Special report: Turkey and the EU. The impossibility of saying no

Many European governments dislike the idea of Turkey joining the European Union - but they are still likely to agree in December to open membership talks

THIS is a tale of two countries that want to join the European Union. The first has been a stalwart member of NATO for over 50 years. It has a flourishing democracy, a lively free press and a stable government with a big parliamentary majority. Although most of its people are deeply religious, it is fiercely secular. Its economy is booming: over the past two years, GDP has grown by an annual average of 8.4%, and inflation has fallen by three-quarters, close to single figures. Unlike the current EU, it has a young and growing population. Its biggest city was a cradle of Christian (and European) civilisation. It sounds, in short, like a shoo-in for the EU.

The second country is quite different. It lies mostly in Asia, and it borders such troublesome places as Iraq, Syria and Iran. Its economy has been a basket-case for decades, its currency has been repeatedly devalued, many of its banks are ailing and it is one of the largest debtors to the IMF. It is far poorer than even the poorest of the ten countries that joined the EU in May. It has a history of military coups. Its dreadful human-rights record and its torture of prisoners are well documented. Its people are overwhelmingly Muslim, and it could soon be the EU's biggest member by population. In short, the EU should not touch it with a bargepole.

The question of which country the EU should admit is, of course, a trick one. For these are not two countries, but one: Turkey. This year the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has become a familiar figure round Europe, pressing the case for starting membership talks. Now the moment of truth is at hand. In two weeks' time, the European Commission will publish its verdict on Turkey's readiness. And in December EU leaders must decide whether to say yes, and fix a date next year for the start of negotiations.

That it is possible, in our tale of two countries, to depict Turkey in such diametrically opposed ways shows why it presents such a poser for the EU. No other country's putative membership arouses such passions. It was a big issue in last June's European elections. This month, fresh controversy has broken out over a Turkish government proposal to criminalise adultery, which was hastily dropped after an outcry around Europe.

Several European commissioners have spoken out against Turkey's aspirations. Franz Fischler, the (Austrian) agriculture commissioner, has said that Turkey is more oriental than European. Frits Bolkestein, the (Dutch) single-market commissioner, declared that Turkish entry would mean that 1683 (when Turkish troops were thrown back from the gates of Vienna) would have been in vain. And Valery Giscard d'Estaing, a former French president, has said that Turkish entry would mean the end of Europe.

The question of Turkish membership of the European club has been around for four decades. Turkey was the second country to sign a European association agreement, normally seen as a prelude to membership, as long ago as 1963. It formally applied for membership only in 1987. The European Commission recommended against that application in 1989, but it remained on the table. Throughout the 1990s, even as they prepared to take in the eight central European countries that joined in May, European leaders trod gingerly around Turkey's hopes, though in 1996 an EU-Turkey customs union was formed. In 1997 an EU summit pointedly left the country off its list of candidates.

This evasiveness irritated the Turks. Turkish politicians continued to insist on the country's European vocation. Turkish generals began to mutter that they might have done better in Brussels had they spent 40 years in the Warsaw Pact, not NATO. Yet the truth is that Turkey's instability in the 1990s, culminating in the “soft coup” that ousted a mildly Islamist party from government in 1997, made talk of EU membership moot. So did its succession of economic crises, leading to near-default and an IMF bail-out in 2001. Turkey's brutal war on Kurdish PKK terrorists in the south-east, and its repeated human-rights violations, also disqualified it.

It was not until 1999 that an EU summit in Helsinki formally accepted Turkey as a candidate. In 2002 EU leaders went further, declaring that if, in December 2004, Turkey satisfied their “Copenhagen criteria”, they would fix a date for opening negotiations. These criteria include having stable institutions that guarantee democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for minorities, a functioning market economy, the capacity to cope with competition within the EU and the ability to take on the obligations of membership.

The Justice and Development party, a mildly Islamist-leaning party that took office in November 2002 (though Mr Erdogan became prime minister only in March 2003), has pushed through a string of reforms to meet the Copenhagen criteria. So much so that few expect the European Commission to say no this time - although it could say “yes, but”. It has become equally hard to see how the December EU summit can avoid offering a date, probably mid-2005, for the opening of entry talks.

Good marks and bad

How has Turkey got this far? The economy has stabilised after the horrors of 2001, thanks mainly to the IMF, but also to the economic policies of the Erdogan government. There are rocks ahead: the current-account deficit remains large, and Turkey's huge debt needs constant refinancing. Foreign investment remains feeble: last year Turkey took in a mere $1 billion, one-fifth of what went to Hungary. But fiscal policy is tight, and inflation is under control.

