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ANDREW
FINKEL
19 April 2009, Sunday |
Turkey and Europe: Shifting
out of second gear
As with yesterday's champagne,
the fizz in Turkey's EU application has certainly gone flat.
Who is responsible for this lack of oomph, and who can bring
back the sparkle?
It takes two, of course, to negotiate,
and the most commonly asked question is whether the Turkish
negotiating team is pushing against a door which still has
the security chain firmly attached. At the same time, Ankara
itself comes under frequent criticism for appearing to lack
the will to overcome obstacles and to only engage with a long
agenda of reform when it has run out of excuses to resist.
The question is whether this resistance is the result of a
lack of conviction on the part of the government -- that its
enthusiasm to kick-start negotiations in 2004 and 2005 has
not been matched by a commitment to see those negotiations
succeed. An alternative explanation is that the government
would like the negotiations to rumble along but lacks the
political courage to explain its pro-European stance to a
skeptical electorate over the heckling of a Euro-skeptical
opposition.
There is third explanation, recently put forward by columnist
Hüseyin Sümer in this paper's Turkish language sister
publication, Zaman, that is not so much the government that
is dragging its feet but the government bureaucracy in general
and its EU secretariat-general in particular. "How can
those whose own faith in Europe has been destroyed hope to
take Turkey into Europe?" he asks and cites an unsourced
email which he purports to have come from these bureaucrats
which attacks the prime minister for signing a harmonization
package back in 2003 that puts Turkey squarely under the EU's
thumb.
Mr. Sümer's column points to a rift within government
departments, but not perhaps in the way he intended. The curious
thing is that the anonymous email he quotes contains the very
public remarks of the leader of the ultranationalist party,
Devlet Bahçeli, made three years ago.
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This is scant evidence
with which to blacken the name of a whole government department.
What we may be seeing is spin between government agencies
battling for control over the negotiating process, with the
Prime Ministry trying to reel back authority from the Foreign
Ministry. My own experience of those Turks doing the actual
negotiations is that they are very much on message in wanting
to get their country into Europe but will in their franker
moments lament that their political masters are not giving
them the support they feel they deserve. Turkey's EU Secretariat-General
for EU Affairs is not the problem.
After all, it is Parliament, not the Foreign Ministry, who
has pointedly refused to repeal the infamous Article 301 of
the Turkish Penal Code (TCK), which envisages dire penalties
for those who insult Turkishness. This is one of those high-profile
laws which have been exploited by opponents to EU accession
to pursue deliberately embarrassing prosecutions against the
country's most prominent writers and intellectuals. It is,
however, the Foreign Ministry that will be left to explain
to Turkey's friends in Europe the unexplainable; that instead
of celebrating the fact that Kurdish nationalism has entered
the democratic arena in party political form, the courts are
trying to drive it underground by arresting party members
and pursuing the closure of the Democratic Society Party (DTP).
Clearly the Turkish prime minister needs
to lend his muscle to the EU process, to both the spirit and
the letter of reform. Without his unequivocal support the
talks will go nowhere. This column welcomed the appointment
of Egemen Bagis as Turkey's chief negotiator in Brussels,
precisely because he enjoyed the ear of the prime minister
and could re-assert the seriousness of Turkey's application.
Mr. Bagis is still the man for the job. One of his tasks is
to harness the expertise of those who have spent their professional
lives accumulating the detailed knowledge of how the EU works.
Mr. Sümer is right that Turkey's journey into Europe
is not for the fainthearted and that those who do not have
faith in the final destination should disembark immediately.
However, this is should be an admonition for those who only
play at Europe in order to expand their sense of power, not
those who have for long years had their shoulders to the wheel,
trying to get the job done.
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