For many long years the relationship between Turkey and the EU could be summed up on the lines of the old joke: Turkey would pretend to be working to join the EU, and the EU would pretend that it working to accept Turkey. The Cyprus dispute seemed to operate on a similar model. In order to enhance their image on the world stage, the various sides would do everything possible to seem as though they were working for compromise — short of actual compromise itself.
For many reasons — the rise of tough-talking French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Cyprus’s entry into the EU, the development of Turkey into a regional power — the uneasy old patterns are breaking down. Volatile frictions in EU-Turkish relations now damage both sides. The status quo is no longer sustainable in Cyprus. The old wisdom is also now out of date. Turkey and Europe are changing, and, beyond the news soundbites, are increasingly overlapping. A Cyprus settlement is possible over the next year, and a better-developed Turkey could join an ever broader-based European Union in a decade or so. European politicians should realize that pandering to fond national myths that exclude Turks or Muslims will lead to a dead end; and Turkish politicians should stop the pretence that Turkey has any real alternative to its well-advanced convergence with Europe. The Turks are an essential part of European security and social architecture, whose non-membership in the EU is a question of timing, not the result of any intrinsic “non-Europeanness.”
The Turks have been following a Westward vocation for a thousand years or more, and there is now a remarkable web of interlocking interests and history. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and takeover of the Byzantine Empire was accompanied by assimilation of Byzantine institutions, populations, political customs, architecture and even cuisine. Political interconnection dates back to 1856, when, after joining Britain and France in the Crimean War against Russia, that empire was briefly taken into the pan-European diplomatic system, the Concert of Europe. The destruction of the Ottoman regime in the First World War was due not to the empire’s non-European religion or ethnicity, but to a catastrophic alliance with two very European powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary.
The new republic that emerged was based on an important strand of European-style modernisation growing in Turkey during the last century of the empire. When republican founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk introduced the European flat cap as the national head-dress, he was following in the footsteps of the reformist Sultan Mahmut II, who brought in the originally Greek fez instead of the turban. More than his predecessors, however, Atatürk decided his new republic would have to copy Europe to catch up with it. He threw out the Ottomans’ mix of common and Islamic law and copied into Turkish statues the Swiss civil code, the Italian penal code and the German commercial code. He deliberately drank alcohol in public, and the first factory he founded in his new capital, Ankara, was a German-designed brewery.
Turkish engagement with Europe and the West sped up after the Second World War. Joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1952, Turkey zealously guarded one third of NATO’s front line with the Warsaw Pact for 40 years. As veteran Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel put it: “when the defense of European civilization [against Soviet communism] was at stake, they didn’t call us [pejoratively] Turks and Muslims”. At the height of this pro-U.S. and pro-Europe period in 1959, Turkey sought an association agreement with the forerunner of the European Union. In 1963, it signed an association accord, the Ankara Agreement, acknowledging its eventual right of accession. At the celebration dinner, in a positive spirit that European leaders would do well to rediscover, Dutch Foreign Minister Joseph Luns said: “the originality of Europe is in its variety. I assure you that Turkey will have in the community a partner that is ready to make its task easier…in recognition…of the sacrifices it has made in defending our shared ideal”.
Significant obstacles to a better European relationship have already been overcome. In 1999, Greece and Turkey overcame decades of infighting and Turkey moved forward to candidate status. In 2004, Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots stepped forward with a compromise on Cyprus. A new approach towards compromise by Greek Cypriot society at large, topped by the election of President Demetris Christofias in February this year, has brought the best chance yet that the dispute can reach a comprehensive settlement over the next year. This would leave the old-fashioned Turkish sceptics in Europe isolated, and throw a lifeline to the flagging official convergence of the EU and Turkey. For sure, some French, German and other EU politicians’ refusal to contemplate Turkey as an EU member has revealed how some Europeans’ attitudes to Turkey were an insincere game. But it is not the attitude of all Europeans, and Turkey could work more with the fact that most EU states support its entry.
By treaty, history, institutional engagement, security orientation and ideological ambition, Turkey is already a European country. From the Eurovision Song Contest to the European football league to the OSCE, Turkey has long been a full member of all major European institutions except the European Union. More than half its nineteen million tourists in 2006 came from Europe, making it Europeans’ third biggest tourist destination.