On the political front, the Erdogan government has used its thumping parliamentary majority to push through a series of substantial reforms, including three big packets of constitutional change. Civilian control of the army, and over its budget, has been reasserted. The notorious state security courts have been scrapped. The judiciary is undergoing reform. Efforts have been made to improve human rights. The death penalty has been abolished.

Progress in Turkey's largely Kurdish south-east has been remarkable. The war with the PKK (now renamed Kongra-Gel) had already subsided after the capture of the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999. Earlier this year teaching in the Kurdish language, once proscribed, was permitted. In June Turkish state television began broadcasting in Kurdish for the first time. And a Turkish court freed Leyla Zana and three fellow Kurdish parliamentarians, who had languished in jail since 1994.

Mr Erdogan's culminating achievement has been to place Turkey on the moral high ground over Cyprus. Ever since 1974, Turkey and the Turkish-Cypriots have been seen as the main obstacle to a peace settlement. The Turkish army wanted to hang on to northern Cyprus for strategic reasons; the veteran Turkish-Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktash, resisted all plans to reunite the island. So the EU decided it would in extremis admit the Greek-Cypriot republic on its own. But as the enlargement date of May 1st approached, one more chance was seized to revive a United Nations plan for a re-unified Cyprus, which was put to the vote in both parts of the island in April. Thanks partly to deft footwork by Mr Erdogan, the Turkish-Cypriots voted yes; this time it was the Greek-Cypriots who said no. That switch of role means that the Cyprus issue, long an obstacle to Turkish membership, is now an argument in favour.

Many people argue that these changes are not enough. The economy remains fragile. Human rights need more protection. A new penal code that has just been put to parliament includes positive measures such as tougher penalties for torturers. But, despite the climb-down over adultery, it does not improve women's rights much: for example, it is still not severe enough on “honour” killings.

On the Kurdish question, Kongra-Gel declared its ceasefire over on June 1st, because the government refuses to accept an amnesty for rebels. Some 35 soldiers and more than 70 guerrillas have since been killed. There is still local opposition to Kurdish rights. One school that planned to teach in Kurdish fell foul of a regulation about door widths. Troops have been turfing Kurds out of their homes again.

Religious freedom also remains circumscribed in Turkey. It is mysteriously hard to open a new Christian church. And the Greek Orthodox seminary on the island of Halki remains shut down. This means that no new orthodox preachers are being trained, even though the ecumenical patriarch is based in Istanbul.

Despite such failings, Gunter Verheugen, the European commissioner for enlargement, who visited Ankara last week, is pleased with Turkey's progress. He has promised to treat Turkey in the same way as all other applicants, though he has placed particular stress on implementation. It is one thing for a government to pass new laws; it is quite another for practice in local police stations, barracks and courtrooms to change.

Mr Erdogan concedes that “implementation is key”. He also insists that his programme of reforms will continue even if EU leaders say no in December - he jokes that he would rename the criteria after Ankara, not Copenhagen. His foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, agrees that reforms are anyway needed to make Turkey a modern democratic state. He too stresses implementation, citing the example of torture, where the aim of zero tolerance will take time to achieve. But he insists that the EU must not apply double standards to Turkey. Other applicants with implementation problems have been deemed ready to start talks, and nobody expects Turkey actually to join the EU for at least ten years.

Unwritten criteria

If the decision in December were based solely on the Copenhagen criteria, it would be hard to say no. Indeed, in its economic, political and judicial reforms, Turkey is in many ways ahead of Romania, which is hoping to join in 2007. But this being Turkey, other factors come into play.

For the Europeans, most of these factors are negative. The easiest to dispose of is the claim that Turkey is not in Europe. At the north end of the bridge across the Bosporus a sign welcomes drivers to Europe. But most geographers would say that one-tenth of the country's land-mass is already in Europe, as is most of its biggest city. Cyprus, which has joined the EU, lies to the east of Turkey's main population centres. In the 19th century, Turkey was a European power (Nicholas I of Russia dubbed it the sick man of Europe, not of Asia). Anyway, the EU has accepted Turkey's candidacy - and its geography has not changed.

Then there is size. This is not a criterion for EU membership. Indeed, Turkey could re-balance a club that has become skewed to the small. The EU, which began with three big and three small countries, now has six big and 19 small. The addition of Turkey, after Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia, would make it seven big and 22 small.

