This year’s survey includes the US, Turkey and 12 EU member states. You can find all the data on the website www.transatlantictrends.org. In this column I want to concentrate on a few remarkable findings related to Turkey.
Having worked on Turkey-EU relations for a decade now, I experienced first-hand how the mood on Turkey’s EU accession process has changed over the years. It is definitively true that in general the enthusiasm, both in Turkey and in the EU, has gone down. The reasons are well known and we do not need to go into them in detail: the unresolved Cyprus problem, the change of leadership in France and Germany, the economic crisis in the EU and, as a result of that, the growing impression in Turkey that the EU is no longer serious and that Turkey should maybe start looking for alternatives.
Against this backdrop, the new Transatlantic Trends survey (TT 11) offers some striking results.
First, it confirms the outcome of several Turkish public opinion polls indicating that public support for EU membership in Turkey has not gone down as dramatically as is often claimed. Almost half (48 percent) of the Turks questioned think Turkish membership in the EU would be a good thing. To put things in perspective: After five years of accession negotiations between Poland and the EU in the 1990s, we could witness the same negative curve in support for membership in Poland, coming down from 75 percent at the start to around 50 percent after a couple of years. At some point, the Poles also lost hope of a quick result and had the impression that the EU was adding tough conditions all the time. In other words, this trend in public support during negotiations is nothing special for Turkey. It has happened before. Poland joined the EU in 2004 after a clear majority of Poles spoke out in favor in a referendum.
Back to the TT 11. Contrary to the general perception in Turkey, the majority of those living in EU countries do not believe that Turkey’s predominantly Muslim population is a reason to keep Turkey out of the EU. The same results were found for the popular idea that Turkey might be too poor to be integrated into the EU. Almost 60 percent of Europeans see no barrier there. It underlines the point that Turks should be a little bit more careful when they accuse all EU citizens of being Islamophobes who do not want to share their prosperity with the Turks. These Europeans exist and they are quite vocal and visible but, as TT 11 shows, they do not constitute the majority.
Another interesting contradiction between perception and reality can be found in the answers to the question “Who should Turkey cooperate closest with?” The plurality of Turks (43 percent) considers their neighbors in the Middle East as more important to the country’s economic interests than countries of the EU.
The fact is that 42 percent of Turkey’s total trade in the last two years has been with the EU and only 11 percent with the Arab world. Apart from the quantitative gap, Turkey’s exports to Europe consist of mid and high-tech products.
Of all foreign direct investment in Turkey between 2008 and 2010, 76 percent came from EU countries and 8 percent from the Gulf countries. On top of that, most European investments in Turkey create new jobs while most Arab money goes into buying shares in already existing Turkish companies. These are just two examples of popular perceptions not being based on the actual state of affairs. The preference for the Middle East is indicative of the positive reaction to the Arab Spring and the negative news coming out of the EU. But I guess most Turks would agree with the conclusion that it makes more sense to base your policies on facts and not on perceptions.
