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Too big for Europe?
Nov 14th 2002
From The Economist print edition
The Turks are at the gates of Brussels
THEY sing in the Eurovision Song contest, play football in the European
football championships and deliberate in the Council of Europe. But apparently
it is all a misunderstanding. Turkey is not a European country. That is the
opinion of none other than Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, chairman of the
convention on the European Union's future. Turkish representatives are at the
convention and the EU has told their country it is a candidate to join the
club. But according to Mr Giscard d'Estaing it would be the end of the EU if
Turkey were ever actually to get in.
The intervention of VGE, as he is familiarly known in France, was widely
attacked. A war with Iraq is on the horizon, there are warnings of an imminent
al-Qaeda attack in Europe, the EU badly needs Turkish co-operation to secure a
settlement in Cyprus and Turkey has just elected a government with Islamist
roots. What a time, groaned the critics, to insult the most secular and
pro-western Muslim country there is. Mr Giscard d'Estaing's critics seized on
his gaffe to argue that the man is clearly past it.
In fact, VGE's intervention was carefully timed. For the European Union is
fast approaching a real moment of decision over Turkey. At the EU summit in
Copenhagen next month, the club's current 15 countries are expected to sign
agreements to let in another ten, mostly from Central Europe. They will also
face mounting pressure to offer Turkey, too, a date for the start of
negotiations to join. A European official in Brussels argues that while
eventual Turkish membership is not inevitable as things stand, once the
negotiating process begins it will be all but unstoppable. So VGE's
intervention was a last-minute appeal to European leaders to call a halt,
before they head down a path from which there may be no turning back.
Some interpreted Mr Giscard d'Estaing's rejection of Turkey as an assertion
that the European Union is a Christian club. VGE is considering inserting an
assertion of Christian values into his draft constitution and recently
conferred with the pope. But Turkey's Islamic culture is only a part of the
argument made by those who are sceptical of its candidacy. Another point made
by the convention's president is that 95% of Turkey's land mass is actually in
Asia. Once geographic criteria for membership are blurred, how will the EU
ever define its boundaries?
But the biggest single anxiety is over Turkey's size. On current
demographic trends, by 2020 Turkey (now 67m-strong) may have more people than
Germany (now 82m-strong but shrinking). That would make Turkey the largest
country in a union which is already a lot more than a mere free-trade area,
though it is yet to evolve into the Eurosceptics' dreaded super-state. In the
Netherlands, for example, around 40% of new national laws are simply
implementations of decisions made by the EU. EU laws themselves are
increasingly made by majority vote; if Turkey got into the EU it would have
the largest number of votes in its legislative bodiesthe Council of Ministers
and the European Parliament. It would also, in time, adopt Europe's single
currency and its people would be free to move to Western Europe as they
pleased. Anti-immigration parties, with a strong anti-Muslim tinge, have
recently gained ground in France, the Netherlands and Austria. Letting Turkey
into the EU, says a prominent European politician, would mean more Le Pens and
Haiders.
All overblown, say Turkophiles. Big though it is, Turkey would still make
up less than 15% of an EU that would then embrace around 600m people. Worries
about its democratic credentials would, they argue, be addressed by the very
process of negotiating entry. Before any country can even start talking to the
EU, it has to conform to certain democratic norms. This year the Turks have
abolished the death penalty and started easing language restrictions on their
Kurdish minority. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Justice and Development Party
has just won the Turkish election, recently told EU ambassadors that his party
would now move to abolish the use of torturethe largest remaining human-rights
obstacle to the beginning of negotiations. Once they do begin, the lucky Turks
would have to adopt around 80,000 pages of EU law, covering everything from
employment rights to clean-air rules. It will all take a long timecertainly
more than a decadeand the Turkey that emerged at the other end would be a very
different place. Rather than fearing Turkey's impact on the EU, says Heather
Grabbe, of the Centre for European Reform, the Europeans should rejoice in
their power to mould and stabilise a large and strategically crucial neighbour.
A habit of being trapped by breezy promises
Whether such a policy would necessarily mean offering Turkey full
membership of the EU will doubtless preoccupy many a future seminar. In the
real world, however, there is a feeling, pace Mr Giscard d'Estaing, that
things are moving the Turks' way. The Americans, who have always promoted
Turkish membership of the EU for their own strategic reasons, are pressing the
Europeans to be amenable.
This may be working, particularly on the Germans, who are desperate to get
back into American good books after being told that Gerhard Schröder's
electioneering hostility to American policy over Iraq had poisoned relations.
In Turkey, meanwhile, Mr Erdogan is playing his hand intelligently. He reacted
in a measured way to Mr Giscard d'Estaing's remarks and hopes that Turkey will
raise its standing in EU circles by putting its weight behind a Cyprus
settlement.
Whatever happens at the Copenhagen summit, the EU has an ingrained
characteristic working in Turkey's favour: a habit of being trapped by its own
promises. Privately, many EU leaders are still queasy about letting in the
Central Europeans, let alone the Turks. But they promised to let in the
ex-communists over a decade ago: what they said publicly turned out to be more
important than what they thought privately. It is a logic that worked for
Central Europe. It may yet work for Turkey.
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