The European Union’s enlargement commissioner completed a trip to Turkey yesterday. This coming December, his report will help the EU Commission to decide if talks on Turkey’s accession can finally begin. If the answer is positive, by 2015, Turkey with a population of over 70 million will become the second largest EU member. However, this week, it again became clear that Turkey’s far-reaching constitutional and human rights reforms will not be as important as the fact that Turkey is a Muslim country.
France, with Europe’s largest Muslim minority, and Germany, with its large community of Turkish workers, are both alarmed by the demographic consequences of Turkish accession. The Dutch, along with the British and now even Greece, are supporters of Turkey’s entry, so it was disappointing to hear the outgoing Dutch EU commissioner for internal markets repeat past claims that admitting Turkey would cause the EU “to implode.”
On the face of them, his arguments are purely economic. He maintains that Turkey’s economy is still backward, in particular its agriculture. It would suck vast sums of financial support out of Brussels. He goes on to claim that admitting Turkey would inevitably also lead to the accession of the Ukraine and Belarus, drawing even further grants and aid out of the Union. This case is remarkably similar to that originally made against the accession in January of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and seven others. Yet the inefficient and wasteful Common Agricultural Policy, (CAP), the largest EU budget item is being reformed to stop big farming countries such as Poland and Hungary from benefiting to anything like the extent of earlier EU members. In 11 years’ time, the earliest that Turkey could join, the CAP feeding trough will have become significantly smaller.
The Dutch minister’s real objection emerged later in his Leyden University lecture yesterday on the decline and fall of empires when he said that Turkey would have to change its identity “completely” before it could join the EU. This is an obvious reference to the Islamic faith of the majority of Turks which is clearly seen as being a challenge to Europe’s nominally Christian majority.
The Dutch official who is normally a political liberal may believe that he is making a rational contribution to the EU debate on Turkey. Unfortunately, his words will be seized upon by bigots everywhere. European racists will use them to reinforce their opposition to Turkish membership while Islamic bigots will claim they further demonstrate the Islamaphobic nature of the Europeans.
British Foreign Minister Jack Straw said this spring in a EU speech in Copenhagen that Europe’s values were no longer only Judeo-Christian but should be universal. He warned that the treatment of Turkey’s accession request would be an “acid test” for the Union. This would appear to be a genuine challenge to France and Germany to regard Ankara’s candidature on its basic economic and political merits.
