The same Sarkozy & Merkel have now seen to it that the Belgian prime minister, Mr. Herman Van Rompuy, whose most mentioned merit seems to be his opposition to Turkey’s accession to the EU, has become the first president of the European Council. Mr. Van Rompuy is on record as saying in a meeting of the Council of Europe (of which Turkey is a founding member) in 2004: “Turkey is not part of Europe and will never be part of Europe. An expansion of the EU to include Turkey cannot be considered as just another expansion, as in the past. The universal values [that prevail] in Europe, and which are also fundamental values of Christianity, will lose vigor with the entry of a large Islamic country such as Turkey.”I must admit that as someone who has throughout the years ardently supported the EU as a project for the consolidation of peace, freedom, pluralism and democracy in Europe and Turkey’s accession to it, I find Van Rompuy’s appointment annoying, to say the least. It is indeed upsetting to see that someone who is so clearly opposed to the EU’s founding philosophy of “unity in diversity” become its first chief.
It may be surprising that the majority of Turkish citizens still support EU accession despite strong opposition coming primarily from France and Germany since 2005. This can, however, surely be explained by Turkish citizens’ appreciation of the support provided by the EU accession process to the liberalization of the country’s political regime and its economic progress. It is a great pity that the Sarkozys and the Merkels have not only rendered the EU increasingly irrelevant to the reform agenda, but what is worse even encouraged opponents of reform in Turkey. Still no government in Turkey should or can be expected to give up pursuing EU accession unless the EU slams the door on it. Turkey should not give up pursuing EU membership because it is in its national interest, and also because the EU living up to its founding philosophy of “unity in diversity” hinges to a considerable extent on Turkish accession.
What is the nature of the Turkey-EU relationship at the end of 10 years of Turkey’s candidacy? What happens to the Turkish reform movement if the EU slams the door on Turkey? These were among the questions debated at a meeting in Istanbul on the occasion of the launching of Dr. Ioannis N. Grigoriadis’ book, titled “Trials of Europeanization: Turkish Political Culture and the European Union” (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009). Dr. Grigoriadis, who is currently lecturing at Bilkent University in Ankara, is a distinguished Greek expert on Turkish politics. His book is surely the most comprehensive and best study so far on the impact of the EU accession process not only on Turkey’s constitutional and legal order, but also on its political culture, that is, on the political values and behavior of Turkish citizens.
I agree with the following conclusion Grigoriadis arrives at: “What the EU achieved by giving Turkey a membership perspective was to untangle the liberalization process by promoting and anchoring liberal reform and facilitating democratic consolidation. … The role of the Justice and Development Party [AKP] with its widespread appeal to the periphery of Turkish society in popularizing the liberal reform discourse initiated by the EU is of critical importance for the success of the process.”
I strongly agree when Grigoriadis concludes, “The repeated statements by the AKP leaders that the democratization process has become independent of the EU could be seen as an important signal that even if Turkey’s accession fails, the Copenhagen Criteria will simply be renamed as the ‘Ankara Criteria’ and reforms will continue.” That the reform process which was undermined between 2005 and 2008 by negative signals coming from the EU and the anti-democratic interventions by the military and the judiciary in Turkey has picked up since the turn of this year and is gaining momentum by the government’s initiative to solve the Kurdish problem and bring the armed uprising of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to an end testifies to this point.
I need to add, however, that although the EU process has surely reinforced it, the transition from a procedural to substantive democracy which Turkey is still going through was triggered before the start of the EU accession process in 1999 by the economic and political reforms led by late President Turgut Özal in the 1980s, and was enhanced by the increasingly daring criticism intellectuals directed against the illiberal and military-guided democracy instituted by the military regime of the period between 1980 and 1983. This is why I am cautiously optimistic about Turkey moving on to consolidate a liberal and pluralistic democracy, whether the EU slams the door on it or not.
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