Better luck next time, Ukraine.

One of these days the EU powers that be are going to realise that when you’ve got countries torn between a European and non-European identity, to keep on telling them “sorry, you’re not European enough yet” is just going to drive them into the other camp.

How much longer are the likes of Ukraine and Turkey going to put up with these repeated, very public rejections before heading off to the waiting embrace of Moscow or non-secular Islamism?

If I were a westwards-looking Ukrainian, I’d be getting very pissed off about now:

Ukraine will have to make do with an “association agreement” with the EU, a pact that for Balkan countries such as Albania, Macedonia and Serbia represents the first step on the path to membership, but for Ukraine carries no such implications

So Ukraine’s less welcome than tiny Albania and Macedonia? Less welcome than Serbia, a country built on a genocidal civil war and still in dispute with much of the EU over the status of Kosovo?

Yeah, cheers for that. Really encouraging. Nice one.

The promise of future EU membership can be a force for good, inspiring positive shifts towards greater democratic freedoms. But the promise has to be made. Taking a carrot and stick approach is a tried-and-tested method for getting people to do what you want – and that goes for countries too. Yet in the case of Ukraine, the EU’s carrot would appear to be largely imaginary – while at the same time, Ukrainians know that Russia has both stick and carrot, and isn’t afraid to use either.

It’s a question I’ve asked before, not least when the backwards Balkan oddity first joined. And now, finally, the EU powers that be seem to have noticed that, erm… letting in a notoriously corrupt, organised crime-ridden country with a dodgy economy and poor track record on human rights may just have been a bad idea.

And so EU funding to Bulgaria has been cut off, with hefty warnings for that other bastion of economic might and social liberalism, Romania.

A handy summary of the European Commission’s report on Bulgaria has a number of highlights – all of which would tend to suggest that, erm, Bulgaria wasn’t quite ready for EU accession last year, and so shouldn’t have been allowed to join:

The Penal Code is outdated and is part of the reason why the judiciary is overloaded… The administrative capacity of both law enforcement and the judiciary is weak… There are signs of corruption in the health and education sectors… A strategic approach to fighting local corruption is missing. The anti-corruption Commission of the Council of Ministers has not been active in this regard… The fight against high level corruption and organised crime is not producing enough results…

And so on, and so on…

Of course, corruption alone is nothing too unusual within the EU. But Bulgaria also falls down in countless other areas, as the US State Department’s 2007 report on Human Rights in the country notes:

The constitution and law prohibit such practices; however, police frequently beat criminal suspects, particularly members of minority groups… Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) reported complaints of police brutality from Romani victims who were too intimidated to lodge official complaints with authorities… Human rights groups continued to claim that medical examinations in cases of police abuse were not properly documented, that allegations of police abuse were seldom investigated thoroughly, and that offending officers were very rarely punished… Prison conditions generally did not meet international standards, and the government did not allocate funds to make significant improvements… The constitution and law prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention; however, there were reports that police at times ignored these prohibitions… Impunity remained a problem. All complaints involving interior ministry personnel and other police forces, as well as military personnel, are adjudicated by the military court system.

And on, and on… They could also have mentioned the arbitrary arrest of political dissidents.

And it’s not as if its economy is booming either, ranking worse than Turkey’s, and – according to Wikipedia, at least – with inflation fluctuating between a low of 2.3% and high of 7.3% over the last five years, while “Bulgaria’s per-capita PPP GDP is still only about a third of the EU25 average, while the country’s nominal GDP per capita is about 13% of the EU25 average.”

Oh, and lest we forget, Bulgaria also signed a gas pipeline deal with Russia earlier this year which has caused some serious problems for the EU’s own planned Nabucco pipeline – designed to lessen Europe’s reliance on Russian gas – and thus handed the Kremlin even greater dominance over the European energy market.

So, as I say, the country is corrupt, has a poor human rights record and a dodgy economy, and seems to be making little progress with any of these, while at the same time is undermining EU efforts to stabilise the continent’s vital energy supplies – so what the hell is it doing in the EU? “Serious concerns” were being raised by the European Commission as late as May 2006 – just seven months before the country was allowed to join, so I’m genuinely fascinated to know who thought it would be a good idea…

More to the point, have any positives been gained from Bulgarian entry? – bar the amusement factor of rabidly right-wing Bulgarian MEPs making arses of themselves, that is.

