By Daniel Dombey and Vincent Boland
Published: November 8 2006 02:00 | Last updated: November 8 2006 02:00
The last time Abdullah Gül, Turkey's foreign minister, met his European Union counterparts, the occasion itself was a stark reminder of the divide that frustrates Ankara's hopes of joining the EU.
Although Mr Gül, a devout Muslim, was observing the Ramadan fast, the Luxembourg meeting a few weeks ago began with what was billed as a working lunch.
Things went downhill from there. The EU representatives proceeded to chide Turkey for its alleged shortcomings, ahead of a crucial EU report that comes out today on Turkey's membership preparations. The incident revealed the strains in the relationship between Turkey and the EU - tensions that now risk getting out of hand.
"The accession process of Turkey is a crucial event, not just for the EU and Turkey but for the future of Europe and the future of east-west relations," Ali Babacan, Turkey's chief EU negotiator, told the FT recently. He added that if its membership bid stalled because of the current difficulties "the consequences could be devastating".
This large, poor, secular-but-Muslim nation of 72m people has been knocking on Europe's door since at least 1923, when the republic was founded from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Today, when the European Commission publishes what is set to be a damning report on Turkey's progress in accession negotiations, the problems in Ankara's relations with Europe will laid out for the world to see.
Many EU officials fear that the report will set the stage for a full-blown crisis, which could end with the suspension of Ankara's EU negotiations and a halt to the country's 150-year push to modernise and westernise.
The Commission will point to two main complaints about Turkey: that the government has failed to follow through on political and economic reforms and on its commitment in a deal signed last year to open its ports and airports to traffic from Cyprus.
"To avoid this train crash, Turkey needs to relaunch the reform process with full determination and meet its obligations on Cyprus," Olli Rehn, the EU's enlargement commissioner, said last month. He argues that EU leaders also need to pay much more attention to the issue than they have to date.
The consequences of a complete breach would not just be political. The belief that Turkey is committed to undertaking the reforms necessary to join the EU has been a key peg for financial markets for the past four years. Now, it appears that investors are taking that underpinning for granted, ignoring the unstated but incontestable fact that Turkey's EU accession process has, for the moment at least, ground to a halt. Tolga Ediz, an economist who covers Turkey for Lehman Brothers, argues that this could be a costly mistake for investors.
A crisis is not what either Turkey or the EU's leaders envisaged when they agreed to begin the country's EU accession process just under two years ago. But since that date, December 17 2004, the news concerning Turkey's preparations for membership has been overwhelmingly negative.
Turkish and European officials acknowledged then that the negotiations might never lead to actual membership - France's constitutional obligation to hold a referendum on Turkish entry to the EU saw to that. But they added that, even if there were a crisis five or so years down the line, the process was still likely to be mutually beneficial. The impetus of the EU talks would push Turkey to carry out constitutional and economic reforms that were both in its own interest and made the country look palpably more western and modern.
Instead, the crisis has already arrived, after two years when neither side has much to show for the negotiations. Indeed, both parties can justifiably accuse the other of having failed to meet its commitments. A process Turkey and the EU had been keento depict as a virtuous circlehas instead become a vicious cycle of recrimination.
The backdrop for the looming crisis is Turkey's reform record. The pace of reform slowed after the 2002-04 period, two years in which the moderate Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan pushed through constitutional changes that reduced the role of the military in the political arena and redrew the country's penal code.
A draft of today's report voices "serious concern" about freedom of expression in Turkey, questions the independence of the country's judiciary and concludes that the military has yet to come under full civilian control. Throughout its dozens of pages, the report rarely commends Turkey for the advances it has made in the past year. Instead, on topic after topic, the refrain is of limited progress or none at all.
Many European officials worry that the reason that Turkey has made so little progress is that the pro-EU coalition within the country has splintered.
When Mr Erdogan's party came to power, both it and the EU process were overwhelmingly popular. Indeed the popularity of the EU transcended some of the deepest divisions in Turkish society. Turkey's powerful military be-lieved that the perspective of membership would reduce the power of the Islamists; Mr Erdogan's AKP thought it would reduce that of the military, as well as guaranteeing religious freedom. Turkish business favoured the EU. So did minority groups, such as Turkey's Kurds, who thought that the bloc would bolster their rights.
But support for the EU is no longer what it was. In 2004, a poll by the Turkish newspaper Milliyet said 67 per cent of respondents thought Turkey should definitely enter the EU. Last month the figure was 32 per cent.
In the intervening period, the controversy about the 2003 invasion of Iraq has battered the west's reputation within Turkey. The US, in particular, has seen its popularity plummet. In a recent poll by the German Marshall Fund, only 14 per cent of Turkish respondents said they supported US leadership of world affairs.
