EU's policies on Turkey a needless stupidity

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "Turkey is too big. It has too much territory, too many people, and too little money," said Greek Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos last week, defending Greece's determination to keep Turkey out of the European Union. He needn't have worried: at the Luxembourg conference on EU enlargement this week, Turkey didn't even make it onto the long list, let alone the short list.

The short list is the six countries that are expected to move rapidly towards membership: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. The 'long list' adds five other countries -- Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Rumania and Slovakia -- that won't really join soon, but are being included in the process to make them feel better.

Turkey didn't make it onto either list, and the EU Council president, Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, added insult to injury by stating that he "did not want to sit at the same EU table" with a country where torture was commonplace. This wouldn't matter much if Turkey were small and weak, but it is the most powerful, most heavily industrialized country between Italy and India -- and the Turks are now very, very cross.

"The EU's policies towards Turkey have become in effect those of Greece," claimed Turkey's ambassador to London, Ozdem Sanberk, and it's hard to dispute his conclusion. Turkey is neither poorer nor much bigger than the largest of the successful EU candidates, Poland: 60 million people versus 40 million, and about the same per capita GDP.

More importantly, Turkey was originally accepted as a legitimate candidate for EU membership way back in 1963. Poland's application, like those of all the other ex-Communist countries, arrived over a quarter-century later. Now all these latecomers sail past Turkey, accompanied by the Greek-Cypriots.

The Turks believe that their rejection at Luxembourg was due to anti-Moslem prejudice and Greek arm-twisting, and they are at least half-right. They have ways to retaliate, and they will.

The first casualty of this mess will be the recent compromise that settled a long-standing dispute within NATO over air traffic control in the Aegean. This is less trivial than it sounds, because the old arrangements frequently brought Greek and Turkish warplanes into dangerous confrontations. And then it gets really interesting.

Turkey has been a full member of the NATO alliance since 1960, and it has the right of veto over any new members. Turkey can stop NATO's present plan to take in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary simply by refusing to ratify it -- and it probably will.

The old thinking was that the Turks wouldn't dare, because they depend so heavily on their NATO allies for access to modern weapons. But that thinking underestimates the degree to which injured pride can drive Turkish policy. It also ignores the new strategic alliance between Turkey and Israel.

Most of the Turkish-Israeli joint exercises, like the creation last year of a 'strategic assessment working group', are motivated by both countries' suspicions about the Arab country between them, Syria. But from Ankara's point of view the alliance also gives Turkey new options for arms supplies.

Israel is already modernizing large parts of the Turkish air force, and there are plans to produce Israeli Merkava tanks in Turkey. As an Israeli foreign policy expert said recently: "The Turks see us as an important and unrestricted source of military technology." But the Israeli link also gives Ankara the ability to defy NATO on enlargement -- which would certainly set the cat among the pigeons in Eastern Europe.

Then there is former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's masterwork, the divided island of Cyprus. The EU has totally bought the Greek line on this issue, proposing to negotiate entry terms with the Greek-Cypriot government as though it actually controlled all of the island and represented Turkish-Cypriots too.

This is not clever. The Turkish-Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktash, has already issued a statement saying that the inter-communal talks are over: "Under these conditions a federation is not on the agenda." But frankly, the talks were going nowhere anyway.

The real problem is that Turkey can and will respond to EU membership for (Greek) Cyprus by annexing the part of the island currently controlled by Turkish-Cypriots. Ankara would then be in a direct territorial confrontation with the EU along a heavily armed frontier, which would have Greek hard-liners hugging themselves with delight -- until the shooting started.

How did the EU arrive at this dim-witted decision? The answer seems to be that as it grows larger and more complex, it is also developing a tendency to be lowest-common-denominator stupid.

The anger in official Washington over the EU's "gratuitous sneers" at Turkey in Luxembourg hit the nail on the head. This was the kind of politics that creates a consensus by finding a scapegoat -- and for Christian (and post-Christian) Europe, what better target than the continent's only large Moslem country?

There are real human rights problems in Turkey. There is a brutal war being waged in the southeast against separatists in the large Kurdish minority. The war, and the huge amounts of off- the-books cash needed to run it, have created a gangster 'state within the state' that now permeates almost all of legitimate politics.

Nobody in their right mind would admit Turkey to the EU as it is. But it would have done no harm whatever to put Turkey (and Cyprus) on the 'long list' of those countries that are not expected to become EU members any time soon.

All the concerns about Turkey's internal crisis could still have been articulated, and it could have been made quite clear that Turkey would never advance to the 'short list' unless they were addressed.

What was done instead was self-indulgent and stupid. If it is not undone quickly, bad things will happen in and around Turkey.