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Sunday, September 8, 2002
11:13 a.m.
Turkey and the EU: the new (dumb) 'Eastern Question'The suggestion that Turkey should be admitted to the EU ranks up there with the Balfour Declaration as maniacal notions that 'seemed a good idea at the time'.
That this tarted-up Asian military dictatorship should find itself the cuckoo in the EU nest never has been, is not, and never will be in the realms of political reality. The warm (no doubt, raki-fuelled) words of the European great and good at the time of the first EEC-Turkey agreement in 1963 were no doubt meant to be just that: words. But, naturally, the Turks have been trying to cash in on their blunder ever since.
Every so often, the Commission or Council get the Turks' hopes up; and someone then has to come along and dampen them down again. We're in a dampening stage right now.
The Turks made their big gesture on August 2 2002 in abolishing capital punishment (an EU fetish) and loosening the state's iron grip on the Kurds just a tad [2]; and now they're expecting the red carpet in Copenhagen in December.
The Danes have started with the cold water: they say the Turks won't have done enough by December to get them on the list of those negotiating for entry; the Turks say they've done what they were asked - and now the EU is welshing.
"L'annonce de réformes n'a pas transformé la Turquie en une société démocratique comparable avec celles de nos pays européens",
says one EU 'expert'.
The point is that a dozen such reforms wouldn't do the trick - the EU leaders know it, the Turks know it.
The article suggests four fundamental reasons against Turkish admission in principle:
"intégrer la Turquie au sein de l'Union coûtera extrêmement cher ; la Turquie étant un pays musulman, son identité européenne est sujette à caution ; son poids démographique (66,7 millions d'habitants) fait d'elle un poids lourd, avec les revendications politiques que cela implique ; enfin, la Turquie est un pays qui viole les droits de l'homme."
To say
"son identité européenne est sujette à caution",
though, is a monumental understatement. Turkey is not European! The most cursory glance at the map will tell you that - it was only ever 'European' to the extent of its Balkan colonies under the Ottoman Empire. Of which only Eastern Thrace remains.
It is as European as France is Latin American on account of Guyane (French Guiana)! And, culturally speaking, for varying reasons, Israel and Morocco would come before Turkey in any rational list (in descending order) of countries with European affinities.
It's role in NATO is quite different (no mention of 'Europe' in the title, for one thing!):
for 50 years or so, the basic deal between the West and Turkey has been: keep the Caucasus locked down and lay off Greece; and we'll look the other way at the repression you need to keep to keep the country together. Purely business. The Turks could have been Buddhists, and it would still have worked.
And, as for the generals, 'they haven't gone away'. This only states the blindingly obvious:
"sans l'accord tacite des généraux, ces changements [the August 2 reforms] n'auraient pas pu être approuvés."
The fact that they no longer strut their brass-hatted stuff from the podium, but are content to stand in the wings pulling the strings of the elected politicians, scarcely makes the country a democracy.
Fortunately, Germans of most political stripes seem pretty much set against Turkish entry. The fact that they are also the most recalcitrant of the major EU powers when it comes to war against Iraq is also potentially helpful in resisting the (no doubt) renewed efforts of the US to get Turkey accepted as an EU member.
(The obvious repost is - would the US be willing to pool its sovereignty with Mexico to the same extent as it wants the EU to do with Turkey? Jump together, or not at all....)
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