The EU is meant to have standards. Membership is supposed to be a reward for having met those standards. Bulgaria patently has come up short – and yet it’s been rewarded anyway. Is it any wonder that Turkey’s getting so pissed off?

Bloomberg and the Associated Press have good roundups of yesterday’s events – the constitutional court blocking ex-Islamist presidential nominee Abdullah Gul and all that, plus the various threats to re-write the constitution. The best place to start, however, is probably EurActiv’s overview, followed by the Economist.

Still, if you want to get a real feel, check out our very own Erkan – on the spot in Istanbul – who has a good roundup of reactions to the court’s decision and current state of play, with several other posts over the last few days, which will give you a far better idea of what’s going on than my ramblings of yesterday.

(Hey, it’s May Day after all, and the fancy parades of Soviet military might are a thing of the past (oh yes, you still get them, but they’re nowhere near as cool) – I thought I’d get a bit of May Day militarism going on in blogland.)

Current events in Turkey seem, from what I can tell of mainstream news coverage during the last few days, to merit practically no attention at all. I mean yes, there has been the occasional article, but buried in the back somewhere and normally fairly small, but despite having the 24 hour news channels on pretty much constantly while I’m working, I don’t recall hearing anything whatsoever about what’s going on.

So while the riots in Estonia (still escalating, that situation, by the by) have got a bit of coverage – people smashing things making good telly – massive protests in Turkey seem not to be worth mentioning.

For why? Well, because everyone’s a bit confused. To cover the current crisis in Turkey, journalists have to get their head around the idea that by supporting democracy, they’re supporting nutty Islamists – and that by opposing a possible military coup they’re opposing the maintenance of Turkey as a secular state.

Tricky, you see. Turkey is one of the few secular and democratic Islamic states, and could be the West’s best hope of calming the situation in the Middle East, acting as mediator / cultural translator between the two systems. But it’s still a bit odd and occasionally nutty – with a suspect (if improving) record on human rights and a pretty shoddy attitude towards its minorities (be they Kurdish or Armenian or whatever) that gives the EU just enough justification to say “sorry, old chap – you’re a bit too unstable to join, that’s all – we’re not being racist or Islamophobic, honest” with a straight face.

Still, it’s been a decade since the Turkish military last got involved in politics (although only via a series of increasingly harsh warnings to then Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, which eventually made him back down) – which means we’re overdue, as the country used to have military coups bang on every ten years (1960, 1971, 1980).

If a coup happens this time (which is possible) it’s going to be fascinating to see how all those pundits – especially the right-wingers who normally hide their anti-Islamic prejudices behind veils of supporting the spread of democratic freedoms – manage to keep a straight face while supporting a military dictatorship in the name of democracy. Much like in Pakistan, I suppose (military dictatorship in the name of democracy for seven and a half years and counting).

The thing is, of course, what all us Westerners still really think – if we’re honest and ignore the self-righteous “weeee! democracy!” crap for half a minute – is that these foreign johnnies really just need a firm guiding hand. After all, it worked in the good old days, didn’t it? Nice white man’s army marches in with its better technology and superior ideas of how to run a country, gradually imposes it with the aid of a great big stick, and soon you’ve got a bunch of loin-cloth-wearing natives running around fawning at your feet, peeling you grapes, calling you “Sahib” and fanning you in the midday sun. All they need’s a bit of discipline. They’re not ready for democracy – they can’t handle it. (“They”, of course, being anyone remotely dusky-skinned – be they knocking about on Europe’s fringe, wandering around the Middle East, South Asia, South America, East Asia, wherever.) And, of course, should you happen to be a maharajah / friendly dictator who doesn’t do what your white masters says, you can expect to be smacked down now just as then.

Imperialist paternalism* lives on – dark-skinned chaps in far-off hot and dusty places need a strong military presence to keep them in check, and someone with authority to tell them what to do. They can’t be trusted to rule themselves, or to decide for themselves what’s best – hence various Western governments being able to happily condemn the democratically-elected Palestinian and Venezuelan governments while simultaneously supporting the corrupt quasi-dictatorships of Central Asia.

