Cliches Against Turkeys EU Membership
Turkish candidacy is not welcomed by public opinion in Western Europe and that is a secret to no one. Western Europeans are skeptical about Turkey as they are with all other candidates and the enlargement process in general.
It will be difficult to lay the foundations of a new Europe unless people are convinced that there will be an advantage in enlarging the Union in general and adding Turkey in particular.
Politicians and opinion makers in the West who openly or discreetly refuse the idea of Turkish membership use a series of controversial and sometimes false arguments to exacerbate the feelings of a public which is already confused about Turkey. Sometimes they use Turkey's candidacy for their anti-European stance in domestic political debate.
Although existing clichés, commonplace misconceptions and fears about Turkey won't change overnight, policy makers and the public at large deserve better information about the issue in order to make the proper judgment. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the most common arguments used against Turkey's membership and the counter-arguments for the use of all concerned.
Economic weakness and burden
Turkey's economic weakness and the burden its membership would put on EU countries through the payment of Structural Funds, is a widely used argument. Today these funds are substantially less generous when compared to amounts countries such as Greece, Portugal or Spain are receiving still today.
A rough calculation of what Turkey may receive is 13 billion euros, yearly. For the sake of comparison, since the customs union took effect in 1996, trade between Turkey and the EU 15 results in a yearly surplus of 10 billion euros for the EU countries.
But Turkey expects more from foreign direct investment (FDI) and loans which are much more efficient and incentivized than non-redeemable grants.
A recent study (cf. www.tusiad.org) by Professor Akat, a leading economist, commissioned by TUSIAD (the association of Turkish industrialists and businessmen) elaborates several scenarios for the year 2012 assuming that Turkey is engaged in the membership negotiations (but still not a member by then) thus offering a visibility and a mid-term perspective to foreign investors.
Akat considers three level of FDI: A weak penetration corresponding to 1 percent of the GDP; a realistic level of 1.5 percent of GDP and a rosy scenario where the FDI flow would hover around 2 percent of the GDP similar to that of Spain since it became an EU member.
Thanks to these FDI levels, by 2012 the GDP per capita could reach respectively $4800, $6200, $9000 which corresponds to $9100, $9900, $10750 in purchasing power parity (ppp). By comparison the per capita income for 2000 was at $3000 and $6800 in ppp. The author notes that he omitted the extreme case of very high FDI flows as in Poland for example, who received around 26 bn euros of FDI against 1.6 bn euros of grants from the EU as of 2000.
In other words, Turkey would dramatically increase its wealth even before becoming a full member, thanks to the membership perspective, which will ensue from the beginning of the membership negotiations. These negotiations, on the other hand, are expected to last at minimum 10 years.
Another grievance is the prospect of jobless Turks pouring into Europe. Contrary to the expectations, Turkish workers may prefer to stay home, for instance in cozy Antalya rather than to go to colder Malmo, if the working life improves in Turkey.
That is indeed the very essence of the pre-adhesion phase during which economic, social and political conditions in candidate countries are supposed to improve so to make life attractive at home. We should also recall the Greek, Portugese and Spanish return migration once these countries joined the EU. The same patterns may happen in the case of Turkish workers already in Western Europe as the prospect of an opulent Turkey could become an incentive to go back.
In other words "Let Turkey feel at home in Europe to make sure that Turks will stay home".
Otherwise labor migration, by virtue of the free movement of persons, could easily be restricted by Member States during membership negotiations as in the case of Austria and Germany today for workers of new members for an initial period of five years.
Finally, although Eurostat data on averages of economic development among candidate countries puts Turkey at the bottom with 23 percent of the EU average, Bulgaria and Rumania, two countries expected to join in three years both stand at 25 percent.
Despite its structural weaknesses the Turkish economy is bound to grow at a high rate in the coming years. The market is unsatured and has 15 million consumers with high purchasing power. Thanks to the Customs Union, 71 percent of the trade takes place with the 25 EU members and future members.
The 'Islamic country'
While talking about Turkey, Western Europeans subconsciously speak about 70 million Muslim Turks, whereas talking about themselves or other candidates no one says, for instance, "60 million British Christians or 40 million Christian Poles".
