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A sour mood as Ankara stands on the threshold

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  • A sour mood as Ankara stands on the threshold

    Financial Times (London, England)
    September 28, 2005 Wednesday
    London Edition 1

    A sour mood as Ankara stands on the threshold

    By VINCENT BOLAND

    Last Saturday morning, a few hundred protesters gathered outside
    Istanbul Bilgi University and threw eggs and insults at a group of
    historians and human rights workers as they rushed between riot
    police into the sanctuary of the university's main building. Amid the
    shouts of "treason" and "lies", it seemed that, despite many
    indicators to the contrary, the battle between progressives and
    reactionaries that has been such a notable characteristic of modern
    Turkey has not yet been won.

    The cause of the most recent outbreak of hostilities was a conference
    on the mass killing of Armenians that took place as the Ottoman
    empire broke apart in 1915. A court ruling banning the conference
    forced its relocation and sparked a ferocious row over free speech at
    an especially sensitive moment, barely a week before Turkey begins
    the long and arduous process of joining the European Union. It is
    little wonder that Abdullah Gul, Turkey's foreign minister, was moved
    at the height of the controversy to observe that "no country can
    shoot itself in the foot like Turkey can".

    The incident was revealing of the sour mood that Turkey is in as it
    stands on the threshold of Europe. The country was desperate to be
    asked to join the EU; now that the invitation has been extended, it
    seems unsure whether to accept. In this, Turkey differs from the
    former communist countries of eastern Europe. For Poles, Czechs and
    Hungarians, accession to the Union was a moment of destiny, the
    righting of a wrong caused by the second world war.

    There is no comparable feeling in Turkey. The country was the vision
    of one man - Mustafa Kemal Atatu

    It is because so many Turks are suspicious of what the EU wants from
    Turkey, and of what it is prepared to offer in return, that there
    seems to be so little enthusiasm for the accession process. In a
    public opinion survey published this month, the German Marshall Fund
    of the US found that the proportion of Turks who believed that EU
    membership would be a good thing had declined in a year from 73 per
    cent to 63 per cent.

    Onur Oymen, a veteran diplomat who is now a senior official in the
    opposition Republican People's Party, sums up the ambivalence of many
    Turks. "The day Turkey joins the EU as a full member will be a
    historic day," he says. "It would be premature to celebrate anything
    before then." Ural Akbulut, rector of Middle East Technical
    University, adds: "I believe the accession process will succeed but I
    am less optimistic now than I was a year ago."

    For many Turks, the experience of the EU since December 17 last year,
    when the Union's leaders invited urkey to join, has not been happy,
    involving too many concessions for too little gain. Cyprus has
    bedevilled relations between Ankara and Brussels throughout 2005, as
    European governments put pressure on Turkey to recognise the Greek
    Cypriot administration in the south of the divided island while, in
    the eyes of many in Turkey, ignoring the isolation of Turkish
    Cypriots in the north.

    That has been a gift to opponents within Turkey of EU accession. Many
    Turks also complain that Europeans put too much focus on the plight
    of Turkey's ethnic Kurdish minority. Amid an upsurge in Kurdish
    separatist violence in recent weeks, these issues have fuelled a rise
    in nationalism and euroscepticism. These were the sentiments that
    Saturday's protesters against the Armenia conference undoubtedly
    sought to exploit.

    According to Guler Sabanci, head of the Sabanci family conglomerate
    and Turkey's leading businesswoman, there has always been a segment
    of Turkish society opposed to EU membership. "These people will find
    a reason, any time and anywhere, to be against this journey, and they
    have reasons right now," she says. Still, she insists, they do not
    represent the broad mass of Turkish society. "Now and in the future
    there is a bigger consensus that they should not get away with it any
    more."

    If the rise of nationalism in Turkey is behind the fall in support
    for EU entry, the government must take part of the blame, according
    to some commentators. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister,
    returned from last December's summit in Brussels in  - triumph. Yet
    he failed to follow through, they say, and lost the reform momentum
    that led to significant political and economic modernisation in 2003
    and 2004.

    A certain amount of reform fatigue was probably understandable. But
    Mr Akbulut believes the prime minister underestimated the chances of
    success last December. "Erdogan and his team were not prepared for
    the success of December 17 and its challenges," he says. "We can see
    that they did not have the plans and people and programmes in place
    to build on the momentum and this damaged his image in Europe."

    If Mr Akbulut is right, the EU has as much reason to be disappointed
    with Turkey as Turkey has to be disappointed with the EU. The
    negotiating process will undoubtedly provide opportunities for mutual
    misunderstanding, perhaps even the reason for one side or the other
    to walk away. Nevertheless, for some observers, joining the EU is
    less important for Turkey than the accession process and the pressure
    it puts on Turkey to lose its inhibitions about the outside world,
    recognise its democratic shortcomings, reform its institutions and
    strengthen its still-shaky civil society.

    Dogan Cansizlar, chairman of the Capital Markets Board of Turkey, a
    financial markets watchdog, says: "The EU is a direction, an
    indicator, a light that Turkey can move towards." Many Europeans, he
    says, judge Turkey by the Turkish communities in their countries,
    which are often more conservative and hidebound than Turks in Turkey.

    Ms Sabanci believes the process of joining the EU will change Turkey
    and make it fit better into the union that, she is convinced, it will
    eventually join. She had a personal stake in the dispute over free
    speech, because a university founded and funded by her family was one
    of the organisers of the Armenia conference. She also believes the
    dispute over free speech is symptomatic of a growing awareness of the
    importance of such things, not just for Turkey's EU aspirations but
    for the country as a whole.

    "This is a very long journey, and during this journey Turkey will
    change," Ms Sabanci says. "The Turkey that will enter the European
    Union is not the Turkey we have today."
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