EUs New Turkey Policy
Here in Turkey, the decision received a warm welcome, partly due to a wariness of "demoralising the people", and partly to bleak Pollyanna-ism. Among the enlargement-related decisions taken since 1993, the Copenhagen decision is that which is the most lacking in vision, the most unfortunate for Turkey, and the most inconsistent in the light of enlargement practices. However, the decision's current shape is not altogether devoid of reason.
The decision is lacking in vision because the EU has failed to surmount the intellectual barriers recounted by Giscard and others. The decision is unfortunate because if the 2004 rendez-vous had been a sincere one, then, instead of the peanuts mentioned in paragraph 20, a powerful package would have been on offer to assist the new government and society in respect of the technical, financial and especially political support that must pave the way for 2004.
The EU has openly articulated that it will withhold its material and moral support from the AKP government, from those sectors of society that aspire for integration with Europe, and from Turkey's process of change in general. It substantially diminished the wind, which was blowing since Helsinki and which facilitated the August 3rd decisions. In the period up to December 2004, Turkish public will continue to be deprived of any tangible EU reality, be it economic, political or social, thus risking wholesale complacency.
The summit conclusions carry no signs of recognising or wishing to prevent this risk. Finally, the decision is inconsistent because it takes for granted that in 2003, Turkey will, by definition, take no steps towards complying with the political criteria, as long as the Regular Report of next October won't be taken into consideration for the start of the negotiation phase. As for the excuse, which claims the impossibility of starting accession negotiations in 2003 because of the need to "digest" the latest round of enlargement, it has no objective basis.
Perceiving the motto "we'll look into it once you fulfil the political criteria" as a novelty, now that it bears a 2004 date tag, and struggling to portray this non-decision in a positive light, set the scene for a failure to draw lessons from Copenhagen and to bargain effectively in the future with the EU.
Because there is now a fundamental problem: Due to a whole host of reasons, the EU can no longer live up to the courageous decision it took in Helsinki regarding Turkey's candidate status. The failure in Copenhagen to take the decision that would anchor Turkey firmly in Europe, namely that of starting accession negotiations phase, signals a regressive step the EU has taken in undoing its pledge of eventual full membership for Turkey.
The expectation at the end of these two years could be to strike a deal on a "special status" for Turkey; a country that can never, without a powerful EU support complete its homework decisively, and whose society will have all but forgotten about EU membership in the meantime. The building blocks and signposts of this process are becoming ever more evident.
Turkey the ever-peculiar candidate
Turkey is the only country among the 13 candidates to pursue accession preparations almost entirely by its own means, without being party to the negotiation process. For the candidate countries, being part of the negotiation process implies making irreversible inroads into the workings of the EU, and thus earning the technical and financial support of the EU institutions.
Given the limits on resources, neither eurocrats, Member State bureaucrats nor other EU institutions responsible for accession preparations are willing to spend time and cash on a country that is yet to start negotiations. Even if they had been so, such a country, and in this case Turkey, would enjoy no priority. Having deferred the start of negotiations due to obvious difficulties in meeting the Copenhagen political criteria, Turkey is struggling to conduct its preparations in such an inhospitable environment, and is consequently failing in its efforts.
Indeed, despite the shortcomings in meeting the political criteria, the preparation stage must proceed in all areas of the acquis communautaire in parallel fashion. This is because a country cannot occupy itself solely with political reforms; if membership is ultimately to take place, legal regulations in fields ranging from agriculture to transportation, fisheries and telecommunications must be harmonised with EU legislation.
Seen from this angle, it becomes all the more evident how reluctant EU institutions and Member States are when it comes to Turkey's general accession preparation. And without the support of the EU, no bureaucracy can handle such a formidable edifice as that which involves, among other things, translating the near-100,000 pages of acquis, adopting the translated legislation through new laws and regulations, setting up the institutions necessitated by the new legislation while dismantling old ones, training the staff who will implement the legislation and informing the end users.
Within this framework, the technical and financial support lent to Turkey has been in no way comparable to that received by other candidates prior to starting accession negotiations.
Turkey is not included in the financial schemes such as PHARE, ISPA and SAPARD, enjoyed by the Central and Eastern European Countries. Despite being left out of these facilities, said to be exclusive to the aforementioned countries, and in spite of its great needs for preparation assistance, Turkey did not receive any ad hoc and proper support.
In the area of technical assistance, it was envisaged that Turkey join a meagre twelve out of the hundreds of existing twinning projects, designed to bring together officials of member and candidate countries in achieving legal harmonisation, but even these could not be put into operation yet.
The Commission's representation in Ankara gained enough staff only at the beginning of 2002. While the other candidate countries, spanning an area of 1.087.000 km², are served by 12 offices, the Turkey representation is struggling to address 780.000 km² on its own, without sub-offices in Istanbul or any other important city. The sub-committees set up for legal harmonisation are largely redundant due to a lack of purpose and adequate resources. Leaving aside legal harmonization, all that has been achieved to date by this highly inadequate preparation process is the translation of a dismal 5000 pages of the 100,000 page-long acquis.