Simple fact: Turkey is a secular country that has no official state religion. Secondly, which Islam do we have in mind? As is the case in the two other monotheistic beliefs, Islam offers a rich variety of interpretations of the original doctrine, so much so that the dominant sect in this or that Islamic country considers a number of them heretical.
In Turkey, for instance with its 13 million members, the Alevi sect constitutes almost a fifth of the country's population and represents a liberal Islam that has little to do with the widespread image of Islam.
A French political writer Regis Debray remarks that where Islam is allowed to express itself democratically, regimes with dominant anti-western preferences arise whereas in radical secular States where political Islam is kept out of the public life the regimes are pro-western.
A blatant counter example to this Manichean view is Turkey where political Islam is more western prone than probably any other recent government and follows the rules of the democratic game. This government, on its way to a new synthesis between democracy and Islam challenges all clichés on this hot issue.
On the other hand, the understanding of the resurgence of a Turkish political Islam should not be confined to a functional approach that reduces the political movement to a group of ill-intentioned politicians with a hidden agenda, who try to take advantage of social discontent.
The movement involves a genuine identity search in which religion acts as a carrier for a social expression that even includes women. Interestingly enough, the supporters of this kind of Islamic modernity refer to both parliamentary and civic democracy as much as the liberals do.
The 'weight of the military'
The First World War brought about the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. It was followed by the signature of the Sevres Treaty in 1920, the occupation of vast territories of the Empire, including important parts of today's Turkey and left the State in a critical situation.
The military elite who won the liberation war salvaged the country. This elite has also been the architect of modern Turkey and the builder of the nation-State largely inspired from Jacobin values and principles.
In parallel, the trauma created by the 1920 dismemberment resulted in an obsession with territorial integrity and security and exacerbated the obsession with law and order that was inherited from the declining Ottomans. The legitimacy of the military survived until today and appears as one of the country's constant features.
The normalization process that is taking shape in Turkey should, in due course and certainly before membership becomes effective but not before the negotiation phase starts, confine the military to military functions.
Secularism and internal security will be guaranteed and safeguarded by civilian rule, as was the case in Greece and Spain in the seventies and eighties where the European perspective fully supported the demilitarization of political life.
To expect, from a country that was simply built by the military elite and especially from a government whose members had problematic relations with the military in recent years, to clear politics of the influence of the military within twelve months sounds ridiculous.
Geographical and historical arguments
Turkey in Europe? Physically speaking, Turkey has been in Europe since 1352, when the Ottomans conquered the Tzympe castle near Gallipoli, situated on the European shore of the Dardanelle Straits.
This is the very place where almost six centuries later, the Ottoman Empire would fight one of its last battles to save its existence, having progressively lost all the territory it had conquered on the European continent.
Historically speaking, relations between Turkey and Europe involve almost a thousand years of mutual fascination, and they can hardly be reduced to a sole belligerent dimension. They certainly involved conquests and reconquests, but also interactions between Europe and an Ottoman Empire that was not only the standard bearer of the Islamic world but also the heir and extension of the Byzantine Empire.
The Ottoman was a pre-modern cosmopolitan empire, quite the opposite of the British or the French Empires. It was a stabilizing factor (pax ottomanica) that one had to treat with. It was also a danger for Western Europeans to unite against.
Indeed the idea of the first comprehensive union of Western powers was developed by the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives against the Ottoman Empire. For six centuries, the Ottoman Empire played its part in European affairs, as it occupied a place in the collective Western imagination. We can trace this in historic figures ranging from Machiavelli to Montesquieu and Louis the 14th among many others.
The substance of these relations began to change with the advent of the age of Enlightenment. The Ottomans ignored the Renaissance and remained increasingly behind their European adversaries, both technically and politically speaking.
More important, the medieval image of the Ottomans underwent a radical change, the effects of which are still at work today: Reshaped by the Enlightenment, the only feature the collective European imagination retained from the medieval image of the Ottoman (called 'the Turk', which was historically incorrect as the 'national' trait happened much later) was its conquering and heretic (because Muslim) character.
