Turkey’s New Leader Recep Erdogan Takes the EU Bull by the Horns

By Jon Gorvett

With the country’s new leaders charging off on one whistlestop European tour after another, these are exciting times for Turkey. Cyprus, the economy, even the political and state apparatus itself—suddenly all these issues seem wide open after years of frosty closure.

This new dynamism seems even more profound when contrasted with the inertia and party infighting which characterized the last days of the previous administration. While Bulent Ecevit’s 57th government seemed old, cranky and stuck on decades-old agendas, Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s 58th seems to be barreling along at breakneck speed.

Since winning the Nov. 3 general election with a landslide majority, Erdogan has been almost continuously airborne. There have been visits to Greece, Italy, Spain, Britain, Germany and Ireland all within the space of a few weeks—sometimes with several countries in one day—followed by a quick dash back to Ankara for a midnight press conference. It’s the kind of pace Turkish leaderships don’t seem to have exhibited since the death of the secular republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

As the old political adage warns, however, activity often can be a substitute for achievement, leaving many wondering just how much Turkey’s new government really means to change things.

The primary impetus behind Erdogan’s awesome accumulation of air miles has been the looming Dec. 12 deadline of the European Union’s Copenhagen Summit, where EU leaders will gather to decide on the next round of enlargement. Most likely at the top of their agenda now will be a new eastern question—what to do about Turkey.

Although it has had official candidate status since the EU’s Helsinki summit in December 1999, Turkey has been given no timeline for accession. As a result, Ankara has been pressing ever since for a date to start accession talks—opinion generally being that, once these talks begin, the EU is pretty much locked into eventually giving Turkey membership, even if the process takes several years.

So far, holding back the EU from giving such a date have been a variety of issues, ranging from the geostrategic to the quasi-historical. While Brussels’ decisions usually are based on a good deal of hard economic number-crunching, in Turkey’s case there seem to be a number of more emotional factors. These were well set out in early November by former French President Valéry Giscard D’Estaing, who made a speech saying Turkey was “not a European country,” and that, while it should be given special status, it should never be allowed in. Doing so, he warned, might even “destroy the EU.”

Much of this view seems based on an idea of Europe that sees it as an homogeneous cultural and even religious whole, a euphemism for that old Medieval term, “Christendom.” As such, D’Estaing’s view has some emotional impact, but clearly goes against the EU’s own definitions of itself—which tend to be wary of “culture,” and certainly make no reference to religion, instead favoring political and economic criteria. D’Estaing was officially criticized by the EU leadership, with many countries expressing condemnation of his views. Yet, if EU membership is open to all those who meet the economic and political criteria for membership, just where do its geographical boundaries lie? Indeed, can there ever be any such physical frontiers?

The Cyprus Question

Such questions explain some of the unease in Europe about Turkish membership. There also are more solid factors, however—one of which is Cyprus. The Greek Cypriot leadership in Nicosia is also heading for EU membership, with its accession talks almost over. All things being equal, it is set to join some time in 2004—whether or not there is a solution to the island’s division. Ankara previously has warned that, should this happen, it will annex the internationally unrecognized Turkish Cypriot state in the north.

While this has created a certain dynamic for a solution, talks between Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaderships had continued to flounder—until, that is, the Turkish general election put Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) into office.

Within hours of his victory, Erdogan was on Greek TV saying that he favored a “Belgian solution” to the Cyprus problem. This means the creation of a federal state comprising two sovereign partners, a solution contrary to Turkish policy for the last 28 years.

Naturally, this did not go unnoticed at the Turkish Foreign Ministry, then still under control of the previous government. Outside the TV studio, Erdogan was set upon by ministry officials who criticized the country’s new leader for “ignorance” of the Cyprus issue. Although Erdogan subsequently backed off, saying he had been giving AKP policy, not official Turkish views, this was not the end of it.

A week later, Erdogan was in Athens, meeting Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis. He took with him the man he was later to name foreign minister, Yasar Yakis, but conspicuously failed to take with him any Foreign Ministry officials.

Some days after that, there were even greater breaks with the past, when Erdogan suggested there was a direct link between resolving the Cyprus issue—a new U.N. plan having been revealed by this stage—Turkey’s EU membership bid, and European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP). The last of these issues is one over which Turkey has been at loggerheads with Europe for some time. ESDP sees the creation of an EU army, but one that would be dependent on NATO resources. As a NATO but not an EU member, Turkey has refused to give its permission for the EU army to use NATO assets unless Ankara is also involved in ESDP decision-making.

Suggesting that all these issues could be bundled up together is completely contrary to previous Turkish policy, which had seen them as quite separate. Erdogan seems to be suggesting that if Turkey gets a firm date for EU membership, both Cyprus and the ESDP deadlock could be overcome.

This doesn’t seem to be quite how Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash sees things, however. He has objected strongly to many features of the new U.N. plan, demonstrating that Erdogan is likely to meet tough resistance to any policy change from the established Turkish Cypriot players, as well as from the ministries in Ankara.

Erdogan’s ability to prevail in such a confrontation must also be affected by the fact that—thanks to a previous conviction for reading in public a poem the fiercely secular State Security Courts deemed to have been inciting to violence—he is forbidden from becoming prime minister. Instead, Abdullah Gul has been appointed to lead the cabinet—giving the country an official and an unofficial prime minister. Gul is a well-respected and competent leader in his own right, however, and no caretaker.

In all the excitement, what does seem to have been largely forgotten is the issue that attracted so much foreign interest in Turkey’s election in the first place: the AKP’s Islamist roots. With Erdogan lunching with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi right in the middle of Ramadan, however, and AKP female deputies without headscarves talking on TV of the importance of secular education and women’s rights, perhaps that’s not so surprising.

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance journalist based in Istanbul.