After years of 'yes if'

Friday October 22, 2004

The Guardian Suspicion and impatience still hang heavy over this most European of Turkish cities in spite of the best report on EU entry that Turkey has ever received. The European commission has just recommended that when Europe's leaders hold their next summit in December, they should decide to open accession negotiations at last. Though the talks themselves will take years, as happens with every applicant, Turkey's decades-long wait in the EU's anteroom appears almost over.

However, instead of rejoicing, Turkish supporters of EU entry are not yet convinced. Even if the summit says yes in principle, they fear no date will be named despite earlier promises that, once agreed, talks would start "without delay". They see rising Turkoscepticism in France and Germany. They note the commission's warning that Brussels could suspend negotiations unilaterally at any time. They hear voices calling for Turkey to get a special status or "privileged partnership" instead of full membership.

"It's important not to create new reservations, and impossible for us to accept that transition mechanisms become blocking efforts," Abdullah Gül, the foreign minister, said here this week at a special conference of Greens from the European parliament.

Nowhere is mistrust stronger than among Turkey's rapidly expanding civic movements. Outside the country there is a widespread view that Turkey's drive for EU membership is largely motivated by economic factors and that the union has used this dream of prosperity to extract political change. It is certainly true that governments in Ankara have started on the path of political reform in recent years, and none more vigorously than the moderate Islamists who swept into power just under two years ago. They have enacted measures to end torture, abolish the state security courts and reduce the political role of the military.

But human rights activists argue that this analysis underplays grassroots pressures for change. It is not just the EU's requirements that have made governments clean up their acts, they say. Public opinion has also played a major role - a sign that Turkey is already more democratic than most Europeans realise.

Pinar Ilkkaracan, an organiser with Women for Women's Human Rights, proudly recalls the energetic campaign in the late 1990s for reform of the country's civil code. Key proposals were to give a wife equal rights to household property and end the need to get her husband's consent to work outside the home. Nationalists and religious conservatives claimed these were disastrous measures that would increase divorce rates and destroy Turkish society. The then government was pushing for EU membership and as long ago as 1999 won agreement from EU leaders that Turkey be considered a "candidate country" (but without any promise of access talks). In spite of this step forward, it balked at bringing the civil code into line with European standards. "So we had to fight with our own lobbying," says Ilkkaracan. "Over 120 women's groups from all over Turkey demonstrated, and we won."

Other activists point to last year's marches to reverse the government's decision to allow American troops to go through Turkey to invade Iraq. Although elite opinion, including most major newspapers and all television channels supported the government, the public was against it. Some saw the war as a Christian crusade against a Muslim country. Others expected the war would lead to instability in Iraq and feared it could seriously affect Turkey's economy, as happened with the first Gulf war.

"Opposition to US troops going through Turkey was a sudden issue where we had to act fast without much debate or going into nuances. We put together a wide coalition," says Sinan Gökcen, project coordinator for the Turkish branch of the Helsinki Citizens' Assembly, a pan-European civil rights group. The street protests helped to persuade parliament to reject the government's line with dozens of MPs defying the whips. "It was the first time MPs had voted in such numbers against a party leadership," Gökcen says. It was a more dramatic sign of parliamentary democracy than anything seen in Westminster in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Traditionally a strong US ally, the vote aligned Turkey with France and Germany, the main European opponents of the Iraq war. It also reinforced Turkey's move towards a more balanced foreign policy with better links to Iran and its Arab neighbours in place of what Ziya Onis, an international relations professor, calls "the US-Israel-Turkey triangle". Turkey's shift from a coercive to a benign international posture was clear over Cyprus, where even the Turkish military changed course and promoted the UN peace plan.

Whether this means Turkey can be a model for the Arab world as a modern secular democracy which respects religious freedoms is doubtful. Countries develop according to their own dynamics depending on culture, history and internal demands for change. Neither reform nor revolution can be imported. But Turkey's newly confident civil-society groups are already forging links with their neighbours, regardless of whether the country joins the EU.

In Istanbul, the EU notion of using Turkey as a "bridge" to the Middle East also appears simplistic. Some champions of EU entry argue that once Turkey is inside the union the Arab states will have less interest in it. They are making their own association agreements with Brussels in any case. The EU's best "bridge" to the Middle East is to develop a stronger and more independent line on Israel's conflict with the Palestinians.

The EU also needs to give full and equal rights to the millions of Turks, Kurds and Arabs who live in its midst. Those who practise Islam must be free to do so with dignity. This is more likely to impress Europe's Muslim neighbours than bringing Turkey into the EU.

But that does not imply that blocking Turkey's EU entry would not matter. While arguing that the EU did not start the liberalisation process, human rights activists in Turkey say it has clearly accelerated it. They want this alliance with Europe to continue, and they applaud the fact that the commission promised special efforts to develop a dialogue with Turkish civil society, not just with the government.