In the early 19th century, the Ottoman State became the sworn enemy of "free nations" for whom it personified the hateful image of the imperial yoke. These attributes came to designate Europe's 'alien body', a metaphor that soon turned into an official policy, aimed at pushing back the body as soon as it showed signs of weakness, from the late 17th century onward.
Ottoman withdrawal, which first began in the Balkans, did not involve a rupture with Europe. Military retreat was a painful process but it also triggered a fascination for European know-how. The European has become now, for the first time, the Ottoman's 'Other', as it still is for Turks today. This was soon to rhyme with 'westernization', which is still ongoing today. Westernization was a voluntary and self-imposed phenomenon, which was implemented through local means. It constituted the basic dynamics of the last three centuries in these lands.
All the successes, but also all the failures of Turkish modernity are part and parcel of this process including clichés, stereotypes and resentments on both sides that need to be overcome by EU integration.
The geographical argument closely follows the religious concerns and often serves as an excuse to reject Islam. It is not difficult to guess how Turkey's membership would have been considered if the Anatolian Greek populations had remained behind instead of being transferred to Greece under the exchange of population agreement between Ataturk and Venizelos after 1922; or if Armenians would have been still living in Anatolia in large numbers.
Geographical limits are political constructions that are determined in precise historical contexts. Modern geography's main endeavor consists of understanding and thus questioning what qualifies a given space.
As such it challenges the old school that poses the limits first and then studies what is inside these limits. In the beginning of the 18th century when Taticheff, Peter the Great's chief geographer pointed out the Uralic limit to the east his purpose was to consolidate the European anchor of the new Russia.
Today the inclusion of the territory inhabited by Turks into the geographical definition of Europe will mean a Europe capable of composing with particular values that share the common political principles and thus showing a universal vision of humanity and human society that is unprecedented.
Cultural difference and difficult integration
More and more we hear that Turkey has a distinct model of society and historical values. Widely used, this argument seems to have become the last harbor of the opponents to Turkey's membership. But the cultural argument is so vague that it can be used in every sense and direction.
Everyone has his own ready-made definition of what is historical and what is cultural. Some Hungarians do not consider Rumanians as Europeans; for Croats, it is the Serbs and the Bosnians who fall out of the definition; for some Southern Europeans, Scandinavians are not really European, as for Luigi Barzini.
Turks like most of their contemporaries elsewhere in the world, aspire to become individualistic consumers in an environment of rule of law and social justice. No more no less.
European opinion tends to see the Turkish population as hostile and impossible to integrate when in fact 4 of the 70 million Turks live and work in the countries of Western Europe, where their successive generations are gradually integrating with local populations.
On the economic front, sizeable numbers of former Turkish factory workers are now successful businessmen who employ local populations. (cf. Centre for Turkish Studies Essen www.uni-essen.de/zft) The integration in the host societies takes place when clear national and/or regional policies exist.
Indeed, integration becomes extremely difficult when foreign workers are considered as temporary guest workers although they live there 40 years. Fortunately, strong new policies aiming at integrating foreign populations are now taking shape in many host countries and the recent change in German nationality law has allowed some 800,000 Turks living there to opt for German nationality. This naturalization trend is also valid for other host countries of the EU.
The 'end of Europe'
Turkey's membership is seen as an Anglo-American operation, not to say a conspiracy, aimed at diluting the original European project by giving a free hand to a mercantile Europe, thereby tarnishing nascent European political identity. Turkey is supposed to be at odds with this project and that identity.
The 'Anglo-American conspiracy' argument seems to be the most elaborate, incidentally referring to the current debate on tomorrow's political Europe. However the integration of a country like Turkey would probably require a policy mix between the Anglo-Saxon and Jacobin positions. In such a Europe all particularities and differences would be recognized, conditions of their free expression provided and their adaptation to the mold of common and non-particularistic values ensured.
This will allow the overcoming of self-imposed limits of identity based almost exclusively on religion or condemned to refer constantly to a universal but abstract secularism. Can we not assume that, as a universal model, the future EU will recognize all differences, including religious ones, without privileging any? In this sense, the Turkish membership of the EU would certainly be a test case for the motto 'different but equal'.
