In 1952 Turkey joined NATO, becoming a basic pillar of the European leg of the Euro-Atlantic defense system. Under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, any attack against one or more members in Europe or North America will be deemed to be made against all members, implying that Turkey was regarded as a European country.In 1963 the European Economic Community (EEC) signed an agreement with Turkey to give it a perspective for membership. At the same time French President Charles de Gaulle vetoed Great Britain's membership on grounds that it was not a European country. When the agreement concluded with Turkey entered into force the following year, European Commission President Walter Hallstein said: "Turkey is part of Europe. That is the deepest meaning of this process: it is, in the form most appropriate to our times, the confirmation of a truth, which is more than the abbreviated expression of a geographical statement or a historical observation, valid for a few centuries. Turkey is part of Europe."
Relations between Turkey and the European Union were suspended for most of the 1970s and 1980s for several reasons: the military coup of 1971, the Cyprus intervention of 1974 and the military coup of 1980, which closed down political parties and trade unions and imprisoned many people on political grounds. Moreover, Greece, upon becoming a member of the EU in 1981, started to use its membership as a tool in its disputes with Turkey, further complicating Turkey's relations with the bloc.
Eventually, the EU summit held in Helsinki in December 1999 made a historic decision. Turkey was officially designated "a candidate country destined to join the union on the basis of the same criteria applied to the other candidate countries." This decision served to postpone Turkey's membership for an indefinite period of time. The coalition government led by Bülent Ecevit prepared a national program to implement the short and long-term reforms demanded by the EU, and in summer 2002, Parliament passed several constitutional amendments and other laws to ensure further compliance with the Copenhagen criteria.
The early elections of November 2002 gave birth to a great reshaping of Turkish politics. The Justice and Development Party (AK Party), led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, secured a large majority in Parliament, thus boosting the reform process. A 2004 report issued by an independent commission chaired by Martti Ahtisaari described this development as a "silent revolution." The institutional and legal system in Turkey has been redesigned in a short time, raising expectations for a better life and allowing for more respect for human rights and freedom of expression. There are many things that Turkey should do in this reform process; however, Turkey has become more than ever an open and democratic society, and this can be attributed to the alluring EU membership that will be gained in the future.
Despite the fact that Turkey has never exerted as much effort to become a member of the European family as it is today and that Turkey is undertaking these reforms thanks to the EU's soft power, while the US is creating chaos in Iraq and the Middle East, the EU has never acted with as much of a double-faced attitude toward Turkey as it is today. It has become obvious that some European capitals have never even considered initiating membership negotiations with Turkey. They were under the illusion that that Turkey would never comply with the membership criteria. When Turkey started to fulfill all these requirements one by one, they counteracted this by manufacturing geographical, geo-strategic, religious, cultural and historical criteria.
The membership process of a country has never been so politicized, and religious and cultural prejudices have never been called into play so intensely as with Turkey. National and religious interests have dominated politics, and European visions have yielded to short-term domestic policy considerations and a static concept of history.
The opponents of Turkey's membership enthusiastically talk about European values and claim that Turkey is not geographically connected to Europe, but they are forced to use the Cyprus issue as a fig leaf to conceal the crime they are committing against the principle of pacta sunt servanda, a legacy of Roman law. Indeed, from Cyprus, situated geographically to the southeast of Ankara and even south of Tunisia, it takes less than half an hour to fly to Damascus but more than four hours to Brussels. By using the Greek Cypriots' hostile attitude toward Turkey and the new membership criteria specifically devised against Turkey, the plan is to discourage Turkey, cause it to abandon membership negotiations and turn its face from the EU.
If Turkey discovers that the long-sought membership is nothing but a mirage and that the promises made are nothing but false maneuvers, the reform process in Turkey will not only slow down or halt, but may also be reversed. This would be a great gift to Islamic radicals and other anti-democratic groups in Turkey and at same time spread the message to the entire Muslim world that the Europeans do not believe in the coexistence of Islam and democracy.
For this reason, the EU would for the first time become a factor of instability not only for Turkey but also for the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia. To say "no" to Turkey on cultural and religious grounds would be a harsh message to some 20 million Muslims in Europe. They would conclude that whatever they do to integrate with the Western societies in which they live, they are destined to remain second-class citizens due to their origins, and this would trigger great social problems for domestic politics. Debates concerning Turkey's EU membership reflect not only short-range political considerations but also a lack of knowledge about modern Turkey and are based on outdated historical reasons about what divides us.
The foregoing words you have been reading as if I wrote them do not belong to me. They are the very words of Ambassador Ingmar Karlsson, who has served as Sweden's consul general in İstanbul for seven years and who is also a prominent thinker and political scientist. I quoted them from his book, "Europa och turken, betraktelser kring en komplicerad relation" (Europe and Turks: Thoughts on a Complicated Relation), translated into Turkish in January 2007. At a time when the Third National Program is heatedly being debated in connection with Turkey's EU bid despite all domestic political problems, I must say nothing has changed on the Western front and that the ideas that Karlsson correctly presented about two years ago still remain valid today.
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