Will Cappadocia be on Sarkozy’s itinerary during Turkish visit?

Erdoğan, in an interview with French newspaper Le Figaro published on Tuesday, noted that Sarkozy had visited Turkey when he was a young man and said he would urge him to visit Turkey to try to win him over to the prospect of Turkey joining the EU. “He should come and see today’s Turkey,” Erdoğan said, suggesting that during this visit Sarkozy would see that Turkey has been more progressive in certain fields than many members of the EU.

Erdoğan did so, and Sarkozy accepted his invitation to come to Turkey and see its progress for himself, noting that he may visit after November.

During both visits, the French, German and Turkish sides stuck to their own positions concerning the eventual goal of Turkey’s membership negotiations with Brussels. Also during both visits, the sides avoided using harsh language towards each other publicly and mostly focused on messages of improving bilateral relations.

Such similar pictures during the two visits led to questions by some on whether Turkey has given up trying to persuade the leaders of the two founding members of the EU on its stance which rejects anything less than full membership.

Turkish officials and analysts firmly rule out those questions, noting that a stance favoring the improvement of bilateral relations through excluding Turkey’s EU bid from the paradigm could be a preferable option for the French and German leaders, but absolutely not for Turkey.

EU countries unanimously agreed to open official accession talks with Turkey in 2005 before Merkel and Sarkozy came to power. Sarkozy claims Turkey does not belong in Europe, while Merkel promotes a “privileged partnership” that falls short of membership, a formula Ankara categorically rejects. In Berlin in May 2009, Merkel and Sarkozy made a joint statement declaring that they shared a common position regarding Turkey’s accession to the EU in that it should be offered a privileged partnership, not full EU membership.

“The French took the wrong lane from the beginning when they resolved that Turkey’s EU membership would negatively influence France’s dominance within the bloc,” a senior Turkish diplomat told Sunday’s Zaman, noting that their second miscalculation was assuming that they could “continue business with Turkey as usual” through taking certain steps in a positive direction in bilateral relations.

“Our answer has always been ‘no’ to such miscalculations: ‘The support you have given or not given to our EU membership is a part of bilateral relations. This will negatively reflect on you’,” the same diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, echoing Ankara’s answer to Paris.

He was also referring to the fact that Ankara has imposed an undeclared embargo on French companies that were shunned in major tenders in Turkey or vetoed in international contracts in which Turkey was a major participant as a result of Sarkozy’s policies. “If the French want to move mountains, before everything else, they should give up their miscalculations about Turkey and its EU bid. Looking back in history, one can see that Turks and the French had major achievements when they acted together. Our relationship should not be a zero-sum, but should be a positive-sum relationship,” the diplomat said.

Remarks by Mehmet Özcan, the head of the Center for EU Studies at the Ankara-based International Strategic Research Organization (USAK), supported what the diplomat asserted.

“Turkey is not buying what is being offered by France at the moment. What can the Turkish side want from the French side other than support for its EU membership?” Özcan told Sunday’s Zaman, suggesting that France wants a bigger share from the Turkish market without giving “anything in return.”

France is already the second-largest investor in Turkey, and many French companies have been very active in the Turkish market for some time now.

According to Bahadır Kaleağası, the international coordinator of the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (TÜSİAD), France and Germany wish for an improved bilateral relationship with Turkey, on condition of excluding debates on Turkey’s goal of full EU membership from this relationship. “What Turkey should do is urgently act on problematic and fundamental issues such as the Cyprus issue, reforms in education, women’s rights. Via such actions, it will be forcing those opponent countries such as Germany and France to treat her as a prospective member of the EU,” Kaleağası told Sunday’s Zaman.

“In the absence of such actions, it is normal that minds are confused as to whether Turkey has given up trying to persuade France and Germany to support its full EU membership,” he added.

A promising equal partner

Senior political analyst Ahmet İnsel believes that there is a “strategic” change in Turkey’s relations with the EU, but, he says, this is not a change in Turkey’s firmness on the goal of full membership.

