But if it is not Cyprus, there is always going to be some obstacle looming just up ahead, and headline writers always have at the ready a score of epithets to suggest that the train crash in Turkish-EU relations is just around the next bend. Of course, this assumes that the Turkish-EU accession talks are proceeding at sufficient pace that anyone would notice if the drivers had to slam on the brakes. Indeed, there are moments when Turkey appears to be moseying down a different track altogether.The paradox is that the lack of momentum in Turkish relations with the EU is not the product of a growing sense of isolationism. Turkish negotiators slowly ponder with their Eurocratic partners differential rates of taxation on imported whisky and locally brewed rakı. Yet Turkish foreign policy makers are speeding ahead, applying an acetylene torch to many of the neighboring “frozen conflicts.” Ankara has embarked on not so much a charm offensive as a sustained campaign to make Turkey a more independent and supple actor in its own region. Compare this to the recent past. It took (literally) an earthquake for Ankara and Athens to realize that their energies would be better expended fighting the forces of nature rather than one another. By contrast, the improvement in relations with, certainly Damascus, but even Yerevan , has been relatively painless. Turkey now aspires to a major leadership role as peacemaker in the Middle East, honest broker in the Caucasus and lion tamer of Syria and Iran, nations which its Western allies find intractable.
So the question is why Turkey appears to be neglecting what conventional wisdom has long hinted should be its main foreign policy objective: steady progress in its EU accession negotiations. The explanations are by no means mutually exclusive. The first is that Europe does not always act in good faith, and that technical progress on bringing Turkey into line with EU norms also has to negotiate around that famous elephant in the room -- that many Europeans do not believe that Turkey truly shares its core values. Such concerns tend to become far more visible when there are European parliamentary elections in the offing. The second is that Turkey's own view of the world, for all its new internationalism, has not entirely managed to shift from solipsistic mode. While the Foreign Ministry may be engaged in a strategic review of Turkey's international standing, an eerily large number of ordinary citizens believe that the West is out to divide and destroy the nation. Public opinion bizarrely ranks well up the scale of threats facing the nation, a horde of missionaries out to subvert its moral fiber. Turkey's more assertive foreign policy taps a popular need to confirm self-worth.
Militant secularists, as much as a religious right in Turkey, are fixated on the Western Peril. It is far more a product of nationalism than religious belief. This helps explain the second paradox, that Turkish public opinion is susceptible to flattery. Most believe a simple gesture from the European side would tap an enthusiasm for the EU project lurking not far beneath the surface. By the same token, Turks are highly suspicious of American intentions while at the same time lending Barack Obama the same sort of approval rating that he enjoys back home. That good standing exists independent of the visit he paid to Turkey so early in his presidency. Indeed, the reality of the trip may have even tarnished a bit of his mystique.
It seems to me, using only a modest bit of hindsight, that the Obama visit was intended to restore a more needed sense of urgency to Turkey's relations with its principal allies and to get it to focus, not just on the border with Armenia, but on its relationship with Europe. The visit may have been intended to flatter Turkey's sense of self-importance, but the fact that the US president felt it necessary to make that gesture suggests that importance may be true.
