WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 (UPI) -- In its querulous and grudging verdict that Turkey should formally start accession talks with the European Union, the EU's Commission has got itself the worst of both worlds.
Instead of a welcome, it gave something close to a rebuff, hedging round the Turkish negotiations with conditions and poison pills that make it abundantly clear to the Turks that the Europeans would really rather not be doing this at all.
The Turks have been warned that the talks can be put on hold at any time, or suspended if there is any backsliding on human rights. They have been told to forget that "right" of EU citizens to live and work wherever they want within Europe. Turks will not get that right for a long, long time, and the EU has warned that if too many Turks try to move, the borders can close overnight.
"No other country has pleaded at its door and had its honor trampled," was the bitter and wholly justified comment in the newspaper Hurriyet.
Turkey has been applying to join the EU for 40 years. The country has been a loyal member of the NATO alliance, had scrapped its death penalty, amended its constitution, and changed its penal code in order to meet EU requirements. And just as Turkey's foot slipped over the threshold, French President Jacques Chirac this week announced that the door could be slammed shut again if the French vote against further enlargement in a new referendum that could be years ahead in the future. This means the accession talks could all be in vain.
In a speech at the European Parliament in Strasbourg last week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey had "done its task."
"Now the EU must do its task," he went on. "They're the ones being tested now. If we don't want a clash of civilizations, but to succeed at reconciliation, Turkey must take its place in the EU."
That sums up the difference in perspective. The EU Commission is worried about jobs, low-wage competition from Turkey, and the reluctance of many white European Christians to welcome much poorer Turkish Muslims into the European prosperity club. Chirac is worried about getting out of a short-term political jam, because he is on record supporting Turkish entry in principle, but his own political party is against it along with French opinion polls.
By contrast, the Turks are talking grandly about clashes of civilizations and reconciliation between Christianity and Islam. Those Europeans who speak in such lofty and historic terms see it rather differently, like the Netherlands' Commissioner Fritz Bolkestein, who cited the Siege of Vienna in 1683 when the last Turkish invasion of Europe was hurled back. Were Turkey to join Europe now, he suggested, then the battle to save Christian European from the Ottoman hordes would have been in vain. This is fanciful stuff, even for the Dutch worried by the fact that the most popular name registered for newborn boys in Rotterdam these days is Mohammed.
The real issues are rather more complex. First, a EU that includes Turkey becomes, automatically, a major and involved player in the politics of the Middle East. The EU's new neighbors will be Syria, Iraq and Iran. The prospect for serious policy clashes between such an enlarged EU and the United States, with its strong commitment to Israel, is alarming, particularly in a time of oil shortages when Europeans and Americans alike are rivals for oil supplies.
Second, a EU that includes Turkey is going to have to pay through the nose for the privilege. The average gross domestic product per head in the former 15-member EU was $25,000 a year, more than four times higher than Turkey's GDP per head.
The Commission estimates that Turkey will receive $20 billion to $35 billion a year in EU subsidies. Over the two or three decades that it will take for full economic integration, the Europeans will be subsiding Turkey to the tune of $1 trillion. (Taken over the long term, and bearing in mind Europe's low birth rates means it will soon be running short of workers, this could be a very wise investment.)
Third, Turkish accession means the end of the long-standing dream of European integration leading to a federal system, a United States of Europe. Each new enlargement of the EU has weakened this vision, set out in the original 1957 Treaty of Rome with its commitment to "ever-closer union." When the deeply anti-federal British joined in 1973, the federal dream suffered a setback. This year's enlargement of 10 new member states from Central and Eastern Europe began to close the federal option. Poland, Hungary, the now Czech Republic and Slovak Republic as well as the Baltic states had not just emerged from 50 years of Soviet domination to submerge their rediscovered national identities into some EU super state.
Europe is already starting to divide into two broad camps. The original members of France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg, still on the whole nurture a fondness for the old federal dream. So does Spain, depending on which government is in power. The new ones, led by the British, the Scandinavians and the new Eastern Europeans, tend to be suspicious of federalism and prefer to see Europe as a glorified free-trade area, with its security firmly tied to the Atlantic alliance.
To a degree, these two camps reflect membership in the euro zone, the countries that share the euro currency and are thus obliged to integrate their economic policies rather more closely. The six original members, along with the Portuguese, Spaniards, Greeks, Finns and Austrians, have surrendered to the European Central Bank the right to set their own interest rates, their own money supply, and even their own national budgets and levels of debt. In financial terms, they are already living under a federal system.
The British, Swedes and Danes, and the 10 new members, are all outside the euro zone, as will be Turkey. That means that in an enlarged EU of some 500 million people, well over 200 million will be in countries that do not use the euro. So the Brits and Scandinavians will no longer be the odd men out from the euro club but part of a very large minority, and when Bulgaria and Romania and Turkey join the EU, the non-euro users could become the majority.
So the ultimate irony is that Turkey will not be joining the "ever closer union" of Europe that the Turks thought they had applied for, but something less grandiose, more fractious and sprawling, and with no clear vision of what it wishes to become, beyond a prosperous and peaceful democratic space.
That may be enough for the Turks. A lot of Europeans think it had better be. Gunther Verheugen, the EU Commissioner for enlargement, put it bluntly last month when he said, "Turkey must find the strength to reconcile traditional Turkish values with European values, because European values are not negotiable."
Maybe. But the signs are that even the prospects of Turkish entry have already begun to change the nature of Europe's future by helping to foreclose the federal option while opening the way to a multi-currency EU. An alternative future is in gestation, of a EU without the euro as a single currency, without a shared vision of "ever-closer union," and without the cultural cohesion of Christian Europe.
