Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will travel there in January 2009. Unless a last-minute change occurs, the days agreed upon are the 19th and 20th. The visit will be the first in more than four years. These are the facts.Remarkable as such, the planned trip carries much more weight. It must be seen as a landmark event on Turkey's road to full EU membership.
2009 must become the year of the EU in Turkey because 2010 and beyond then must be promoted as the years of Turkey in the EU. A renewed effort is vital in realigning political and economic developments in Turkey with those in the EU. The magic of 2005 and 2006 must be recaptured. And in particular the "Midas touch" of the prime minister must somehow be rekindled, if not totally re-found.
Brussels is a place where people meet and lobby and then meet some more. Recent counts arrived at 30,000 lobbyists shaking hands on a daily basis, of course figuratively speaking. This does not include the tens of thousands of full-time EU civil servants and national representatives. Add the quite impressive (measured by dilemmas, output and numbers alike) bilingual Belgian bureaucracy. Put all this together and you would be forgiven if you described the Belgian capital as one big conference hall! More correctly, it has become the administrative marketplace of Europe. Brussels must be understood -- foreign delegations must uncover its secrets, its habits, its failures and success stories. Turkey is lacking in this regard.
In order to make it in Brussels, you must be present. Lobbying by e-mail does not work. You can get away with it when you send your "number two and three," but every now and then the leaders must attend themselves. This is true for corporate magnates as well as elected representatives of nation-states. On a day-to-day basis, the eyes and ears of elected leaders happily and quite capably run affairs in Brussels. However, they manage affairs on behalf of their employers back home, and a state is an employer in this sense, too.
Correct -- Turkey over time increased its visibility in Belgium but there was a key ingredient missing: the actual physical presence of Prime Minister Erdoğan, who has a substantial track record to show off in the EU but no one knows about it! Four years later -- after 2004, that is -- Turkey has no longer had to accept "after-hours debates" on whether to start accession talks or not. Four years later Turkey can rightfully demand to finally get that crucial timetable stating that, albeit tentatively and only after the next EU budget enters into force in 2014, Turkey should be close to joining, if not already being a member state in, the EU. Talks are open-ended, true, but open-ended does not imply endless and without a clear mandate binding both sides.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso is a very experienced diplomat. He certainly knows that the Turkish prime minister cannot leave Brussels empty-handed. Local elections are on the doorstep as well as an EU-skeptic Turkish public. Never "anti EU" as such, the public from Edirne to Van now needs to see clear and encouraging signals of where the EU road will lead them. The EU needs to learn about Turkey's wholehearted commitment to becoming an EU member and, frankly speaking, this is the one and only priority the national government must pursue from 2009 onward. Erdoğan should make close friends with Barroso -- Brussels is all about contacts and showing them off. One day the French too will understand that they will gain quite a lot when Turkey joins the EU -- but someone must tell them first!
The visit will be a balancing act between understanding the EU's own imperfections while introducing the EU to Turkey's impressive track record. Certainly far from complete, but impressive nevertheless. The trip's output must declare the roadmap and which issues need to be taken care of by which of the two sides and by when. Time is up for postponing matters on both sides.
Turkey then needs a much more high profile Ministry for European Union Affairs. It must start educating its citizens about the EU all the way from schoolchildren to pensioners. The fact that the EU already spends millions and millions of euros for Turkey's development must be made more visible. İstanbul won the coveted title of becoming a European Capital of Culture (ECOC), which in itself is a decision based on votes in the EU's Council of Ministers -- there was no veto; even Cyprus gave a green light. Why does no one in Turkey portray it as a key springboard for Turkey's EU accession? I am not criticizing the ECOC 2010 team in İstanbul, but they must understand that İstanbul won because of Turkey's EU bid and that ECOC 2010 must be used as part of Ankara's EU strategy. Ankara needs an ECOC 2010 liaison office; it is a national event after all.
I wish the Turkish prime minister success in rebuilding the national consensus -- EU membership is not a toy for the current government; it is an asset for Turkey's present and future generations.
