Acceptance as Candidate for EU Membership May Cap Turkey’s Exceptional Year

by Derk Kinnane Roelofsma
EurasiaNews Feature Article

October 20, 1999

Republished With Permission from Author

Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit is hoping that the best for Turkey in 1999 is yet to be. Certainly bigger things have happened this year than his trip to the United States at the end of September. Such official visits are supposed to be shows with some glitter. Unfortunately, the glitter had fallen away even before Ecevit’s plane landed at Andrews airforce base.

After the devastating earthquake on August 17, Turkey sought $5 billion from the US in loan guarantees. The Clinton administration, having sounded out Congress when it reconvened after Labor Day, informed Ankara the best it could do was less than $1 billion. The Turkish government responded by saying, virtually on the day before Ecevit’s arrival on September 26, that on reflection it did not need the guarantees. The big, shiny showpiece had collapsed before the show itself had begun.

The Turks are said to have turned down the Clinton offer because they felt such a reduced sum was not worth the risks involved to their international credit standing and of Congress tying approval to concessions on the Cyprus issue. Nor did the administration grant a Turkish request to waive high-interest debts for military goods. It was intimated to Ecevit that greater American financial largesse might follow from Turkey making the right choice in the matter of a $4 billion contract for the purchase of 145 attack helicopters. The leading competitors were on display at an international arms fair in Turkey when Ecevit got home. One is the Kamov Ka-50-2, made by an Israeli-Russian consortium. The other is Boeing’s Apache AH-64D Longbow.

Ecevit also held inconclusive discussions with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. According to a 1998 World Bank report, Turkey was the sixteenth biggest economy in the world. It has a gross national product of about $2 billion a year. It also has an economy beset by heavy state spending and high inflation. Talks with the IMF about a stand-by credit continued after Ecevit left with the Fund repeating again and again what a good thing sound budgets are.

The New York Times said the visit was unsuccessful and Ecevit left empty-handed. Not really. Ecevit provided a partial rebuttal to the Times when, collared by Sen. Joseph Biden, the Turkish leader frostily informed the imperious Senator that he had not come to Washington to beg for alms. He was also able to tell the press when he got back home that he had secured an increase worth $108 million in the U.S. quota for Turkish textile imports. Textiles are an important earner for Turkey. More importantly, the visit was not just about immediate financial and commercial matters. It was at least as much about mutual long-term geostrategic interests. About these, the sage, 74-year old Ecevit, once a virulently anti-American leftist, left Washington satisfied. The White House confirmed him in his belief that, as he put it some time ago, America is the country that best understands Turkey’s importance.

Clinton reiterated American support for Turkish admission to the European Union and for the project to build a pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey. The US repeated its support for Turkey to have, as an administration official put it, ‘a space at the table and a voice at the table’ in the EU’s European Security and Defense Identity (under construction, as they say on the web). Sweetest of all to Turkish ears was Clinton’s remark that there can be no return to the pre-1974 situation in Cyprus. Unfortunately, it was one of those remarks that on inspection mean less than they seemed to when uttered. Angry mutterings in Athens prompted a White House clarification that all the President had meant was that the Turkish and Greek communities on Cyprus should live in security. True, the visit was no dazzling showbiz success, but neither was it unsuccessful. It was useful but as such things often are, no big thing.

Big things, however, have happened for the Turks during 1999, so far four of them. The first was the arrest in Kenya in February of Abdullah Ocalan, the head of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, followed by his trial and conviction for treason. Since then the PKK at his urging has said it was ending its 15 year long guerrilla war and withdrawing from Turkey.

This may have somewhat eased the way for a resolution of the Kurdish issue. (See Derk Kinnane's EurasiaNews article on Turkey and the Kurds)

The second big thing touched on the secular-Islamist issue. It was the dramatic fall in the vote for the Islamist Virtue Party in parliamentary elections in April. The Virtue Party had been the biggest party in the Turkish Grand National Assembly and was expected if anything to increase its representation. Instead, it dropped from 21.9 percent to 15 percent of the votes as previous supporters deserted it for the rightist National Movement Party. This, with 18.2 percent, came second to Ecevit’s Democratic Left Party (22 percent).

The election eliminated the possibility of another crisis arising between Islamists in government and the secularist state establishment and its guarantor, the military. Such a crisis occurred in 1996-1997 under the Islamist Prime Minister, Necmettin Erbankan. It ended when the army forced Erbakan to resign.

