TURKEY should have been celebrating October 3 as one of the milestones in its history – after decades in the waiting, at last the start of full accession talks with the European Union.
No country that has ever started accession talks has failed to join the EU. But the growing opposition to Ankara’s membership across the continent suggests Turkey could well be the first to break the mould.
As Monday’s rendez-vous nears, the debate gets more strident by the hour. Indeed, there is still no agreement on the negotiating framework, without which talks cannot begin, with Austria holding out for an explicit alternative to full membership to be written in. Turkey has said it will walk away from talks if such a clause is inserted.
The realisation that Turkey’s membership prospects are now for real has suddenly reminded politicians across Europe of Turkey’s many democratic shortcomings. People who’d barely heard about Cyprus are now championing its cause; the European Parliament is suddenly insisting that Turkey cannot join without acknowledging the Armenian genocide; many point to the ill-treatment of religious minorities or the charges laid against novelist Orhan Pamuk for comments on the massacres of Armenians and Kurds.
They’re right of course. The ‘deep state’ is far from dead in Turkey, for all the reforms of the past years, and the country still offers its critics plenty of sticks with which to beat it. Turkey does little to help itself with its blustering arrogance, and the aggressive rhetoric it feels it has to offer its domestic audience to offset the compromises it is making.
But is it helping anyone to raise all these issues at this stage and start talks in such a negative climate? Turkey’s accession process is a win-win for all. The kind of changes Ankara will have to undertake will address precisely the kind of problems that so many are now nagging about. This can only be a good thing, anchoring a potentially unstable country in an institutional and economic framework that over a decade will erode precisely those fears that many harbour about Turkey.
If at the end of that process, the Austrian people – or whoever else – are still implacably opposed to accession, then they will say no, period. That’s when we can start thinking about special partnerships and the like – and to have reached that stage, Turkey will in any case have matured sufficiently not to slam the door and precipitate a regional crisis.
So let Turkey enjoy its historic moment on Monday, and let’s have the opportunity over the next decade, step by step, to try and bring the country into the orbit of democratic values that the European Union represents.
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