Dec 16th 2004
From The Economist Global Agenda
On Friday, the European Union’s leaders are expected to agree to start membership talks with Turkey. But they will do so with trepidation, for their rich western club will find it difficult to absorb such a big, poor Muslim country
THE European Union is looking something like a stuffed banquet guest. This year, it accepted ten new members, mostly from poorer, post-communist central Europe. Though hailed as a triumph of east-west reconciliation, the enlargement was far from easy. Taking in the new members required big changes to Europe’s institutions, and the newcomers will need years of subsidies and reforms to catch up with the old members. And just as the digestion of these new members begins—and talks on swallowing other wannabes, such as Bulgaria and Romania, continue—comes the prospect of the biggest new dish of them all: Turkey. Despite their queasiness at the prospect, Europe’s leaders are likely, on Friday December 17th, to agree to offer Turkey a date to start membership negotiations.
Why does Turkey pose such a challenge? In short, because it is big, poor and Muslim. Albania and Bosnia, two other would-be EU members, are poor and mostly Muslim too, but they are small enough to pose few problems. Poland—one of the ten that joined in May—is big and poor, but it is Christian and undoubtedly at Europe’s core, making its membership a crucial part of uniting the continent. Europe does not shy away from tough enlargements. But Turkey would be the toughest.
Most of Turkey’s land mass is in Asia Minor. Bringing it into the EU would extend the border of “Europe” to the edge of Iraq, Iran and Syria. Turkey has 72m people, and by 2020 is expected to have more than Germany, currently the EU’s most populous member. And its GDP is just 27% of the current EU’s average, making it far poorer even than the members that joined this year. Europe’s biggest spending programmes, on farming and regional aid to poor areas, could become unsustainable if extended to Turkey in their current form.
And then there is the question of Islam. Nearly all Turks are Muslims, and the country’s current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leads a party with Islamist roots. But he has insisted that he and his party are no more planning to make secular Turkey a religious state than are Christian Democrats in countries like Germany. (He mis-stepped recently by announcing plans to criminalise adultery, but the outcry in the EU’s halls quickly changed his mind.) There is no obvious reason why Islam should be incompatible with EU membership—unless the question is begged by defining “Europe” as inherently Christian.
Most of the EU’s politicians are unwilling to do that. And most of them are similarly unwilling to appear stingy by publicly making the argument that Turkey is too poor to take on. But Turkey offers another big reason to be sceptical about its European credentials: its human-rights record. Though this has improved in recent years, Turkey remains a rough place by European standards. Its prison conditions are poor, corruption is rife, and women and girls suffer discrimination (and sometimes “honour killings” for adultery and similar transgressions). Most prominently, Turkey’s Kurdish population still struggles for full equality. Though the long-running civil war in the south-east of the country has abated somewhat, and Kurdish-language broadcasts were allowed for the first time in 2004, there is some way to go. Kurds lack official recognition and Kurdish remains banned in state schools, though after a reform this year some private Kurdish-language schools have opened.
Mr Erdogan’s government claims to be changing. It has a “zero-tolerance” policy on torture, and has instructed imams to describe honour killings as a crime against God. By October 2004, enough progress had been made that the European Commission, the EU’s executive, recommended starting membership talks. But it also called for continued monitoring. Opponents of Turkish membership will use any evidence of backsliding as an excuse to halt membership talks.
Stumbling over Cyprus?
There are misgivings in several of the EU’s bigger and longer-serving members, including France and Germany (which has a big Turkish population). France’s ruling party and its new boss, Nicolas Sarkozy, are against (though President Jacques Chirac is in favour). Ardent federalists across Europe worry that making the EU bigger with Turkey will hurt the cause of deeper integration. Nonetheless, all 25 of the Union’s leaders are expected to agree to begin negotiations.
But each current member has a veto, and there might just be one holdout. The southern, internationally recognised and ethnically Greek part of Cyprus joined the EU this year. The ethnically Turkish republic in the north of the island is occupied by Turkish troops. A UN-sponsored plan to reunify the two halves failed earlier this year. As a result, only the southern bit entered the EU.
The Greek-Cypriot president, Tassos Papadopoulos, may make trouble at the summit. He has insisted that Turkey set a timetable for pulling its troops from the north in order to win his approval for Turkey’s EU negotiations. And he wants Turkey to recognise his government as the legitimate government of the whole island. Turkey’s foreign minister has refused this precondition. Mr Papadopoulos will be under immense pressure from the other 24 members not to hold Turkey hostage. But he has shown himself able to resist international moral suasion: his refusal to endorse the UN reunification plan helped ensure its failure in a Greek-Cypriot referendum.
Even if the EU’s 25 members come to an agreement, Turkey will have to endure difficult negotiations with them. Some worry not only about Turkey’s suitability as a member but also about hordes of Turkish workers using their freedom of movement to head west and seek jobs. The EU will almost certainly impose long transition periods before Turkey can enjoy all its European rights. It may even seek to make some of these restrictions permanent. But Turkey has insisted it will accept no second-class membership. It could be a decade or more before Turkey finally makes it through the door. Friday’s summit is not the end for Turkey, or the beginning of the end, or even the end of the beginning. A long journey lies ahead.
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