While even some official documents originating from Brussels fail to take note of Turkey's formal candidate status, ever since Helsinki, confusion has reigned over whether Turkey will be included in Community programmes. On the other hand, for a considerable length of time, bureaucratic obstacles impeded Turkey in the Commission's Reding-Verheugen initiative on communication for Enlargement.
Notwithstanding the urgency and importance of raising awareness both in Turkey and within the Union, this budget came into force only at the beginning of this year. The Commission's vital communication strategy failed to do more than issue a bland publication and scrape together weak links with a cluster of unrepresentative persons and groups. Similarly, Europe's political decision-makers seldom visited Turkey, and when they did, this was usually for the purpose of extinguishing fires. Since the Helsinki Summit, only Germany, Greece, the Netherlands and Sweden joined Turkey for EU-related projects.
August 3rd to December 13th
Which brings us to the present. Despite what its officials say, since last summer and especially following August 3rd, the EU initiated a new enlargement ballgame custom-made for the Turkish case. Turkey has undeniably contributed to this procedure by insisting on "a date", and thus making the EU's job easier.
Even though the EU started accession negotiations with countries which had displayed sufficient resolve to meet the Copenhagen political criteria, it wilfully or unwittingly ignored the revolutionary August 3rd legislation, perceiving these as ordinary political reform. Lack of accurate analysis by the Commission officials and rather feeble appetite shown for Turkish affairs are behind this state of affairs.
Nevertheless, the EU was in some way perturbed by the August 3rd decisions, and through its officials, began to recite the themes of insufficiency and patchy implementation. However, unlike the Copenhagen economic criteria, the political criteria do not entail any clear-cut legislative moulds or quantifiable aspects that can be judged objectively, except for the requirements to ratify Human Rights related international legal instruments and meet general Human Rights standards.
Just like democracy itself, this criteria is open-ended. An ill-intentioned counterpart can, if it so wishes, find loopholes until the end of time, especially in the case of Turkey. Implementation, on the other hand, occurs during the preparation/negotiation stage just like it has been the case with several other candidates. The Commission's real reason in its search for grounds for denial was to postpone as far as possible the start of Turkey's negotiation process.
This attitude was, after all, made official in the Regular Report dated October 9th where the Commission did not recommend the opening of accession negotiations. Furthermore, every positive echo created by the agenda-topping issue of Turkey's membership bid, brought home by the extraordinary efforts of Turkish civil society including the representatives of religious minorities and Kurdish groups, was met by roundabout statements voiced by officials of the Enlargement Directorate-General to warn public opinions and parliaments that negotiations must not be started. Above all, Verheugen toured newspapers and parliaments in missionary spirit, lobbying against a decision in favour of opening the negotiation phase.
In its Composite Paper (now called the Enlargement Strategy Paper) published in 1999 and covering all applicant states, the Commission summarizes its new accession strategy thus: "[The Commission] proposes a strategy for the opening and the conduct of accession negotiations destined to ensure that they will progress in parallel with the candidate countries' preparations for membership. This approach will (...) stimulate the candidates' preparatory efforts. Ensuring parallelism between negotiating and preparatory progress [reduces] the risk that accession treaties may not be approved." (pp. 26-29)
It is precisely this process from which Turkey has been excluded as a result of this year's Regular Report. This country is now being implored to take an altogether different course.
Towards the special status
Copenhagen must be evaluated in the context of the reasoning behind the October 9th Regular Report and the Strategy Paper. After all, paragraph 20 of the Copenhagen Summit Conclusions quotes the Strategy Paper, when it states that "the EC-Turkey Customs Union should be extended and deepened".
This statement is a landmark on the road to a "special status" for Turkey. Pushed by an adviser to Prodi, there are efforts to market the "special status" to the Turkish business community. Among them those who are ready to accept it, make two calculations. There are those who believe that the improvements EU norms would bring to the working life if full membership remains in prospect, will stifle competition. It is also believed that this status promises new and immediate trade opportunities. Unfortunately, these are empty dreams, since a co-decision to expand the scope of the Customs Union will oblige producers to comply with non-negotiable production norms and standards. For instance, someone intending to export milk products will be required to supply data down to the origin of the cow supplying that milk. The easiest and cheapest way of meeting the norms and standards is through adopting the relevant EU legislation as for the accession preparations! And after all, Customs Union was ever thought only as a step on the road to full membership.
Special status is an ad hoc status that is one degree higher than Customs Union, but nevertheless vastly inferior to full membership. Commission officials have but a vague idea about how it is to be implemented. There will probably be no political conditionality attached to the formula. EU is showing consistency in this respect, since it has already stated that it will not lend any tangible political support to the reform process in the next two years, including the 2003 Regular Report, which has already been sentenced to be discarded.