The antagonism between secularists and Islamists has gone off the boil but still simmers. The most publicized recent incident concerns Merve Kavakci. Elected in April to the National Assembly on the Islamist Virtue Party ticket, she arrived to take her seat wearing an Islamist headscarf. Not only was she turned out of parliament, she was subsequently stripped of her Turkish nationality. That happened when it came out she had acquired US citizenship without asking, as required, for official permission. State prosecutors, claiming she has links with the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas, are now trying to charge her with membership in an illegal organization. As for headscarves, a bill has been introduced into parliament that specifies deputies may not cover their heads in its chamber.

The third big thing was the earthquake in August. It killed at least 15,800 people, injured 44,000, destroyed or damaged more than 244,000 houses and workplaces, and left 600,000 homeless. The devastated region, bordering the Sea of Marmara, is the industrial heartland of Turkey. At the time of writing, no figure for the missing had been released. When one is, it may indicate a much higher number of fatalities. The World Bank estimates the quake caused $6.5 billion in damage.

Within Turkey, the disaster triggered popular anger at the state’s failure to cope effectively, a failure all the less acceptable as the Turkish state casts itself as the provider of solutions to virtually all its citizens’ problems. An earthquake disaster fund set up years ago turned out to be empty. The army stayed in its barracks. Foreign relief workers were held up at the airport. Lack of official co-ordination forced people to do what they could for themselves. A survey by a private firm found that among survivors in the quake region, sixty percent were living on food and supplies donated by the private sector, not by the state. Turks have learned they possess a considerable civil society, capable of acting effectively and independently of the state. It was an important lesson.

Outside Turkey, the earthquake aroused humanitarian sympathies around the world, but most notably in Greece. This Greek popular sentiment facilitated efforts already urged on by Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, at an EU summit in Cologne in June: to get the Greeks and Turks to overcome their mutual hatred and prepare the way for Turkey to be taken into the EU. It was a switch for the EU, which had cold shouldered Turkey since 1997 over territorial disputes with Greece in the Aegean and Ankara’s bad human rights record. The Turks in turn had cold-shouldered the EU after having tried for 36 years to gain entry.

The Cologne summit showed that Europe’s leaders had decided that after all Turkey must not be alienated from Europe. The Greek government, subject to reservations, agreed. So even before the quake, Athens and Ankara were exploring ways of co-operating in cultural and economic affairs, against terrorism, and even in a modest way in the military field.

Out of such ‘seismic diplomacy’ came the fourth big thing of 1999. On September 5, Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou announced Greece would no longer block the acceptance of Turkey as a candidate for membership - which it had done since Turkey first approached the EU about membership. The dramatically improved political atmosphere was further enhanced by the swift delivery of Turkish aid to Athens, struck in turn by a major earthquake on September 7. But atmosphere is one thing, substance another. It is not clear yet how far or how fast either Greeks or Turks will soften their positions. As Ecevit told the Foreign Policy Association in New York, ‘Of course, we cannot expect our two foreign ministers to address immediately the sensitive issues pertaining to the Aegean, but they can pave the way to establish a psychological atmosphere” A few days later, Papandreou, visiting the quake-stricken Turkish village of Derince, said Athens wished Turkey to take steps to build confidence between the two countries.

The four big things will have influenced the fifth big one. That will be the conferral on Turkey by the EU of the status of a candidate for membership. If it happens, as seems likely, it will be at the EU summit in Helsinki on December 10 and 11. Never mind that the following process of admission will be slow and difficult, the psychological effect on the majority of Turks and all of the political elite will be of great importance, a sign of their coming full acceptance into the Western club.

Before the Helsinki summit, other things will bear on the Turkish application. In October, the Turkish Court of Appeals will review the death sentence passed on Ocalan in June. The court is expected to confirm the sentence. This will go down badly with the EU, which is seeking to have the United Nations call for a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty. The Turks will nevertheless follow their elaborate procedures and the decision will go next to a parliamentary judicial committee, and from there to President Suleyman Demirel. If he confirms the sentence, it will have to be published in the Official Gazette before it is carried out. There have been no executions in Turkey since 1984, the year Ocalan launched the PKK violence, and Turkish political circles are aware that EU membership will be endangered if Ocalan hangs.

