Another pespective on Turkey's EU membership from Gwynne Dyer:
13 December 2004
Turkey in the EU?
By Gwynne Dyer
"I am absolutely in favour of Turkey's membership in the European
Union," said Poland's President Aleksander Kwasniewski in September. "We
will support it. But -- if we say yes' to Turkey -- it is a question then
what we will say to Ukraine."
The EU probably will say "yes" to starting negotiations for Turkish
membership at its summit meeting in Brussels on 17 December, although it
could be ten years or longer before Turkey is actually a member. Ukraine
is not even a candidate yet, and has not begun the lengthy process of
reform that would be needed to bring its laws and practices into conformity
with EU human rights standards. But it is Turkey that faces the higher
hurdles.
President John F. Kennedy was still alive when Turkey was first
promised EU membership some forty years ago. Since then the EU has
expanded from six to twenty-five members, with three more scheduled for
entry in 2007 (including two, Romania and Bulgaria, with a lower per capita
income than Turkey). The reason that Turkey is still at the end of the
queue is not its relative poverty (though that is an issue), but its
location, its size, and -- above all -- its religion.
Turkish membership would give the EU borders with Iran, Iraq and
Syria, and make it a major power in the Middle East. Turkey would be the
biggest country in the EU (its population, now 71 million, will overtake
Germany's within ten years), and since most EU decision-making is weighted
by population, that would give it a huge voice in the EU's affairs. Above
all, it would kill the notion of "Europe" as a Christian club.
Add, say, eighty million Turks to the twenty million Muslims who
already live in various EU member states, and an EU that includes Turkey
would be an entity whose population is about 20 percent Muslim. This has
prompted bigots like former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing to
warn that Turkey's membership would mean "the end of Europe," but such
voices are in the minority.
More representative of mainstream official opinion in the EU is
French President Jacques Chirac's comment that "We have an interest in
having Turkey with us," or the Advisory Council on International Affairs's
September report to the Dutch government that "Admitting a Muslim country
may be new to the EU, but it does not differ in principle from earlier
expansions. One way or another, Islam should gain a place within the
EU...."
So far, so good, but the problem until recently was that Turkey
simply wasn't a sufficiently democratic country to meet the EU's standards.
As Britain's Minister for Europe, Denis MacShane, put it in October:: "The
process of the entry negotiations should promote as radical a reform
process as that initiated by Ataturk."
An immense amount has already been accomplished on this front in
the past two years. After a decade of political turmoil and deadlock, the
Turks elected a government in November, 2002 with a large majority in
parliament and a clear mandate for change. The new governing party was,
remarkably, an "Islamic" party whose predecessors had once been seen as
opposed to the whole secular republic founded eighty years ago by Ataturk.
Under the leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan,
however, the Justice and Development (AK) Party repackaged themselves as
"Muslim Democrats" along the lines of Europe's many "Christian Democratic"
parties, and proceeded to remake the whole Turkish state in order to fit it
for EU membership. In only two years, Erdogan's government has rewritten a
fifth of the constitution, ending the death penalty, bringing the army
decisively under civil authority, granting language rights to the Kurdish
minority and entrenching European standards of free speech in Turkish law.
Abuse and torture of prisoners in Turkish jails is one area where
more work is needed (though the government is clearly trying), and there is
a continuous tension between the AK party leadership's Europeanising
intentions and its conservative religious base over questions having to do
with women's rights and family law.
Nevertheless, enough progress has already been made that in October the
European Commission declared that Turkey had met the political and economic
conditions to be considered for EU membership.
.... cont'd