Too big to handle?

Turkey's application to join the EU is causing anxiety on both sides

THE desire of Turkey to join the European Union may well be the greatest tribute ever paid by an outside power to the EU's brand of liberal democracy. Both Turkey's secular elite and its moderate Islamic-backed politicians think that Europe's pluralist model can best protect their values and interests. With a lot of luck, both might be proved right.

But reaching an accommodation with Turkey also presents one of the biggest challenges faced by the EU in more than 30 years of admitting new members. Turkey is big, poor and populous. It sprawls from Europe into Asia. Its people are overwhelmingly Muslim, although its political institutions are secular. The EU's decision to declare Turkey a candidate for membership in 1999, 12 years after Turkey formally applied, was a bold move. Turkey was just starting to emerge from a “lost decade” in the 1990s, marked by “civil war, secular-Islamic polarisation, authoritarian proclivities, economic crisis and systemic corruption”, in the words of Omer Taspinar, co-director of the Turkey programme at the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank. It had suffered three military coups since 1960, four if you counted the army's help in bringing down a government in 1997. Weak and shifting coalition governments were the rule until the centre-right AKP party, appealing to moderate Islamic voters, won a landslide victory in 2002.

Turkey still falls far short of European standards in many areas of human rights, despite recent bold reforms. The German chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, one of Turkey's staunchest friends within the EU, said in May that the country's heavy-handed policing methods, limits on freedom of expression, and discrimination against women, were “incompatible with [Europe's] common values”.

Last year the EU declared itself ready to open negotiations with Turkey this coming October so long as Turkey met some last pre-conditions, mainly by bringing an amended penal code into force and extending its customs-union agreement with the EU to cover all the new members, including Cyprus. Turkey duly implemented the code in June and was also expected to extend the customs-union agreement, though without meeting Cypriot demands for access to Turkish ports and air space. Cyprus has been a sore point in Turkish-EU relations since Turkey invaded the northern part of the island in 1974 and installed an illegal government there. Cyprus joined the EU last year despite this de facto partition. Hopes for reunification have come to rest mainly with a United Nations peace plan that Turkey is willing to swallow, but which Cyprus thinks is too generous to the occupier.

Even if the accession talks do get started in October, the EU has gone out of its way to say that a successful completion cannot be presumed, still less guaranteed. At best, an accession treaty with Turkey may be ten years away. Even if one does comes then, France has promised a referendum on further EU enlargement, which in the present climate of opinion would certainly go against Turkey. Fear of Turkish entry probably played a significant role in the French rejection of the EU constitution in May.

Member or partner?

A change of government in Germany may do even more to hurt Turkey's perceived chances, if Mr Schroder loses the early election which he has called for the autumn. Opinion polls say that the next German government will be led by the Christian Democrats. Their policy is to make Turkey a “privileged partner” of the EU, but not a member. The rest of Europe knows that relations with Turkey are a vital national issue for Germany, which has a resident Turkish minority of almost 3m. Germany is also the biggest net contributor to the Union's budget. Germany alone could not secure Turkey's admission to the Union, but it could certainly block it.

A “privileged partnership” with Turkey might sound like a good compromise to many on the EU side. It may even sound attractive to a rising number on the Turkish side, where enthusiasm for Europe has been declining, though it is still high. A poll in May found that two-thirds of Turks wanted to join the EU, down from three-quarters a year earlier. Commentators said that the social and political changes needed to please the Europeans were upsetting nationalists and traditionalists.

This friction on the right may have played a part in the slowing of Turkey's reform programme this year, after the EU's agreement in December to open accession talks. The EU's chief of mission in Ankara, Hansjorg Kretschmer, in March spoke of “slippage”. He had in mind restrictions on foreign property ownership and on religious minorities, together with policing methods. The last of those made western headlines on March 6th when Turkish police beat women demonstrators in Istanbul. Instead of condemning the police, the government defended them.

Turkey's international image slipped further in April, with the commemoration of the 90th anniversary of Turkey's mass murder of Armenians in 1915. The government struggled to defend the Turkish version of events, and above all to reject charges of attempted genocide, when an apology for the many deaths that undoubtedly occurred, or simply a respectful silence, would have gone down much better abroad.

But if the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has not been looking its best this year, it can still point to some impressive achievements since the prime minister took office, including scrapping state security courts, cementing civilian control of the army, allowing Kurdish-language teaching and broadcasting, and shaking up the judiciary. These are the sort of things a country does when it is very serious indeed about trying to join the EU.

They are not, however, the sort of things a country does merely to have a “privileged partnership”. Russia claims a partnership with the EU, but makes no concessions to the EU's political or social agenda at all. If Turkey was to be told now, on the brink of starting its membership negotiations or even after, that the EU had changed its mind about membership, then Turkey would not feel “privileged” at all. On the contrary, it would feel frustrated and embittered, and understandably so.