Doubtless the message will be reiterated in Istanbul at another summit meeting, that of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on November 18 and 19. Clinton will be there, combining an appearance at the summit with a state visit at which he and Ecevit will be able to talk some more.

The death penalty, continuing use of torture, and the denial of human rights, including repression of free expression about the Kurdish and Islamic issues, are the core objections raised by those, such as the Nordic countries, reluctant to admit Turkey to the EU. As the Finnish Justice Minister, Johannes Koskinen, put it on September 17, the human rights of Turkey’s Kurdish minority are not being respected and “Turkey in no way fulfils democracy and fundamental rights in this area.” In a similar vein, Anne Lindh, the Swedish foreign minister, insists Turkey must undertake reforms, including abolition of the death penalty, before the EU considers allowing its application.

There are those in Turkey who concur although few of them would raise their voices, correctly fearing having to spend several years in prison if they did so. Still there is widespread acceptance within the political establishment of the need to overhaul the constitution and mend political ways. One voice that has spoken out without fear of being jailed is Turkey’s most senior judge. On September 6, Sami Selçuk set off what was called a ‘political earthquake.’ Selçuk is President, that is chief justice, of the Court of Appeals. Speaking to a gathering of the highest in the land, he had harsh words for the current constitution. This was adopted in 1982 under the scrutiny of the military who had taken power two years earlier. It ‘lacks any formal legitimacy, it is null and void,’ Selçuk told an audience that included the President and the Prime Minister. ‘It can be said that Turkey is a State with a constitution,’ Selçuk said, ‘but it is not a Constitutional State.” 

As for secularism, the chief justice said, ‘It is understandable that Ataturk and his comrades, who had suffered from the political exploitation of religion during the War of Independence [1920-1922], should later have tried to keep religion under control; and this was a realistic attitude.

But it cannot be continued in the context of a democratic, pluralist, popular state.’ Moreover, Selçuk noted, the government finances schools run by Sunni Muslims, but not those of other faiths. ‘The facts are clear,’ he said, ‘the Turkish Republic, from the point view of the source of its sovereignty, is secular, but from the point of view of its State organization, is theocratic.’ Some commentators saw in this a veiled and Byzantine, so to put it, argument favoring the Islamists.

Without mentioning them by name, Selçuk referred to the Kurds, denouncing the banning of non-Turkish identities as ‘cultural genocide.’ ‘Democratic society excludes cultural monopoly,’ he declared.

And Selçuk urged that change be brought about swiftly and now. Turkey cannot and should not enter the new century with the present constitution.  He said. ‘Turkey must not enter the twenty-first century as a country that is busy, by repressive laws, crushing its inhabitants brains and reducing them to silence.’

Selçuk spoke at the ceremonial opening of the judicial year. Another grand state occasion, the opening of the National Assembly on October 1, was the setting in which the President of Turkey answered the President of the Court of Appeals. Demirel reaffirmed the commitment to the secularist and unitary ideas of Ataturk. From his frequent references to the constitution, it was clear Demirel, unlike Selçuk, believes Turkey has one and it works. Still, he accepted the need for change. Turkey, he said, should undertake the structural reforms needed to leave behind constitutional debates and if there are deficiencies in terms of democracy, Turkey should remove them.

Secularism, he said, was needed if only as the defense of religion. ‘Secularity is not only the basis and guarantee of democracy, but also of the freedom of belief and worship as well. Those who dare to call Turkey “dar-ul harp” [an Islamic pejorative term for the world outside Islam] should not forget this: it is because of the Republic that we continue to enjoy Islam, which is the most perfect and tolerant religion, free from worry, and as a religion of happiness, peace and love in this land.’

As for the Kurds, Demirel, too, avoided using the K word. ‘In democracies,’ he said, ‘the right of being different is not a group right. To accept this right as a group right encourages the formation of tribes and causes separatist violence and terrorism.’ In democracies the right of the being different should be assured by the concepts of constitutional patriotism and constitutional citizenship.

As to the pace of change, Demirel favored a prudent one. He spoke of the need for striking a balance between basic rights and public order. The National Assembly would, he believed, be careful about this balance and then ‘sooner or later will start a meaningful and constructive discussion from which will emerge a constitutional reform plan, comprising the structural changes desired by all sections of society.’

