‘Bazaar bartering’ may prove testing

Date: 29/09/05

Luxembourg's Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean Asselborn remarked after December's tempestuous negotiations with Turkey that Ankara had a lot to learn about negotiating with Europe.

"What many colleagues say, [that] Turkish politicians still have things to learn, is quite right," he said angrily. Evoking imagery familiar to any tourist visiting to Istanbul, he added: "We are not carpet-traders here in Europe."

The thinly veiled allegation was that the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had behaved improperly or at least outside European diplomacy norms.

Although angry that the Turkish government again raised the question of the recognition of Cyprus - after European leaders thought a text had been agreed - by the time Asselborn had uttered these words the bazaar had already become a popular metaphor for Turkish negotiating behaviour.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, many US officials and commentators portrayed talks over US-troop deployments to Turkey as a matter of bartering. Although there was stiff public opposition to the war in Iraq among ordinary Turks, the US simply had to offer the right price, a view prompted by comments from Ankara about the cost of the Iraq war on the Turkish economy.

According to Amanda Akçakoca, a policy analyst at the European Policy Centre in Brussels, such an approach means the EU will have to show patience during the initial stages of membership negotiations with Turkey, expected to begin in Luxembourg next week (3 October).

"They will not go into this and do what they are told. They will look at it as a bartering process. It will get easier when they realise this is not the case," she said.

For Akçakoca, membership negotiations are something of a misnomer, with Turkey required rather than asked to adopt the body of EU laws known as the acquis communautaire.

Coupled with Turkey's status and pride this might lead to problems, she warned. "Turkey is the most important country that the EU has [held membership talks with]... in terms of global power and strategic location. They are a proud country, the EU is telling them what to do and it will take a large jump [in mentality] for Turkey to accept this," she said.

Accounts of early Ottoman diplomacy point to a similar pride to explain difficulties in establishing useful diplomatic ties between the Sublime Porte and Europe. Historians cite the Ottomans' difficulty in accepting European states as the reason why the Ottoman Empire did not send a resident representative to Europe until almost 350 years after the Milanese diplomat - and possibly the world's first resident ambassador - Nicodemo da Pontremoli, was accredited to Florence.

According to Nuri Yurdusev, an expert in Ottoman diplomacy at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, today's Turkish pride is a continuation of the Ottoman past. "The Turkish take pride in the Ottoman Empire although it is not a part of the normal Kemalist view [of the country]," he said. But, according to Yurdusev, the difficulties posed by Turkish pride and the tensions it has prompted can be overstated.

"Every country has some sort of pride... we are not so different from France in that respect. Turko-European relations have not been a total confrontation. Relations between France and Germany have been a story of conflict and co-operation. Turko-European relations are no different."

Article anticipates the difficult negotiations on Turkey's accession to the EU, scheduled to start on 3 October 2005.