EMERGING THREATS WALKER’S WORLD: CAN FRANCE VETO TURKEY?
AMBy MARTIN WALKER
United Press International
June 12 2008
Who said President George W. Bush has no influence in Europe? On the
eve of his arrival in Paris, and just as he was urging the European
Union to welcome Turkey into its ranks, the French Senate moved to
do his bidding.
The Senate’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee deleted a proposal
for a constitutional amendment that would require a referendum in
France on the admission of any new EU member state whose population
was more than 5 percent of the EU total. That seemed aimed directly
at Turkey (although it could also affect Ukraine).
The amendment "might be considered as being against Turkey,
which is a friend and ally country, and thus might deal serious
damage to diplomatic relations between France and Turkey,"
noted a written statement from the French committee. That was an
understatement. Turkey’s Foreign Ministry could hardly have been
more clear.
"It is inevitable that this kind of discriminative approach will
harm our bilateral relations and will also have a negative impact
on images of Turkey and France in each country as well as on the
traditional friendship between the peoples of the two countries,"
commented Turkey’s Foreign Ministry in a written statement.
The controversial clause was passed last month by the National
Assembly, the lower house of France’s two-chamber Parliament, as part
of a package of constitutional amendments. The committee’s vote may
not be the end of the matter. It can be taken up on the floor of the
Senate and put to a full vote, but would almost certainly need a strong
push from President Nicolas Sarkozy to rally a sufficient majority.
This presents Sarkozy with a difficult choice. French opinion polls
are against admitting 73 million predominantly Muslim Turks into the
495 million EU. Sarkozy himself has argued against it. But with 10
percent of France’s population now immigrants and their children from
traditionally Muslim countries, the issue of Europe’s relations with
its Islamic neighbors across the Mediterranean cannot be ducked.
President Bush and the British argue there are three main reasons
to admit Turkey. The first is strategic, that as a longstanding and
loyal member of NATO, Turkey is key to European and Western security
in the region.
The second is economic. With European birthrates falling, the EU
needs Turkey’s large young workforce and its potential for economic
growth. Turkey’s current GDP per capita is just over $5,000, a quarter
of the EU average. Doubling Turkey’s GDP per capita means an extra
market worth $400 billion; bring Turkey up to the EU average, and it
is worth another $800 billion on top of that. That would mean selling
a lot more Mercedes cars and Swedish refrigerators, French perfumes
and Finnish mobile phones.
The third is cultural: that Europe needs to demonstrate that its
traditional happy mix of democracy and prosperity is also open to
Muslim countries that abide by the EU rules on human rights and
political freedoms, free markets and free institutions. If there is
one large Muslim country that can show the world that Islam is no
bar to democracy and modernity, it is Turkey.
The importance of that latter argument runs far beyond the EU-Turkish
relationship. It plays directly into the EU’s relations with the
150 million Muslims just across the Mediterranean in North Africa,
let alone the Arab world to the east and the Muslims in Asia. As Tony
Blair told his colleagues at his last EU summit, "There can be few more
important goals for the West in the long term" than to help establish a
successful and prosperous democracy in a predominantly Islamic country.
But down in France’s political trenches, local issues intervene. The
original amendment to exclude Turkey was backed by Justice Minister
Rachida Dati (herself the symbolic immigrant of Muslim origin in the
government) but was reliably said to be opposed by Prime Minister
Francois Fillon. A further factor for the ruling UMP party is the
strength and lobbying power of France’s Armenian community, which
insists on no deal with Turkey until it accepts responsibility for
what they call "the genocide" against their people back in 1915.
Sarkozy is hoping to finesse this row over Turkey by pushing for
what he calls a "Mediterranean Union," a much broader and closer
relationship between the EU and all the Muslim countries around the
Mediterranean coast, with a generous new budget for foreign aid and
much closer trading relationships.
It sounds good, but it already has been tried with a special trade
and aid deal called the Barcelona Process, started over a decade
ago, which has shown only modest success. Moreover, Turkey has long
had a customs agreement that gives it essentially free trade with
the EU. Along with Turkey’s NATO membership, that means Turkey has
long enjoyed precisely the kind of special relationship that Sarkozy
now wants to extend more widely. And since Turkey says its current
second-class status is no substitute for full EU membership, other
Arab countries are likely to say the same.
Sarkozy’s plan is to be launched July 15, but five North African
states and Syria met in a summit last week in Tripoli and were highly
critical. Algeria denounced the idea that Israel could be included in
the Mediterranean Union as a backdoor way to normalize Israel-Arab
relations. Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi called the whole Sarkozy plan
"an insult."
"This is taking us for fools," Gadhafi said. "We do not belong to
Brussels. Our Arab League is located in Cairo, and the African Union
is located in Addis Ababa. If they want cooperation, they have to go
through Cairo and Addis Ababa."
The final decision on the French constitutional amendment will be
taken in July when the upper and lower houses gather for a plenary
meeting. The text has to be agreed to by a three-fifths majority. By
then, Sarkozy will have launched his Mediterranean Union, President
Bush will be back in Washington, and Turkey will still be trying to
decide whether it is a Western democracy that happens to be Muslim
or a Muslim country that is not welcome in the West.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