Reform measures are being taken, but are modest in scope. A bill before the current parliament, if enacted, would curb the immunity enjoyed by deputies, some of whom are known to be mobsters. Another bill under consideration would annul Provisional Article 15 of the constitution. This prohibits questioning the constitutionality of laws passed by the military administration that came to power in a coup d’etat in 1980. One measure already taken allows privately owned television channels. Another has removed military judges from state security courts.

But big changes? ‘At this stage,’ as one Turkish analyst put it, ‘it is not realistic to expect the constitutional restrictions which cast a shadow on the freedom of thought and expression, freedom of the press, the right to assemble and to demonstrate, union rights, the right to strike, and judicial autonomy, will be removed.’ The same may be said of the corruption in which politicians and the mobs are sometimes both linked.

An initiative by Rahsan Ecevit, wife of the Prime Minister and deputy chairperson of the Democratic Left Party, turned into a demonstration of the ties between legislators and the mobs. Dismayed at the number of children and others guilty of petty crimes kept in prison, Mrs. Ecevit promoted an amnesty bill. By the time right wing and Motherland Party deputies got through with it, the measure would not have benefited children so much as gangsters in jail and politicians facing corruption charges.  This resulted in a furore in the press, a veto by President Demirel and a declaration by Rahsan Ecevit, not before time, that ‘this is not my amnesty.’

St Augustine prayed that God should make him chaste, ‘but not yet;’ the Turks seem to pray that they should be freed of corruption, but not yet. In the days after August 17, the whole nation was in protest against construction contracts being handed out on the basis of political connections. There were calls for the blood of builders who had ignored requirements that make buildings quake resistant. Less than a month later, it was back to the usual way things work in Turkey. In the area flattened by the quake, government contracts were going to officials of the National Movement Party, carried to power in April having pledged to fight corruption. Other contracts went to officials of the Motherland Party, also part of the governing coalition. A deputy of the Ecevits’ Democratic Left Party acknowledged that the civil servant in charge of schools in his locality had telephoned to ask how he would like tenders for reconstruction work to be drawn up.

Ecevit’s White House visit was bracketed by incidents of the kind that raise doubts about Turkey. The day after he arrived in the United States, ten leftist prisoners were killed and six gendarmes wounded. It happened when police were tipped off that an escape tunnel was being dug and they swarmed into a prison in Ankara. The prisoners used mobile phones to spread the word, and riots broke out in seven other prisons around the country. As Ecevit lunched at the White House, at least seventy-four prison guards were being held hostage.

Large parts of the prisons, notorious for overcrowding, dilapidated buildings and corrupt staff, are controlled by political or mobster inmates. Marxist and Kurdish nationalists freely display their partisan insignia and run indoctrination courses. A week earlier, the guards responded in a different manner when rival gangs of mobster inmates shot it out in an Istanbul prison. The staff remained aloof from the fray.

The day after the White House lunch, a Turkish journalist, Nadire Mater, appeared in court, charged with insulting the military and facing an up to six years in prison. She had offended by publishing a book, ‘Mehmet’s Book: Soldiers Who Have Fought in the Southeast Speak Out.’ In it forty-two veterans talk about the military campaign against the PKK.

Since Ocalan launched the insurrection in eastern Turkey, that is Turkish Kurdistan, in 1984 over 30,000 people have been killed, most of them Kurds. According to State Department figures, 560,000 people have been forcibly removed from their villages. Over 2,500 villages have been destroyed. The drain on government resources has been vast.

While Mater was appearing in court, 5,000 Turkish troops with support from armor and helicopters were attacking PKK guerrillas in Iraq. By the time Ocalan was caught, the PKK’s military effectiveness had been severely reduced. It has not been eliminated, though, as evidenced by continuing Turkish casualties and the army’s declaration on September 28 that operations would continue until every terrorist had surrendered or been neutralized.

The PKK has said it accepts Ocalan’s call from prison that it halt the guerrilla war and leave Turkey. So far some PKK forces, estimated at about 1,500 militants, have withdrawn into northern Iraq and Iran where they are expected to regroup, possibly having in mind a resumption of guerrilla activities next spring. Other militants are believed to have disappeared into the swollen Kurdish districts in cities in western Turkey.

It is a long time since Ocalan talked about his original dream of uniting all the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Iran into a single Maoist state. Today the talk is about cultural rights and a better deal for the 12 million Kurds among Turkey’s population of 60 million. The Kurdish cause is legally represented by the People’s Democratic Party (HADEP). Although it failed to win enough votes nationally last April to send deputies to the National Assembly, HADEP candidates were elected mayors of thirty-seven municipalities in eastern Turkey.