A military version of this view stresses the American affinities of the Turkish army, without mentioning the historical fact that it was European sulkiness towards them that led the Turks to seek closer ties with the U.S. Turkey's Atlantist inclinations are seen as a potential menace to the gestating European military identity.
Continental Europe would be caught in sandwich between Europe's two most Atlantist armies, the British and the Turkish. This argument makes sense in view of recent developments regarding Iraq.
The parliamentary vote of March 1, 2003 refusing the passage of U.S. troops via Turkish territory has created an unbearable feeling of 'strategic loneliness' in Turkey. Western Europeans were neither keen nor ready to fill this vacuum and as a result the government tried to regain the American confidence by deciding to send additional troops to Iraq.
In an enlarged Europe no one expects all members to be on the same wavelength for common and federal policies. That is why we have invented 'reinforced co-operations'. As usual core and like-minded members will get together to go ahead on various issues for more federalism. The others, including Turkey, will follow suit sooner or later.
The extra weight in EU institutions
Regarding the future Turkish national representation in various EU institutions, in particular in the European Parliament (EP) it is indeed a possibility to have a great number of Turkish MEP's proportionate to the size of the Turkish population.
Here we should also note that Turkey's demographic weight is often given as absolute data while the population growth has been constantly declining since 1985 because of economic hardship, birth control and urban life's constraints, exactly like many other European countries.
Otherwise, it is not understandable why future Turkish MEPs should express themselves on a given subject along the national line. Social Democrats would vote with PSE (Party of European Socialists) and the conservatives with the PPE-DE (European Peoples' Party-European Democrats). Parliamentarians and other Commission officials likewise do not represent their respective country but the Europeans.
Keep the wind blowing
What the Turks fear the most is to be left out of the present enlargement process thus, to be left out of 21st century Europe. Conservative approaches by the public, regarding hot issues such as the role of the army and the Cyprus problem are in fact due to defensive reflexes which are often misinterpreted by foreign observers.
As recently stressed by the Chief of Army Staff Hilmi Ozkok in an interview to the Greek daily Elephtorotypia, referring to relations with Greece, "problems can be solved in a week's time if Turkey is in Europe".
This formula is probably valid for all longstanding matters. In other words, the Turkish public looks for a show of confidence by its European partners, needs to feel at home to tackle its external as well as domestic problems. The best and most cost effective way to show this confidence is to start the accession negotiations that will make Europe a tangible and visible reality in Turks' life.
European policy makers are keen to qualify the current enlargement process as a historical opportunity. No doubt, with the enlargement of the Union, Western and Eastern Europe will come to terms with each other and the parenthesis opened at Yalta will be closed. The strategic interest of such redistribution is quite obvious and the decision to include Turkey in this process follows the same logic:
The enlargement of the EU will contribute to the establishment and consolidation of democratic values and a market economy in the candidate countries, with the relevant social safeguards, which will constitute the best guarantee for the stability and security of these countries.
Their stability and security will in turn constitute the best guarantee for the peace, security and stability of the whole continent. Turkey has been invited to join in this strategic project in which the interests of all actors are intertwined.
Politicians who will decide about the next step of Turkey's pre-accession phase should know that dramatic changes are happening in Turkey thanks to the Helsinki decision. European dynamics are already working as a catalyst for Turkey's internal evolution as it has done so in Greece, Portugal and Spain in the early 1980s, and is doing so in the candidate countries of Central and Eastern Europe today. The European stability concept is taking hold in Turkey and needs to be furthered.
The Helsinki act has probably opened the way for a new era in the pendulum movement that has characterized European-Turkish relations for many centuries. As of now reciprocal interests would hopefully prevail over passions.
As it comes to terms with one of its oldest figures of the 'Other', Europe will have taken another step towards the goal of becoming a genuine world power, capable of ensuring the co-existence of a wide variety of cultures and religions. This is an eminently political process, in the noblest sense of the term. (CA/NM)
* Cengiz Aktar PhD, is a senior manager at the United Nations. The views expressed are his owns and do not commit the organization for which he works.