The Turkish train crash

Nov 30th 2006
From The Economist print edition

MELANCHOLY is Istanbul's defining characteristic, writes Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's Nobel prize-winning novelist. And melancholy has now descended on the country's relationship with Europe. “Almost everyone I know has lost heart,” says Soli Ozel, a political scientist at Istanbul's Bilgi University who wants Turkey to join the European Union.

His disenchantment is justified. Turkey's membership talks are on the edge of collapse. The EU gave the Turks until December 6th to open their ports and airports to traffic from Cyprus (ie, the Greek-Cypriot republic). Turkey refuses to do this unless the Europeans lift what amounts to their trade embargo on the (Turkish-Cypriot) north. The current Finnish presidency of the EU has failed to find a compromise. So the only questions now are how many “chapters” in the negotiations will be suspended—this week the European Commission suggested eight out of 35, all related to trade and the internal market—and whether the suspension is handled with enough delicacy by both sides to let them be reopened easily in a couple of years' time.

It was always going to be difficult to get Turkey into the EU. On top of complications arising from its poverty, its mostly Muslim culture and its mistreatment of the Kurds, it would be the largest member, with the most votes in the Council of Ministers and the most seats in the European Parliament. Even so, the accession talks have been unnecessarily fraught.

During the past year Turkey and the EU have squabbled bitterly over Cyprus, over clauses in the Turkish penal code that limit free speech and over a French proposal to make it an offence to deny the Armenian genocide of 1915. These may be real issues, but they have not affected Turkey's Western orientation, as embodied in its NATO membership and its impressive reform programme. The economy is growing by 6-7% a year; Turkey was the first Muslim country to send peacekeepers to Lebanon.

All this suggests that the quarrel is to do as much with the Europeans as with the Turks. In 2005 European political leaders agreed to negotiate Turkish accession in good faith, but it is not clear that all are doing so. Unwilling to admit that they want to keep Turkey out, France, Austria and Cyprus are making demands that seem designed to induce the Turks to walk away.

Now another insidious argument is being aired. Negotiations with Turkey are not merely failing; they are damaging the country's Westernisation. Because of the disputes, Turkish support for joining the EU, which stood as high as two-thirds in 2004, has fallen to only one-third now. Three-quarters of Turks believe the EU will never let their country in. Better, say some, to suspend the talks now, before these squabbles do more harm.

Some add that it will make little difference. The painstaking work of bringing Turkish law into line with EU law has more or less stopped. Talks on suspended chapters cannot restart soon because, over the next 18 months, three elections will get in the way (presidential and parliamentary ones in Turkey; a presidential election in Cyprus). So, the siren voices argue, Turkey would do better to give up now and settle for a privileged partnership instead (this is what Germany's Angela Merkel wants). Turkey's Westernisation need not be halted, just diverted: it began in the dying years of the Ottoman empire, long before the EU was dreamt of, and is thus independent of it. For the Turks, EU membership is not a matter of identity; it is a matter of choice.

But it is a good choice—and the consequence of abandoning it could be more serious than the Europeans realise. The EU goal helps to stabilise several shaky elements in Turkey. For the moderate Islamist government, it offers protection against military intervention. For the army, it guarantees secularism. For business, it entrenches market reform. For Kurds, it promises minority rights. Turkey would not suddenly become like Iran if its membership bid failed. But any of these elements might wobble—and the risk of a clash between the army and Islamists would rise.

Nor is Turkey about to join the axis of evil. But unlike previous applicants, it has options other than the EU: bad ones, perhaps, but alternatives nonetheless. It could flirt with Russia or Iran (as a former army chief has suggested). Or it could become pro-Western in the way that, say, Egypt is.

Pause, don't stop

For the EU, a rejection of Turkish membership would represent a huge lost opportunity. Europe's foreign policy, and its hopes of global significance, would suffer a catastrophic loss of credibility if it were seen to be blackballing a moderate Muslim country that has NATO's second-largest army. The EU's reputation in the Muslim world, which is watching the membership talks with Turkey closely, would sink, perhaps even below America's.

At home, a failure of the talks would send a message to Europe's 15m Muslims: that you have no place in Europe. There are some 3m Turks in Germany. What is the government going to tell them? “You do not belong here. Please do not riot”? The Germans, who have more at stake than anybody else, have been breathtakingly insouciant about the consequences of a failure of Turkey's membership bid. In many ways Ms Merkel's ambivalence has done more to damage Turkey's prospects than the more obvious hostility of France and Cyprus.

If it is bad policy to freeze the negotiations, and impossible to continue them, what is the alternative? At their summit later this month, the EU's leaders will rule on the plan to suspend talks on eight chapters and, unusually, to keep other chapters open until Turkey allows access from Cyprus. This may send a negative signal to Turkey but, given the doubts of many EU members, it may be the best that can be agreed on. The Europeans, however, should put no new obstacles in the way of reopening talks and also exert far more pressure on the Greek-Cypriots to settle the Cyprus problem. Hitting the pause button may be inevitable. But the pause must not turn into an indefinite stop.