What really bothers existing members is that Turkey, which has 71m inhabitants and is growing, would be the biggest EU country, overtaking Germany in roughly 2020. Even so, its population would still be only about 15% of the EU total. Under the “double-majority” voting system in the draft EU constitution, it would have a weight equivalent to 14% of the total. That compares with Germany's weight, in an EU of 25, of 18%.

Turkey's poverty could pose other problems. One-third of the population is engaged in farming, which would be a big challenge for the EU's common agricultural policy. That, and its poverty, might mean big budgetary transfers from Brussels for many years - although most Turks say they are more interested in attracting foreign investment than in EU handouts.

But the biggest issue of all is Islam. Few people now insist that the EU is a Christian club, but the feeling that it should be is widespread, especially among Christian Democratic parties. September 11th, Iraq and the war on terror have all focused renewed attention on whether the EU is right to consider admitting a Muslim country. The arrival of the Justice and Development Party in government, so beneficial to Turkey's EU prospects in other ways, has not helped in this respect, for even within Turkey many suspect it of having a covertly Islamist agenda.

Mr Erdogan roundly rejects the label Islamist, yet his party has Islamist roots and its actions sometimes challenge Turkey's secularism. Mr Erdogan's first controversial target was rules that make it hard for graduates of religious training (imam hatip) schools to attend Turkish universities. In May he forced through a law giving all vocational-school graduates, including those from imam hatip schools, equal treatment with other graduates. The army chief of staff came out against the law, and the president duly vetoed it.

Mr Erdogan, who is himself an imam hatip graduate and whose four children also attend such schools, feels strongly that he is in the right. He says the army should not interfere with an issue that ought to be left to parliament; yet for now, he has dropped the law. He has acted similarly over the criminalisation of adultery. For weeks, he defended the plan, saying that the West was not “a model of perfection for everything”. But he has now withdrawn the idea in the face of fierce protests.

The suggestion that Turkey could be kept out of the EU simply because of its religion is not really tenable. This is not least because the Union already has 12.5m Muslims, and two other potential candidates for membership - Albania and Bosnia - are partly or wholly Muslim. It is also because, in a broader sense, Islam can be read not as a negative, but a positive for Turkish entry.

Ever since September 11th, the West has been anxious to avoid a “clash of civilisations”, and to show that democracy and liberal economics are compatible with Islam. One of the best ways to do this would be to admit Turkey to the EU. As one EU foreign minister puts it: “letting Turkey in would be like D-Day in the war on terror”. By the same token, a no to Turkey would antagonise other Muslim countries, especially in the Arab world, who would see it as a slap in the face delivered by the West against Islam.

The naysayers

Despite these arguments, a strong body of opinion in Europe is against Turkish membership. The most negative attitudes are to be found in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. Besides fretting about Islam, these countries worry about possible migration from Turkey and about cost.

In France, President Jacques Chirac's UMP party has come out against Turkish membership, though Mr Chirac has said he is in favour. In Germany the opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) and their allies in the Christian Socialist Union are against. The CDU leader, Angela Merkel, visited Ankara earlier this year and offered Turkey a special associate status instead of full membership. Mr Erdogan is not interested in any such status. In any case the Social Democratic chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, has come out for Turkish entry. So have most other EU governments, even the Dutch.

Until a few years ago, Greece was seen as an insuperable opponent of Turkish membership. But after the rapprochement that followed the earthquakes in Turkey and Greece in 1999, that has turned round: Greece is now a strong supporter of Turkey's EU goal, and its prime minister, Costas Karamanlis, is a close ally of Mr Erdogan's. Cyprus is less predictable, but the Greek-Cypriot government, already in bad odour in Brussels, is unlikely to court further calumny by vetoing Turkey. Most of the ten new countries that joined the EU in May claim to support Turkey. It is the existing EU 15, not the new countries, that fret most over Turkish accession.

The biggest reassurance to naysayers will be a promise that Turkish negotiations will take many years. Turks themselves talk of ten years, with a target date of perhaps 2015 for actual entry. Others think it will be more like 15 or even 20 years. In some ways, it is the travelling towards membership that counts, not the arrival. That reassurance alone should be enough to win Turkey its promised date for opening entry negotiations in December.

Yet there will still be a doubt over their outcome. Turkey's entry needs to be approved unanimously by the existing members. A new CDU-led government in Germany could upset the apple-cart. A failure to ratify the draft EU constitution might be seized upon as a reason to stop any talks with Turkey. Or somebody, perhaps Mr Chirac, might promise a referendum on Turkish accession to draw the sting of political opposition. It is little wonder that, although three-quarters of Turks say they favour EU membership, half say they never expect it to happen. Yet they are closer to it than anybody would have thought possible a few years ago.