The politicians who had bet their credibility on taking Turkey into the EU, and who had carried out controversial reforms as part of that project, would be discredited. Their reforms would be reviled, perhaps reversed. The country might retreat towards radicalisation and polarisation, in a geopolitical climate much more dangerous than that of the 1990s. Italy's foreign minister, Gianfranco Fini, said in May that a rejection from Europe at this stage might be enough to turn Turkey from moderate towards fundamentalist Islam. What price a privileged partnership then?

A Turkey successfully integrated into the EU, on the other hand, would be a great achievement in many ways. It would be evidence, to quote Mr Fini again, of the “compatibility of Islam with democracy”, setting an example for the Middle East beyond. It would bring an end to the division of Cyprus, removing the main potential trigger of fresh strife between Turkey and Greece. It would align more closely the interests and the memberships of the EU and NATO, so reducing the scope for tensions between the two: a separate European defence capability would become both easier to manage and less necessary.

With Turkish accession, the EU would extend into the southern Caucasus, helping to stabilise new pipeline routes bringing oil and gas westward from the Caspian. These will lessen Europe's energy dependence on Russia. A pipeline running from Baku in Azerbaijan, through Georgia, to Ceyhan in Turkey, loaded its first oil in May. A European Turkey would also be under strong diplomatic pressure to normalise relations with Armenia, drawing Armenia closer to the West and opening up new possibilities for peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Georgia's hopes of following Turkey into the EU would be quickened, which would be all to the good. Georgia deserves much more support and encouragement from the EU for the political and economic reforms it has pushed through since President Saakashvili won power in the “rose revolution” of 2003.

America would like few things more than to see the EU and NATO working together to stabilise the Black Sea and the southern Caucasus. Energy exports aside, the region offers a bridgehead into what America calls the Greater Middle East, useful for projecting democratic values and military force. America has lobbied Europe repeatedly in past decades to be more welcoming to Turkey. Bringing Turkey into the EU would probably be easier now if both could turn to Washington as a common friend.

Iraq's shadow

Worryingly, however, relations between Turkey and the United States have deteriorated significantly since Turkey refused use of its territory for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Turkey has fretted since about the possibility of a Kurdish state emerging in northern Iraq, giving fresh impetus to Kurdish separatism across the border in eastern Turkey. The choice this year of a Kurd, Jalal Talabani, as president of Iraq, may have helped calm Turkish fears, by giving the Iraqi Kurds a stronger interest in national unity.

In testimony to the Senate this year, Bruce Jackson, an influential American lobbyist for NATO expansion, said renewed tensions in Turkish-American relations were a sign that “

Turkey's national and geopolitical identity crisis is far from over and that Turkey may be entering a difficult and problematic stage...the ruling AK party seems to have taken a turn for the worse, characterised by strident anti-Americanism, cultural anti-Europeanism and a resurgent xenophobia...Perhaps most worrying are reports of Turkish-Russian discussions of a co-ordinated policy in the Black Sea region which would inevitably be conducted at the expense of smaller pro-European democracies...Turkey has entered a dangerous period both for itself and for US-Turkish relations, which deserves serious attention.”

That may be a harsh assessment. The Turkish government would certainly claim so. Its ministers have been insisting repeatedly this year that the talk of problems with America has been overblown. As if to argue the point, Mr Erdogan made his third official visit to Washington, DC, in early June. A month earlier he had been reaching out indirectly to America by visiting Israel, trying to repair relations which touched a low point last year when he accused Israel of practising “state terrorism” against Palestinians.

But still, America must doubt very much that Turkey shares its vision of radical change in the Middle East. The fundamentals of Turkish policy there include improved ties with Syria, touchy relations with Israel and fear of further upheaval in Iraq. It is rather as though Turkey's pro-Americanism worked well so long as America kept a respectful distance. It works less well when America is in Turkey's back yard, shaking up countries nearby and casting covetous eyes on the Black Sea. At such a point, says one western diplomat, Turkey's older instincts break ground. Where regional politics are concerned, it shows itself to be a “status quo” power, not a force for change.

Now that Turkey is approaching its EU entry talks, it may be discovering that Europe, too, looks better from a distance. Accession talks can be humiliating at times, and Turkey may be less good than the central Europeans were at quietly putting aside national pride. It is, after all, the rump of an empire with a history as long and lofty as Europe's own. That makes its accession to the EU all the more desirable, and all the more difficult.

Turkey's application to join the EU is causing anxiety on both sides. Article forms part of a survey 'Meet the neighbours. A survey of the EU's eastern borders'.