about our unity being broken, about an
undue emphasis on minorities and people of non-Turkish stock,’ Mr
Kiniklioglu says. By `hitting Turkey on its most sensitive issues,’ he adds,
`the EU has overplayed its hand as far as the impact of its soft power is
concerned.’

The EU accession process has stimulated important reforms in Turkey – such
as changes to the country’s penal code and abolition of the death penalty.
But some commentators say the accession agreement between Turkey and the EU
contains the seeds of its own failure, because it does not offer Turks a
guarantee of membership. It is the first time such a pledge has been
withheld from a candidate country. Ahmet Evin, director of the Istanbul
Policy Centre at Sabanci University, says this fact compromises the EU’s
ability to use moral suasion to encourage Turkey to reform in the way that
would satisfy European public opinion. `The ability of the EU to Europeanise
Turkey is fatally undermined by this lack of commitment,’ he says.

A dialogue of the deaf would therefore appear to be preordained between
Turkey and Europe. A curious side-effect has been the manner in which
Turkish people are now turning on the EU with the message that `without
Turkey, the EU Erdogan has transformed his argument for Turkey’s membership
from is doomed’. Mr one of civil rights, economic stability and
greater democracy to one couched in religious and `civilisational’ terms.

Businesspeople are also increasingly likely to lecture the EU – as they did
at a recent World Economic Forum conference in Istanbul – about how Europe
needs Turkey’s young workforce, which is mainly unskilled, and its market,
which is large but relatively poor. Some observers say this argument is
indicative of the sometimes overblown notions Turks harbour about their
country’s strategic importance and urge a little modesty. `We have to
remember that we are the ones who want to join the club,’ Ms Boyner says.

Others say the basis of Turkey’s engagement with and understanding of the EU
needs to adapt to today’s realities. `The pro-EU argument in Turkey is
overstated by its supporters,’ says Ercan Uygur, professor of economics at
Ankara University. He says it was shaped initially by a lack of information
about the EU and now by a misunderstanding of what the EU might mean for
Turkey.

The EU is a choice for Turkey that should not be based on a
misunderstanding. `When it comes to a choice – an informed choice – most
Turks would still choose the European Union,’ Prof Uygur says.

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