Repression of the Kurdish identity began a few years after the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Their efforts to build a democratic, egalitarian and secular state, like France, provoked resistance from what we would today call Islamists and from Kurdish feudal leaders who under the ancien regime had enjoyed a free hand in their region. Repression of Islam and Kurdish nationalism was intensified.

Ataturk drew his ideas from the received Western progressive ideas of his day. Today, received progressive ideas favor multiculturalism, not monoculturalism. In France itself, an attack is underway on the privileged, monocultural position of the French language, embedded in the constitution of the present Fifth Republic. Bretons have mounted the attack under the flag of the European Union and its policies favoring cultural minorities.

Progressive trends in the West continue to shape thinking among educated secularist Turks who see themselves as belonging to the same civilization.  So it is not surprising that Sami Selçuk’s address was peppered with quotations from Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and other luminaries of the Paris intellectual heavens. Nothing could be more contemporary than Selçuk’s admonition that, ‘Reality is plural.’

For all the shortcomings it perceives in Turkey, the West also sees its geostrategic importance. The Turks have proved valuable and reliable friends, obliged by geography to live in a difficult neighborhood. To their south is Iraq where the Turks fear the Kurdish Regional Government will turn into an independent state Kurdish state on its border. There is also Syria, where rivalries within the dictator’s family have broken out in a struggle for the succession to the ailing Hafez al-Assad. To the east is Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Daghestan and the Caspian basin; to the north Caucasia, Chechnya, Ukraine and Russia. To the northwest of Turkey in Europe is the troubled Balkans. heartland of the Eurasian landmass.

Over the past fifty years, Turkey has demonstrated again and again a willingness and capacity to help the West. The country is a solid bastion on the southeastern frontier of NATO. Turkish troops, fighting alongside Americans in the Korean War, distinguished themselves by their valor. From the days of the ill-fated Baghdad Pact onwards, Turkey was stalwart in supporting efforts to check Soviet penetration of the Middle East. In 1991, it backed the American-lead coalition in the Gulf War. Ecevit estimates the direct losses caused to his country by the embargo on trade with Iraq at between 30 and 35 billion dollars.  The US has turned down repeated requests for compensation for this loss.

In the years since the Gulf War, Turkey has allowed the airbase at Incirlik to be used by the US airforce for operations over Iraq. The Turks have sent about 1,000 soldiers to take part in the KFOR occupation force in Kosovo and about 200 to Albania. It took in 20,000 Kosovar refugees.

Turkey has also developed military ties and joint arms industry ventures with Israel. The Ankara-Jerusalem alignment has brought Turkey other benefits, too. The pro-Israeli lobby in Washington helps to balance the anti-Turkish activities of the Greek and Armenian lobbies. The Israeli connection also helps with trade problems. Ankara would like to get around American import restrictions through a proposed Turkish-Israeli Free Investment Zone at Gaziantep in eastern Turkey. The idea is that the US would allow in products from the zone as Israeli goods, which enjoy advantageous terms. Shortly after the Ecevit visit, an administration official was dispatched to Turkey to look more closely at the proposal.

Part of Turkey’s post-Cold War significance is its proximity to the energy sources of the newly independent states formerly part of the Soviet Union. Seeking secure access to the oil fields of the Caspian basin, the administration is persisting in support for a proposed pipeline to carry oil from Baku in Azerbaijan to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.  American oil interests oppose the line as uneconomical and would prefer one running through Georgia and Russia to the Black Sea.

Secure access to energy sources is part of the broad policy of promoting stability which is at the core of US and NATO policy.  In these terms, the eastern half of the Mediterranean has a bad patch where hostility between Greece and Turkey carries the seeds of instability. Hence the American and European drive for a settlement between the two Aegean neighbors who dispute the demarcation of the sea’s continental shelf and the ownership of a number of islets populated, if at all, by goats.