When the Ankara Agreement was signed in 1963, trade with Europe was dried figs, hazelnuts and sultanas. Now agricultural exports have been eclipsed by manufactured goods, led by the textile and automotive sectors. The EU has become more important to the overall economy. Whereas in 1980 just one third of Turkey’s trade was with EU states, it was half on the eve of the 1995 Customs Union. It has stayed that way, while overall trade has quadrupled, and now accounts for 3-4 per cent of all EU trade. Thanks to preferential trade arrangements and the Customs Union, Turkish companies manufacture half of Europe’s television sets and two thirds of its television tubes. Automotive exports shot up ten times from 1995 to 2005, mostly to Europe. Turkish companies control European icons like chocolate maker Godiva and ceramics maker Villeroy and Boche. One owns Grundig, an icon of German electronic engineering, controlling its patents, organising its pan-European service network and designing and manufacturing its television sets. The European Commission in 2004 awarded its top prize for energy efficiency to a Turkish-designed refrigerator-freezer.
Another area of overlap has been European-Turkish cooperation on peacekeeping, although this has slipped since the troubles caused since 2005 by the Cyprus problem and attacks on the relationship by sceptics in both Europe and Turkey. Ankara offered troops, aircraft and command structures to peacekeeping operations critical to the EU; indeed, French troops would have arrived far later to the Congo without Turkish airlift capacity. For decades, Turkey has perceived its security interests as identical to Europe’s. European Commission officials reckon the Turks adopt 90 per cent of the CFSP. Turkey has a role too in helping mitigate the EU’s worries about how reliant it is on Russia for its energy security.
European goals in spreading free expression and human rights were also greatly helped by the golden years of the EU accession process between 2001-2004. They had a striking impact not just in new legislation and improving the situation of Turkey’s ethnic Kurds, about 15 per cent of the population. Kurds began to feel more secure as Turkey increasingly accepted international legal oversight, and, at least until the EU convergence stumbled in 2005, began to feel more loyal to a state clearly heading towards a more prosperous future.
Turkey’s success with the EU also helped spread European ideas farther eastward. For all its flaws, Turkey remains the most secular and democratic country and the biggest economy in the Islamic world. Largely thanks to the EU acceptance of Turkey as an equal — 250 journalists from the Muslim world were on hand to report the announcement of the start date of membership negotiations — Turkey’s approaches to Muslim modernisation are a staple subject for commentators in the Middle East. Many want to find a new way after nationalist and Islamist ideologies have failed to provide progress, peace or prosperity. Turkey’s deep historical links to the Middle East are not necessarily a negative. In previous EU enlargements, worries were expressed and then forgotten about Britain’s former empire and Spain’s ties to Latin America. Prime Minister Erdoğan has spoken of Muslim leaders telling him they would welcome Turkish EU membership not because they wanted this for their countries but because it would give the Islamic world a voice at last in European councils.
One of the enigmas of Turkey’s quest for acceptance by Europe is the role played by, and European perceptions of, the large Turkish minority on the continent. Officially there are 3.7 million Turks in Europe, and the real total may five million or more — more than Scots, Irish or Lithuanians. They contribute €80 billion to the EU economy, about 0.75 per cent of its output. Yet, unfairly, many Europeans divide the immigrant community between the assimilated, well-integrated and successful Turks they accept as Europeans, and the un-integrated holdouts – typically stereotyped in the media by women wearing rural headscarves and men with gruff beards and baggy trousers – whom they see as the true representatives of the Euro-Turk community. Another mistaken presumption is that these “typical” Turks in the poorer suburbs of Europe represent today’s Turkey, or have much relevance in the overall EU-Turkish relationship.
In short, it is out of date and irresponsible, as at least one French politician has portrayed it, to present Turkey’s Europeanization as a breakable flirtation or engagement. This relationship may have started as a mixture of idealism and make-believe by sometimes insincere elites seeking to motivate or secure their populations. But the resulting thick web of ties can no longer be easily cut, with both sides then moving into new worlds. Turkey and Europe are old neighbours, once distinct, but, like two towns that grow into each other, they now overlap to an extent that cannot be undone.
Reprinted with the permission of "Re-Public" online journal.
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