Turkiye’s European integration: The Reality of Pragmatism or the Dream of Romanticism?
Turkey’s EU admission process exemplified a 60-year-old moving process with an unknown result. The Turkish authorities, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have publicly denounced Brussels’ identical attitude toward such discriminatory treatment of Turkish society and state, humiliatingly putting Turkey in the status of a hopeless candidate for more than half a century.
Turkey has been an associate member of the European Community since 1963 and a candidate for European Union membership since 1987. The current level of social liberties and democratic rights in Turkey does not conform to the acknowledged norms in EU countries. As a result, the Turkish state’s economic development falls behind that of the industrialized countries of the European continent.
Simultaneously, during the second part of the twentieth century, Turkey has made incremental progress toward the establishment of a democratic society and a liberal market economy built on the Western patterns. It is important to remember that Turkey’s starting opportunities in the direction of democracy and market were significantly different in comparison to European countries, taking into account the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, monarchical despotism, the traditional suppression of social freedoms by the power of the sultan and Islamic religion, and feudal remnants of economic development. The authoritarian one-party regime of Ataturk, the creator of the Turkish Republic, served as the country’s transitional stage from imperial oppression to democracy.
However, Turkey agreed to the following Western demands to alter the political power system in the middle of the twentieth century. Since 1950, Turkey has transitioned from a single-party to a multi-party election system; the country has witnessed the birth of power alternation, and the Turkish parliament has gone a long way toward establishing competitiveness between the government and the opposition. However, Turkish democracy has acquired new facets of respect for citizens’ rights and their choices in conjunction with Islamic morality.
Turkey has also made a significant leap in its economic development, transforming its economy from an eternal beggar of foreign financial aid and a supplier of guest workers to the markets of Europe, such as Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc., to the development of its own industrial production, especially in such sectors as light industry, agrarian, chemical, transportation, military industry, machine building, energy, and services markets, including tourism and banking sectors.
One can debate the evident and politically motivated injustice against the “eternal candidate,” Turkey, given that the EU welcomed nearly all of the Baltic and Eastern European nations into its ranks after the fall of the USSR and the socialist commonwealth at the turn of the century. Turkey was particularly ahead of the old communist camp at the time in terms of many aspects of its political and economic development, not to mention Turkey’s participation in NATO from February 1952.
Among the counterarguments to Turkey’s admission to the EU, European politicians and officials, as a rule, name the usual reasons: failure to match the level of democracy, respect for the rights and freedoms of citizens, economic problems, the growth of extremism and xenophobia, and imperfections in national legislation according to EU norms. At the same time, Europeans have traditionally feared Turkish passivism, Islamism, and radicalism. Germany is particularly sensitive to the subject of cultural differences between Germans and Turks because it is the country with the largest Turkish diaspora in Europe (more than 5 million people).
It should be acknowledged that the development of war situations in the countries of Asia and Africa, along with enormous migrations of the Muslim population to Europe, has put the multiculturalism policy of the developed democratic countries of the EU in a position of severe difficulty.
The European policy of supporting the so-called LGBT community, which is abhorrent in the predominantly conservative Turkish society with its traditional values of family and the religion of Islam, also causes considerable contradiction between the EU and Turkey.
Nevertheless, Turkey’s interest in EU membership is motivated not so much by the democratic values of Europeans as by the economic and scientific and educational (technological) achievements of the Old World. The active collaboration between Turkey and Europe and its association with the EU have played a significant role in the modern technological advancements of the Turkish economy.
As is well known, Turkey’s attempts to somewhat expedite the pace of its admission to the EU, even during the early years of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s presidency, were unsuccessful. In response to this disregard for Turkey’s interests, Ankara has begun to demonstrate a new East-oriented policy. Erdoğan actually pioneered the neo-Ottomanist philosophy and Turkey’s rise to prominence as a supraregional force with sway over the former Ottoman Empire’s territories and the newly independent Turkic nations in the post-Soviet space.
In alliance with Britain and the United States, Turkey, due to its favorable economic and geographical position, gradually turned into the most important transit zone on the way, first of all, of energy goods such as oil and gas from the Caspian basin – Azerbaijan, for the moment, and in the future, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, to the European market. Erdoğan started establishing global pan-Turkic organizations, including the Organization of Turkic States, which have highly practical economic and political objectives. It enables Turkey to become a major hub on the route to the EU, giving it the chance to have a positive impact on Europe in the future. It also enables the creation of a new economic market that includes the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and Pakistan, which together have a population of over 375 million.
Naturally, the tragedy of the devastating February 2023 earthquake in the south-eastern regions of Turkey has created an extremely crisis situation, which, along with the collapse of the Turkish lira and rising inflation, requires the authorities to look for new opportunities to stabilize the economic situation in the country. Given the adaptability of Turkish diplomacy and in light of the military-political situation involving Russia and Ukraine, which resulted in a de facto deterioration of relations between Russia and the West, Turkey is currently attempting to increase its influence over the outcome of the energy transit to the EU nations.
Erdoğan began to partially exploit the topic of Finland and Sweden’s membership in NATO for the same purpose. The Kurdish issue became merely an excuse for Helsinki and Stockholm’s joining the North Atlantic Alliance because the Kurdish crisis is only solved in Ankara, not in European capitals. Erdoğan has already stated his desire for Turkey to be admitted to the EU as soon as possible and to give Turks with advantageous financial loans as a prerequisite for NATO expansion, including Sweden.
In Vilnius, the Swedes did not refuse the Turks’ support for their EU aspirations. However, this does not mean that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will be reciprocated promptly by Charles Michel in Brussels. So far, Erdoğan has taken a time-out on the NATO fate of Sweden until the end of the parliamentary vacation in October this year. Time will tell what kind of vacation the Europeans will mark for themselves on Turkey’s membership in the EU. We currently believe that the Europeans involved in the Turkish issue have gone on vacation and won’t be returning…
However, European officials and academics have recently made frequent references to the difficulty of Turkey entering the EU anytime soon in the international press following the NATO summit in Vilnius, claiming that the NATO and EU membership processes are distinct things.
For instance, according to Peter Stano, the Lead Spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Commission, the accession procedure takes years, not hours, thus the EU won’t be able to welcome Turkey until the end of 2024.
In other words, Brussels is unwilling to accept Ankara’s ultimatum conditions. However, what is to be understood by the statement made by Peter Stano on the deadline “until the end of 2024”? What will ultimately happen with this situation in 2025? Until 2028, Erdoğan will continue to serve as Turkish president.
So far, the EU is not even ready to grant Turkey a visa-free regime, because the criteria for visa liberalization require the candidate to respect human rights and political freedom, which is not enough in Turkey today, according to Peter Stano.
Oddly enough in terms of an operational initiative, the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs called on Turkey to recognize the Armenian genocide as one of the new accusations against Turkey on its road to the EU. However, in the past, the idea originated from Armenian organizations, even though the European Parliament has previously favorably discussed this topic of acknowledging the horror of the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War since 1987. In this case, however, such promptness of the official EU institutions testifies not so much to their interest in resolving the Armenian-Turkish historical contradictions as to their desire to use the Armenian issue once again to satisfy their interests against Turkey.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made a similar demand for EU membership in exchange for NATO membership in Vilnius at the same occasion, citing the fact that he had already presented this plan to US President Joseph Biden. In other words, it is not Europe that decides the fate of the EU, but their master in the form of the United States. Accordingly, the “decision” of Brussels and the fate of Turkey’s European integration – whether it will become an achievement of Erdoğan’s pragmatism or remain a pipe dream of Turkish romanticism – will depend on Washington’s position and its valuable indications in favor or against.