"The US and Europe have been the two anchors of the west in Turkey," says Ron Asmus, head of the GMF's Brussels office. "Now the US anchor is badly damaged and the EU anchor does not look in good shape." The risk he highlights is of a country in one of the most sensitive regions in the world slipping away from the Euro-Atlantic principles to which it has held firm for the past half-century.
What makes things worse is that the EU itself has visibly grown more hostile to the idea of enlargement in the wake of the May 2004 inclusion of 10 mainly ex-communist countries. A strategy paper, also due to be adopted by the Commission today, makes clear that the EU will expand beyond 27 member states - Romania and Bulgaria are joining on January 1 - only in the "medium or long term", after the bloc has reformed its institutions.
In a Commission survey published in July, 48 per cent of EU citizens opposed Turkish membership, even if Ankara met all the bloc's conditions. Only 39 per cent supported membership. The figures are still more striking in some of the individual countries that would have to agree Turkish membership. In France 54 per cent were opposed, in Germany 69 per cent and in Austria 81 per cent.
Such figures have bolstered suspicions within Turkey that the bloc has little or no intention of giving Turkey membership and that the negotiations with Brussels are a road to nowhere. As a result, Ankara is still less disposed to make a compromise on the one crucial issue that could bring its EU quest to a halt - Cyprus.
The internationally recognised Greek Cypriot government in the south of the island coexists uneasily with the self-styled Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. A United Nations plan to reunify the island failed in 2004 after being rejected by the Greek Cypriot population and government, although it was backed by the Turkish Cypriots.
In response, the EU vowed in April 2004 to end the isolation of the Turkish Cypriots by allowing trade between the north of the island and the rest of the EU. But Cyprus, which became an EU member less than a week later, has consistently vetoed any such move. Turkey regards this as a sign of the EU's bad faith. Ankara has maintained its refusal to open up its own ports to Cypriot ships - despite an EU warning last year that if Turkish ports were not opened, "overall progress in the negotiations" would be affected.
Now, the crunch is coming. The Commission will today tell Turkey that the negotiations will suffer unless Ankara opens its ports in the next few weeks. The underlying threat is that, unless Turkey relents by December, the Commission will recommend a suspension of the negotiating "chapters" most closely linked to the Cyprus dispute. But France, Greece and Cyprus want to send a much stronger signal that many more parts of the negotiations will be affected if Ankara does not meet the EU's demand.
All indications are that the dispute will reach a climax at a mid-December summit of EU leaders. A formal decision to suspend the entire negotiations remains unlikely. But EU officials fear two things, above all: first, that the summit will be unable to agree an EU line on how to respond to Ankara's defiance, leaving the talks technically in limbo and in effect suspended, and second, that Turkey may at some point just walk away if the EU pitches its demands too high.
With the popularity of the EU flagging within Turkey, and Mr Erdogan keen to build bridges with nationalist elements within the Turkish state and society, such a gesture may be seen as reasserting national pride.
Amid such fears, some pro-Turkey officials are trying to keep their spirits up. One argument is that expectations are now so low that a breakthrough can be achieved with relatively little. Mr Erdogan signalled at the weekend that Turkey might consider altering article 301 of its penal code, which outlaws criticism of Turkishness or the Turkish state.
To many western eyes this article, the basis of the abortive prosecutions of the writers Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, has become the symbol of everything that is wrong with Turkey today. If it really were to be amended or junked, the atmosphere surrounding the Turkey debate would certainly lighten.
Mr Ediz of Lehman Brothers concurs that the best way for the logjam to be broken is for Turkey to restore the momentum of domestic reforms. "Unless the government accelerates reform, EU leaders may want to give Turkey a wake-up call while stopping short of full suspension" at the December summit, he wrote last week.
Another hope is that Finland, which has striven without success to broker a temporary deal between Turkey and Cyprus, will yet manage to forge a compromise. Indeed, all the steps Turkey has taken towards the EU to date have become possible only after last-minute deals.
"I think everyone will step back from the brink," says one diplomat. "At the end of the day, whose interest is it to bring a halt to these talks?" He argues that though the talks have borne little fruit over the past two years, that is no reason to rule out change in the future - particularly after Turkish parliamentary elections in a year's time. If, on the other hand, the negotiations come to a halt, anything is possible - including a much more Islamist or nationalist style of government in Ankara.
But the diplomat concedes that, unlike past occasions. the crisis is not just a question of dramatics intended to impress electorates in Cyprus, Turkey and elsewhere. This time, although the stakes are enormous, the outcome is genuinely uncertain. Worst of all, the peoples of Turkey and Europe are becoming visibly disenchanted with each other.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
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