LONDON, 3 October 2005 — British politicians are strongly rallying behind Turkey ahead of today’s talks in Luxembourg between Ankara and the European Union (EU) which is chaired by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and which officially signals the start of the negotiations for Turkey’s accession to the EU as a full member, a process which could take a minimum of 10 years.
Yesterday Straw, in the capacity of the current British presidency of the EU, hosted an emergency meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg and bluntly told them that it would be “a betrayal” of an agreement signed by all the EU leaders with Turkey earlier this year should the EU go back on its words. It would also undermine any future enlargement of the Union and the West’s relations with Muslim countries. The foreign secretary said that the accession process would in any case take a long time.
British politicians are particularly incensed at the Austrian government, which has threatened to veto any accession application talks with Turkey. Instead Vienna wants the EU to negotiate a “Privileged Partnership” arrangement with Ankara and to start accession talks with neighboring Catholic Croatia. A move which Turkish Prime Minister Reyep Tayyip Erdogan has dismissed as racist, anti-Islam, unacceptable and imposing new conditions on Turkey. Not surprisingly, Ankara has threatened to boycott today’s talks if Austria persisted with its veto on the accession negotiations. The fact that Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel reiterated his objections to the Turkish EU membership talks only on Saturday on the grounds that Turkey was a large Muslim country with 70 million people and that the EU had to acknowledge popular concerns over its expansion, is threatening an impasse over the talks. Ankara has already told Straw that Turkish negotiators will only turn up if this impasse is resolved. France and Germany are also against Turkish membership of the EU and have promised to hold referendum in their countries in this respect.
Denis McShane, erstwhile British Minister for Europe yesterday strongly condemned Austria and warned “the debate in recent months in Austria over Turkish membership of the EU has frankly bordered on the unacceptable.” What he was implying is that the debate had racist, anti-Islamic, and in some quarters neo-fascist undertones, and unbecoming a democratic European country, let alone a member of the EU, albeit a recent one.
Perhaps it should not be surprising that it is Austria that is jackbooting this opposition to Turkish rapprochement with the EU. It seems that the Austrian national psyche is still bedeviled by the images of the Battle of Vienna almost three centuries ago when the Prussians were the last line of ‘defense; against the march of the Muslim Ottoman Empire into central Europe. Is the Austrian “betrayal” and opposition to the Turks a 21st Century version of the Battle of Vienna, presumably on behalf of Christendom? This is what many Turkish intellectuals are arguing. Lord Patten, the former EU external affairs commissioner, yesterday warned that the West’s relations with Islam would be seriously damaged if Turkey’s application to join the European Union is blocked, and would have a serious impact both within the EU and on the world beyond.
“The impact of the West’s relationship with Islam if we turn down Turkey’s accession, even after Turkey has carried through reforms, mostly on the visceral grounds that we are the relics of Christian civilization and they’re Islamic — and that’s how it would play in the Islamic world — then that would have very bad implications,” he told BBC.
“You hear so much rhetoric about Europe playing a significant role in the world. What the hell signal do we send to the rest of the world if we can’t accept Turkish accession to the European Union? To define Europe today as though it were an introverted, cohesive, medieval Christian community is, I think, terrible, and it sends not only awful messages outside, but it actually sends some pretty dubious messages to the 12 million or more Muslims who live within the European Union.”
For Britain, the Turkish accession talks would be one of the high points of its EU presidency, which has already come under criticism by former French president Valery Giscard d’Estang as ineffectual and unproductive. Britain of course has been pre-occupied with events such as the terrorist outrage in London on 7 July and the botched attacks on 21 July. Turkey first applied for membership more than 40 years ago but its human rights record has proved a major obstacle.
EU leaders now believe Turkey has made the necessary start on this and social and economic reforms for official membership talks to start. Italy’s Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini, for instance, last week said that Turkey had “fully satisfied the conditions” laid down for opening membership talks on 3 October, and its bid represented “an opportunity for a major relaunch of the entire European project.”
If the EU allows Austria to endanger the renewal of the European project with its obfuscation tactics, the danger is that Ankara may seek alliances elsewhere. Already there is talk in some political quarters in Ankara that Turkey should align itself with Russia and the CIS countries to form a counter-clock to the EU.
