Turkey and Europe

An uncertain path

Faltering membership talks are reducing the European Union’s influence

Oct 15th 2011 | ISTANBUL | from the print edition

The Economist

WITH Turkey vaunting itself as a model for the Arab world, the tendency is to see its 50-year-old goal of joining the European Union as dead. When you have a booming economy, secular democracy and new regional clout, goes a common refrain, “who needs Europe?”

The membership talks that began in 2005 have all but stopped, because of rows over Cyprus and the resistance to Turkish membership by some EU countries. No new chapters have been opened for a year; none will be unless Turkey opens its ports to Greek-Cypriot vessels, which is unlikely.

The impasse was noted in this week’s European Commission report on Turkey’s progress towards membership. Resorting to litotes, it said “the accession negotiations with Turkey have regrettably not moved into any new areas for a year.” The ruling Justice and Development (AK) party seems unworried. As the Europe minister, Egemen Bagis, likes to claim, “the EU needs Turkey more than Turkey needs it.” Relations with Europe seem to be souring, even though polls show popular support for EU membership holding up. The German Marshall Fund, an American think-tank, found 48% of Turks were in favour this year, up from 38% in 2010.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s mercurial prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is hinting at war over Greek-Cypriot drilling for gas off Cyprus’s southern coast, prompting a sharp rebuke from the Americans. He has accused Britain and France of having “neocolonialist” designs over Libya and claimed that an unnamed German foundation is financing the Kurdish-separatist PKK. And his government plans to introduce Arabic as an optional language in primary schools, still spurning the Kurds’ demands for the teaching of their mother tongue. Some of this reveals the EU’s waning influence. Yet Turkey continues to become more democratic. The commission report notes the army’s declining clout. Some properties confiscated from Christians are to be returned. The government plans to reduce pre-trial detention periods of as long as ten years for terror suspects. Most important, the government is consulting the opposition over a planned new constitution to replace the one drafted after a military coup in 1980.

The commission still found much to criticise. More journalists are in jail in Turkey (64 now) than in any other country; violence against women is among the worst in the world; a renewed clampdown on the Kurds has seen over 3,000 people arrested, including 12 elected mayors and six Kurdish members of parliament. Only this week prosecutors sought 150-year sentences for three female Kurdish parliamentarians. Turkey still has much modernising to do.