by Burak Bekdil
Turkey says it wants to join the EU, but has no intention of complying with membership rules. The EU says it wants Turkey to join, but is fully aware that it does not qualify.
Slightly edited excerpt of the original article.
Turkey
says it wants to join the EU, but has no intention of complying with
membership rules. The EU says it wants Turkey to join, but is fully
aware that it does not qualify.
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When Turkey officially applied to become a full member of the European Union (EU), cell phones looked like bricks, Red Bull and The Simpsons
had just made their debuts, President Ronald Reagan made his famous
"Tear down this wall!" speech in West Berlin, the world population was
five billion, Colonel Qaddafi in Libya was playing godfather to
terrorists, Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister of Britain, Gestapo
boss Klaus Barbie was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against
humanity, the first intifada was launched, and sports superstars Lionel
Messi and Maria Sharapova were newborn babies.
It
was 1987. The mere opening of accession negotiations with Turkey would
take another 18 years. Another 12 years after that, everyone in Brussels
and Ankara knows full well that Turkish membership in the EU is an
impossibility for the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless,
the Turks think that 1) their country deserves full membership and 2)
the only reason the EU has not granted them membership is because they
are Muslim. Few diagnoses could be as inaccurate as this.
Three
decades after Turkey formally applied for membership, it stands at
position 146 on the Global Peace Index and position 155 on the World
Press Freedom Index.
...
Against
this unpleasant backdrop, the European Parliament has called for
Turkey's accession talks to be suspended if Ankara fully implements
plans to expand Erdoğan's powers, which he narrowly won in a referendum on April 16. Although the parliament's vote is not binding, it illustrates the gulf that has grown between Ankara and Brussels.
The
resolution passed by the parliament in Strasbourg "calls on the
Commission and the member states ... to formally suspend the accession
negotiations with Turkey without delay if the constitutional reform
package is implemented unchanged."
Tedious rounds of mutual Turkish-EU pretension are growing less sustainable by the day.
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If
the object of the resolution was to rein Erdoğan in, it didn't work. He
remains defiant. He said the majority of Turks did not "want the EU
anymore", and the EU is not indispensable for Turkey.
For
decades, Turkey and the EU have been the lead actors in a strange, not
very amusing opera buffa. Turkey says it wants to join the club with no
obligation to comply with membership rules. The club says it wants
Turkey, although it knows full well that the applicant does not qualify.
Turkey hopes the club rules will change; the club hopes the applicant
will change. Neither will happen.
But
both know that formally calling off the show will not benefit either
party. In the curtains-down scenario, Turkey suffers economically and
the EU faces an officially hostile Turkey (as opposed to today's
unofficially hostile one). It could find itself suffering from Turkey's
"nuisance value" (remember Turkish threats last year to "open the doors
and send millions of immigrants to Europe.")
Regardless, the tedious rounds of mutual pretension are growing less sustainable by the day.
Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based political analyst and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
Source: http://www.meforum.org/6873/a-turkish-eu-opera-buffa
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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