“The change is about the reasoning used by Ankara on why it should become a member. Until now, Ankara has been saying that it should become a member because the EU side promised this at the time and was constantly reminding the EU of the principle of pacta sunt servanda [a principle of international law which means in Latin that agreements must be kept],” İnsel told Sunday’s Zaman. “Instead of these arguments, Ankara is now listing concrete reasons one by one both in terms of Turkey’s strategic and economic power and potential and explaining what kind of significant contributions it could bring to the EU in the case of it becoming a member,” İnsel said. “The European side has come to understand that ‘the bride’s dowry is not empty’,” he added sarcastically, using a European idiom.

According to İnsel, an editorial published on Friday in the prestigious French daily Le Monde is a strong sign that Turkey’s new approach is being influential. “Keeping Turkey away from the EU has a political price,” the Le Monde editorial was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency. “It is easy to imagine how a Turkey -- at the same time a member of the EU and with strong credit in the Middle East -- will offer a significant opportunity to Europe for increasing its clout in the region. And [Europe will] have more assets to weigh with more radical elements in the region.”

It is not easy to eradicate the enlargement skepticism among European leaders, but it is easier to take “the trump cards” in the hands of leaders such as Sarkozy and Merkel through “acting as an equal partner who promises to bring a lot to the EU, instead of saying ‘I’m not playing this game’,” İnsel said.

However, he also warned that too much emphasis on the “geographical, historical and strategic importance of the candidate country” might be off-putting and sound too “egocentric” if the wording was not carefully choreographed.

İnsel, meanwhile, recalled that days ahead of her visit to Turkey Merkel provided details of her brainchild “privileged partnership” concept.

“There are intertwined relations between Turkey and the EU. There are 35 chapters in the [membership] talks. I am confident that 27-28 of them can be taken up, and this will really mean a privileged partnership. Some issues, like institutional integration, will be left out of the scope,” Merkel told a group of Turkish reporters.

It has now become more obvious that Merkel’s idea of privileged partnership is no longer sustainable even at a conceptual level, İnsel said. “When Turkey has fulfilled whatever is necessary concerning those 27-28 chapters -- even with the EU or not -- what will they say? They cannot defend the argument of privileged partnership in such a situation. If any country attempts to do so, then a grave question in terms of political philosophy waits for that country to answer,” İnsel said.

Civilization and geography

The Le Monde editorial to which İnsel referred concluded by saying: “The story is not over. Nicolas Sarkozy has not closed all the doors. The president must keep his promise to move quickly in Ankara.”

There is still a long time before Sarkozy’s planned visit to Turkey, and his itinerary will obviously be determined through coordination between French and Turkish diplomats.

Cappadocia, only three-and-a-half hours from the capital, is the second favorite holiday destination for foreign diplomats based in Ankara, -- with İstanbul obviously being number one. It may also be a felicitous spot on the French president’s itinerary. Back in the spring of 2007, during presidential campaigning, Sarkozy had clearly revealed his obstinacy regarding Turkey during a heated television debate with his then-Socialist rival Ségolène Royal.

During the debate, Royal argued that as an EU member, France could not ignore that it has engaged in a commitment with the start of accession negotiations between Ankara and the EU, emphasizing that “the door cannot be closed completely to a great country and civilization like Turkey.”

“When you say to those who live in Cappadocia that they are Europeans, the only thing you will have achieved is to strengthen Islamism,” Sarkozy then replied.

At the time, a senior Turkish diplomat said he believed that Sarkozy had picked the most unfortunate example by arguing that Turkey is “not on the European continent and belongs to Asia, and thus doesn’t belong to European civilization.”

“A Europe without Cappadocia cannot even be imagined,” Ambassador Oğuz Demiralp, then-head of the Secretariat General for EU Affairs, told Sunday’s Zaman at the time, while recalling that Cappadocia is the land where the pre-Socratic thinkers laid the foundations of European philosophy.