Turkey: what is the answer?

On July 1st Croatia was welcomed as 28th Member Country of the European Union and at the same time, Serbia was granted a concrete perspective for adhesion. Also Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Albania have good reasons to hope that EU membership will be negotiated in the near future. Given implied expectations, will the European Union be able to create the political and constitutional conditions for this to happen? Will the EU overcome the present monetary and economic crisis, which is also a crisis in confidence in the European government system, and resist the crisis in the long run? In the process of enlargement towards Balkan states and peoples, will the European Union also include Turkey, with which EU adhesion negotiations are already under way and which – as just decided – negotiations will continue in spite of the fact that human and civil rights have been blatantly breached in recent months? Under various angles Turkey is a particular case among candidate countries. Not only with respect to the recent popular uprising against the government, evidently unable to carry out a rational dialogue with citizens leading to a solution the conflict through democratic and constitutional means. The European Union encompasses the creation of a transnational, democratically legitimized and federally organized community of a new kind, whereby European peoples and States unite their destinies. This community is marked by a future of stability. It has the tools to overcome the problems that prompted its foundation, thus enabling all of its citizens, as well as its thriving political and social forces, to enact that project. The European Union is founded on a binding, written constitutional system. Its authoritative principles are freedom, democracy, respect of human rights and fundamental freedoms and the rule of the law. It is a Community of reconciliation, peace, solidarity and rights. And most of all, the European Union is a community of values. The question regarding the acceptance of Turkey as a candidate to EU membership should be addressed within this framework. It isn’t a question of foreign policy, which ought to be solved through diplomatic means. In fact, the issue pertains to the compatibility of the social and government system of Turkey with that of the European Union. An affirmative answer to this question raises substantial and reasonable doubts. Despite the fact that it has been a member of the Council of Europe for many years, and despite its fifty-year-long relations with the European Community, to date Turkey has not created the necessary conditions for entry in the EU, even though for a long time its political leadership considered the idea of the country’s candidate status. The reasons for emerging incompatibilities are to be found in the fundamental differences in its historical and cultural developments. The success of the European Union and its long-lasting cohesion are grounded on the cultural and historical consensus characterizing Member State countries’ mutual relations. The Turkish population is not involved in this consensus, even though most of its educated classes, the military and the representatives of the economic and industrial sectors claim their Western or European identity and thought. The affiliation of the Turkish population to Islam is not critical to the response to Turkey’s adhesion request. The European Union is not a ‘Christian club’, even though Christianity is one of the most influential forces in Europe. Several millions of Muslims live and work in Member States, and many of them are citizens of these countries and therefore also citizens of the EU. They are European Muslims. More important is the fact that each community that wants to reach this goal must prove that it has the tools to meet the interests and the needs of its members. This means that it should be governable. A country’s governability depends not only on the solidity and the reliability of its political institutions. It also depends on its territorial expansion, on its demographic conditions and – last but not least – on its geopolitical context. In other words, a community is not free to expand as it wishes. At a certain point each organization reaches a critical threshold. Turkey is a large and populous country located in a geopolitically exposed area, extending to the extreme peripheral boundaries of EU territory. It is thus very likely that Turkey’s EU adhesion could carry with it the burden of centrifugal tendencies that are likely to manifest themselves in such ways so as to question cohesion. For Turkey it would be best to seek a solution that is different from that of adhesion, such as that of a special partnership. It is worthwhile negotiating the contents and forms of this partnership. To this important NATO partner, performing the delicate action of linking the East and the West, should be given the possibility of enjoying every possible political and economic benefits deriving from a permanent, close cooperation with the Union. It would also enable Turkey, – more than it would as an EU member country – to play an important political and cultural role in the framework of the peoples of the region to which it is closer also in cultural and ethnical terms. EU adhesion is unlikely to satisfy Turkey’s ambitions. To include them would split the European Union with excessive pressures.