Turkey disappoints its EU champions

Date: 15/06/2000

By Simon Taylor

WHEN EU leaders took the plunge at last December's Helsinki summit and decided to give Turkey candidate status, a few sceptical voices warned that no one should expect rapid and radical transformations in Turkish political life. Six months on, they have been proved right.

Little has been achieved on the economic front since Helsinki and in the crucial areas of human and civil rights, Ankara has disappointed its supporters in the Union who argued its case. The most worrying sign was its decision to keep leading human rights activist Akin Birdal in prison despite his illness, but other moves have reinforced the suspicion the Turkish leopard has not yet changed its spots.

Ankara's unpromising start to the new era in relations with the Union prompted enlargement chief Günter Verheugen to express his disappointment at a meeting between EU and Turkish officials in April. "With some concern we have unfortunately noted that not much progress has been made since Helsinki," he said.

The April association council meeting was the first since Ankara angrily broken off political relations with the Union after it refused to treat Turkey as a full candidate for EU membership at the Luxembourg summit in 1997.

But beyond the political symbolism and generally warm atmosphere of the encounter, there has been precious little concrete progress since then. Verheugen and Turkey's urbane Foreign Minister Ismael Cem agreed to set up eight special committees to identify the work Ankara needed to do to bring its legislation into line with Union rules, but these have yet to produce any firm results.

Nor has there been any rapid progress in negotiations over the free movement of services and public procurement rules, which were identified as priorities for agreement in the customs union struck five years earlier.

By the end of this month, the EU and Turkey should have worked out a strategy for the reforms which Ankara must introduce to graduate beyond simple candidate status. But the signs so far have increased scepticism over Turkish Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit's bold claims at Helsinki that Ankara would be ready to join the Union much sooner than most people thought.

If identifying the technical challenges which Turkey must meet over the coming years is so difficult, then the problems involved in tackling the enormous political changes needed in the country's political life to make it a credible candidate for EU membership seem insuperable.

Verheugen has stated that the toughest issues will have to be left for a much later stage in the development of EU-Turkish relations. These include topics such as the military's role in Turkish politics through the powerful National Security Council (NSC). The Union says the NSC's existence is not a problem in itself as many EU member states have similar bodies. But curtailing the power of Turkey's military élite will require a fundamental transformation in the country's political make-up.

Another major question is how Ankara would react to Cyprus joining the Union while the island is still divided. Greece managed to secure agreement at the Helsinki summit that the lack of a solution to this problem should not be a bar to the Mediterranean island becoming an EU member. But Nicosia's accession would need to be counterbalanced with firm political guarantees for Ankara to enable it to manage the political fallout at home.

The dispute with Greece over Ankara's territorial claims to ownership of small islands in the Aegean is another serious problem which will not be settled quickly.

Yet despite the limited progress since Helsinki, recognition of Turkey's importance as a strategic player in a new world order where the Union has to shoulder more responsibility for security in its backyard means there is still a reservoir of good will for Ankara to draw on. In discussions on how NATO members such as Turkey would be consulted in the run-up to decisions to deploy the EU's fledgling military force, Union governments have tried hard to accommodate Ankara's sometimes unrealistic demands to be treated practically the same as full EU members.