By Philip Stephens
Published: November 11 2010 22:32
Turkey’s president Abdullah Gul was in London this week. He picked up the prestigious Chatham House prize from the Queen and had talks with David Cameron. In between, he gave a couple of speeches about Islam, democracy and the world order and dropped in at the Financial Times.
Along the way Mr Gul posed a question that should make some Europeans feel uncomfortable. He asked them to think hard about what they really wanted from Turkey. Were they pleased to see it emerging as a strong, democratic and economically advanced nation with rising influence in its region?
He was too polite to spell out another possibility; that, after decades exhorting Turkey to embrace democratic norms and market capitalism, its neighbours are at best ambivalent about its progress. A rising Turkey, they are discovering, has its own point of view.
Life, you can hear them muttering to themselves in Paris and Berlin, was more agreeable when Turkey could be dismissed as politically repressive and economically backward. Ankara’s place was as a compliant member of the Atlantic Alliance standing guard on one of Europe’s eastern flanks. Military rule rather conveniently relieved the European Union of a long-standing promise to one day open its door.
Mr Gul insists his country’s European ambition is undimmed by such sentiments. The Islamist AKP government has lately turned eastwards, fixing some troubled relationships with near neighbours and claiming a role as a powerful regional actor. It has fallen out with Israel and voted against United Nations sanctions on Iran. Ahmet Davutoglu, its hyperactive foreign minister, sometimes sounds a little too keen for western tastes on a new Ottoman Caliphate.
To the president’s mind, there is nothing here that subtracts from the aim of joining the EU. He says this is an ambition transcending politics in Ankara at any given moment. Turkey is taking a strategic view – looking 20, 30, even 50 years ahead.
It will need all the patience Mr Gul implies. Formal talks between Ankara and the European Commission in Brussels have stalled. These negotiations are supposed to be technical – measuring whether Turkey meets the political, legal and economic conditions imposed on all EU candidate nations. In reality, the process has fallen victim to politics.
The Greek Cypriot government in Nicosia is blocking the opening of many of the three dozen “chapters” in the draft accession treaty. In 2004 it spurned a UN-sponsored plan to reconcile the island’s Greek and Turkish communities. This month the UN will make another attempt to broker an agreement on the divided island. But there is no sign the Greek Cypriots will lift an effective veto on Turkey’s accession talks.
Mr Gul does have allies. Support for Turkey’s application has been just about the only European policy that has always united Britain’s political parties. Mr Cameron reaffirmed that backing this week.
Greek Cypriot intransigence, however, serves as a convenient cover for widespread hostility elsewhere. France’s Nicolas Sarkozy is also holding up progress. The president of the fiercely secular French Republic seems to think that Europe can only properly define itself as a Christian club. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has proposed Turkey accept second-class membership under a new strategic partnership. Unstated, but well understood, is an assumption that German voters would fear being swamped by 75m Muslims.
Supporters of Turkish accession should not be under any illusions. For all the progress it has made since negotiations started in 2005, Turkey is far from ready for early membership. The Turkish economy is growing fast but remains undeveloped. The country has a long way to go to lock in the democratic freedoms rightly demanded by the EU of all prospective members.
Military rule is behind it, but there remains a dark side to the political and security establishment. The judicial system is far from perfect; anti-terrorism laws can be too often used an instrument of wider repression; and the AKP shows its own authoritarian tendencies.
Mr Gul acknowledged some of this on his visit, saying he shared concerns in Europe about the recent jailing of journalists. The president – a more instinctively liberal figure than some of his colleagues – said he had raised his own anxieties in discussions with the justice ministry. He wants changes in the law to guarantee greater press freedom.
The government has a serious point in arguing it should be more closely involved in the US and European-led effort to halt Iran’s nuclear programme. But that is not to say it does not turn the issue to domestic political advantage.
Then again, the goal surely must be to pull Turkey closer – to give it a bigger stake in agreement with the west. Everyone, including the president, agrees that Turkey’s full integration into the EU would be a decades-long journey. What matters is the direction of travel – and a willingness among existing members to imagine the Union as it might be in, say, 20 years from now.
Logic says that Europe has everything to gain and nothing to lose from Turkey’s embrace of modernity. It sits at the crossroads of the continent and one of the world’s most vital but volatile regions. It is a bulwark of western security and an essential transit route for energy supplies. It sets a powerful democratic example to the rest of the Muslim world. A vibrant economy and swelling middle class present new trade and investment opportunities. It has a unique influence in the Middle East. And it wants to be part of the west.
Which brings us back to Mr Gul’s awkward question. Even as it knocks harder on the EU’s door, a rising Turkey inevitably will assert itself. It no longer sees why it should accept the role of supplicant or cipher for the US or Europe. It considers it has the right to its perspectives.
You can sense the hackles rising in Old Europe. Would-be members of the EU club are surely supposed to know their place? As Jacques Chirac once said of the former communist states of eastern Europe, Turkey should take the opportunity to keep quiet. Leadership must reside in Paris and Berlin.
There you have Europe’s grand delusion. It thinks that if it closes its eyes the future can be wished away. But the world will not stop turning at its behest. Locking out Turkey will not forestall its rise but serve only to push it away. The choice for Europe is simple: it can share power or it can watch it slipping away.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.
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