December 2004 seems wholly designed to pave the way for a "special status". At the same time, when one remembers the omission of Turkey's membership-to-be from the institutions of the enlarged EU as set out in the Nice Treaty of December 2000, as well as from the workings of the Convention since March 2002 and from next Fall's Intergovernmental Conference that will prepare the new treaty, it appears that the groundwork for "special status" has been underway a long time in advance and maybe since Matutes Package of June 1990.
Seen in this light, it is no coincidence that the hitherto sotto voce proposals of a "special status" became louder in the European Parliament's late November session on enlargement, while even the Liberals' amendment reaffirming the mere candidacy of Turkey was rejected.
Towards a new era in EU relations?
Many factors gave a historical and noble role to an enlargement process which, along with "the other Europe", would embrace Turkey, "the Other" of Europe. These included the post-1989 prospect of re-uniting Europe after the closing of the parenthesis opened at Yalta, the continent's seizing of a chance to finally become a continent of sustainable peace, stability, prosperity and freedom, and the goal of building a new and universal Europe of the 21st century based on Europe's solidarist roots and a set of shared values and advantages.
Today, however, the discussion is jammed thanks to the religious passions awakened by Turkey's candidacy process, as well as to the manipulation of such feelings in the domestic policy scenes of many countries, and pedantic calculating over how much structural and agricultural funding the newcomers should receive. One of the ways to overcome this gloomy state of affairs would be to find the courage to follow through the 1999 Helsinki Summit's decision regarding Turkey.
However, the EU's decision-makers could not find this courage; instead, they made do with decisions that amount to the nitty-gritty engineering of enlargement and failed to put the fading vision of a 21st century Europe back on their agenda.
Turkey entered the EU's agenda from Ankara on August 3rd, and was excluded from it on December 13th in Copenhagen. Being loathe to take such crucial decisions as starting the negotiation process with Turkey, the current leaders of EU thus opted for a murky decision with no binding power.
Faced with an EU which has flatly told Turkey to sort out its backyard without EU help and attention until the end of 2004, and which assumes that the longer the saga grows, the easier it will be to sever the hopes of accession, it won't be easy for Turkey to keep membership on its national agenda. Here, civil society and the government have a lot of work to do.
These forces will try their hardest. However, while trying to preserve Turkish public's morale and enthusiasm, it would be naive to miss the EU's evident lack of heart and its plans of setting up a different relationship with Turkey. Otherwise, the risks of making mistakes will be increased.
Citing negative public opinion on Turkey, as the EU's politicians currently do, amounts to admitting that the post-1989 structure of the new Europe has not been effectively communicated, and to billing this on Turkey's membership application.
And it is deceitful to express such a concern when there is no public pressure in sight. After all, when Turkey's candidate status was affirmed in December 1999 in Helsinki, EU public opinion was neither more willing nor informed about Turkey or the enlargement process in general, than it is now. They will unfortunately not be any more willing, come 2004.
Public information and image building efforts by the civil society will be hard-pressed to change a centuries-old image in a mere two years. Consequently, the public opinion argument will always be at hand for EU's politicians. Not taking this at face value will help us to understand that the real problem is not public opinion but the uneasiness created by the prospect of Turkish membership, and to design our policies accordingly.
In the upcoming period, the Cyprus problem, which EU wants to freeze while accepting all risks (the unfortunate suggestion of a possible "East German model" for Cyprus is truly reminiscent of the Soviet glacier), may be resolved according to Annan Plan, with the pressure of the US, or may not be resolved.
On the other hand, apparently having lost their priority on EU's democratic agenda, Turkey's political problems may now be resolved under any administration that guarantees Syria-fashion stability. Such an option looks unfortunately to be the pragmatic solution in the minds of many EU politicians today.
An EU which makes comfortable bedfellows with authoritarian Russia will have no ethical qualms in enjoying trade ties with an authoritarian Turkey as the regional gendarme of the US; but from now on, what is essential for us is a wholesale and pressing re-evaluation of all relations with the EU as the latter's intentions become clear.
These unwelcome developments hovering over the country's future should be re-explained to Greece, which has often prided itself in having an understanding of this country. Today EU prepares to openly alienate Turkey and embark upon an historical and almost irreparable mistake.
It should be asked to modify the Copenhagen decision in Thessaloniki by lending to Turkey a strong and tangible political support simultaneously with the resolution of the Cyprus problem prior to February 28th or April 16th latest. Contrary to the understanding of politicians behind the Copenhagen decision Turkey would make a fundamental contribution to the future 'political Europe' and therefore is fully entitled to take advantage of the EU's dynamics as from today.
* Cengiz Aktar, PhD, teaches the enlargement process in the University of Galatasaray. Istanbul