The biggest and most difficult problem is Cyprus. Its immediate origins lie with the military junta that ruled Greece in the 1970s and its sympathizers among the Greek Cypriots. In 1974, the colonels in Athens connived at a coup in Nicosia. The coup leaders had union with Greece as a goal. This prompted the Turks, with Bulent Ecevit Prime Minister at the time, to invade and seize the northern third of the island. In 1983, a Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus was declared, headed then as now by Rauf Denktash. The governments of the world refused to recognize it; only Ankara did so. But no one tried to dislodge the 35,000 Turkish troops stationed there or suppress the Turkish Cypriot entity. The UN has called for the reunification of Cyprus, withdrawal of the Turkish troops, for the 50,000 settlers from Turkey to return when they came and for the 200,000 displaced Greek Cypriots to be allowed back to what were their homes. The Turkish side, possibly with the Israeli example of successfully disregarding UN resolutions in mind, has ignored them.

The United States supports proposals put forward by the G-8, the group of seven leading industrial powers - the US, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada—plus Russia. These call for talks without preconditions under United Nations auspices. The Turkish Cypriots insist on one precondition which the Greeks and Greek Cypriots reject: that talks be conducted as state to state. The Turks agree. Demirel told the National Assembly, ‘Today, in Cyprus there exist two separate peoples and two separate states. Any solution that disregards this reality and the strategic interests of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and Turkey cannot bring lasting peace to the Island.’

Washington, like the EU countries, wants Turkey to try harder to sort out the Cyprus problem. Given the West’s secular religion of human rights and humanitarianism, Turkish participation in a Cyprus settlement would not of itself be sufficient for admission to the EU; but it is a necessary element for it. Within days of the Turkish visitors return home, Clinton was to send Alfred Moses, his new special representative for Cyprus, to the region. Moses would be holding talks with all sides on how to get negotiations started.

Following the Israeli elections earlier this year, with Bibi Netanyahu giving way to Ehud Barak as Israeli Prime Minister, a cloud of euphoria enveloped the Israeli-Arab peace process. Today, with the failure of substantive talks between Israel and Syria to even begin and continuing disputes with the Palestinians over implementing the Wye accords, the cloud has dissipated and intractable obstacles can once more be seen blocking the way ahead.

The ‘seismic’ diplomacy following the earthquakes in Turkey and Greece has given rise to another cloud of euphoria that has not dissipated as yet. But as Ecevit said in New York, closer political cooperation between the two “is not established yet.”

This is scarcely surprising when Turkish-Greek relations involve what both sides consider important national interests over which both reluctant to make concessions. In such conditions, as well as a force for change, there is a force at work tending towards immobility. Similar forces are at work in Turkey’s internal affairs, too. The EU summit in December is when the outcome of the opposition between these forces is to be declared. If the forces of change are judged to have prevailed, Turkey will get candidate status. It will have made it to the semi-finals on the way to EU membership. The West will have kept Turkey within its embrace and Turkey will bask in Western acceptance. Everyone except some sobersides in the north of Europe will rejoice.

Now Turkey is at present as unlikely a country to have a revolution as one think of. Even its military have pretty much foresworn mounting coups d’etat. Yet without some such radical upheaval, what reason is there to think rapid change will triumph over prudent caution, not to say unbending loyalty among many, including the army, to fundamental values by which a nation has lived and prospered to a considerable degree? That is not to say the EU must judge insufficient such reforms as Turkey has already introduced and may accomplish in the coming few weeks. The EU does not lack for fudge as it showed with some of the countries it found to have met the strict entry requirements for the Economic and Monetary Union.

At the beginning of October, Roman Prodi, President of the EU Commission, said he expected the Helsinki summit to accord Turkey candidate status. He might just as well have said plainly, the fix is in. Prodi went on to say Europe could not compromise on democracy, human rights, minority rights and freedom of conscience and the further process of Turkey becoming a member would be a rather long one. That is to say, Turkey would have candidate status but it would still really have to shape up before it made it to the finals and actual EU membership.

It is indeed likely that the process of becoming a member will be rather long providing Turkey with ample time for prudent reform. What Prodi omitted to say is that the EU is also subject to forces tending toward immobility which are part of the deep divisions within the Union over when to admit any new members.

In Turkey, as elsewhere, strategic analysts continue to employ the concepts of geopolitics, enunciated by Sir Harold Mackinder nearly a century ago. At least some Turkish analysts see the Oceanic powers, today meaning the United States, as creating a democratic and peacekeeping empire in Europe and the Mediterranean region. Turkey is a pivotal state, controlling the Bosphorus, helping to keep the Black Sea stabilized and to balance Russia, the giant in the

Copyright © Derk Kinnane Roelofsma 1999

Malta October 1999

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