This goes for Turkey, too. If the EU was honest about the general attitude to Turkish membership, they’d bluster a bit and then use similar reasoning to that used by Churchill in the 1930s when he was leading the campaign to block India from being granted Dominion status – these wogs simply can’t look after themselves.

Which is, I’d guess, part of the reason for the Turkish situation having received so little attention in the European (and American) press, despite the potential ramifications of further escalation being absolutely massive – if Turkey fails to maintain itself as a democracy, all our little prejudices will have been proven right. Plus, rather conveniently, it’ll give the anti-Turkey lot in the EU a perfect excuse to tell them to bugger off permanently. The fact that we’d have replaced a secular and stable Muslim neighbour with an unstable and potentially increasingly religiously fanatical one may be a bit of a downer – but hey, we’d have also managed to get rid of one of the few inconvenient examples of Muslim states that aren’t absolutely insane that all those damned liberals keep using to prove our theories about Muslims not being able to handle statehood are wrong. Bonus!

So, let’s just let Turkey get on with it and pretend nothing’s happening. Because whatever the result we can confirm our prejudices and feel all superior at our cozy Western systems of government that increasingly seem to provide precisely no check on the executive doing what it wants, allowing us to sleepwalk into illiberal constitutional reforms and wars with shadowy enemies based on little or no evidence.

Personally, I rather envy Turkey.

* Hey, it’s May Day – and although I’m not a socialist, it’s traditional to have a bit of socialist rhetoric spewed at this time of year. Cue various one-off visitors in the comments accusing me of being a communist who thinks Stalin was great, etc. etc. – And no, I can’t be arsed to turn this into anything other than a glib off-the-top-of-my-head thing. I took my copies of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism off the shelf, as well as a few on Latin America in the 1970s, a bit of Chomsky, a spot of Kipling, various books on the Raj, a bit of Mill (volume 6 of his collected works), etc. – but then I realised that I had proper work to do, and couldn’t be arsed, leaving a long and rambling post, the point of which even I’m not too sure of any more. Sorry.

One of my ongoing convictions about the worth of the EU is that its very presence, and the vague carrot of potential EU membership, can be a force for good in the lesser-developed states of the European fringe – following the example of the Council of Europe’s guidelines for a decently-run country, but cranking them up a notch.

Of course, it doesn’t always work (cf. the refusal of Belarus to get involved in either the Council of Europe or basic democracy, or the current Polish government’s apparent hatred of women and homosexuals) but, as a general rule, I reckon this EU carrot is one of the most positive contributions the organisation has made to the world.

But maybe not. Here are two examples of ways to react when the EU’s attention is focussed on you if you’re a struggling post-communist state, hoping either to tighten links with the EU or to be taken more seriously by other EU member states, both of which have cropped up in just the last couple of days:

1) Uzbekistan – arrest and prosecute journalists working for European news organisations just as an EU delegation arrives

2) Slovenia – convince opposition parties not to, erm… oppose government policy in case partisan squabbles make the country look bad in the eyes of the EU

It’s fairly safe to say that neither of these are quite the positive impact that the EU is supposed to have on countries aspiring to reach western European levels of development…

Meanwhile, via Erkan, an intriguing take on what Turkey’s attitude to the EU should be:

“Despite the stubborn Western habit of ignoring it, history records the fact that the Turkish republic has been a free, independent, secular, and mainly democratic state ever since Ataturk created it out of the ashes of the Ottoman empire in 1923. Great Britain aside, that’s a record very few European states can even approach… I still think the EU should say yes to Turkey, but developments in postmodern Europe — illustrated, most recently, by the responses of Britain and the EU to Iran’s brazen Easter parade of British hostages — convince me that Turkey should say a polite but firm no to the EU.”

So now I’m confused. Is the EU still valid as an aspirational organisation or – now that it’s expanded to 27 and has member states with governments as nutty as Poland’s and economies as dodgy as Romania’s – has its aspirational value been all but used up? Considering that Turkey’s economy is doing better than those of member states Poland, Romania and Bulgaria (see also), and that human rights abuses are ignored even in leading western European member states (and that’s before we even raise the spectre of the EU’s rather pathetic official response to the extraordinary rendition question and – again – failure to tell Poland to abide by basic rules of civility and decency when it comes to minority groups that are supposedly a condition of its EU membership), is there any reason for the remaining non-EU member states to really aspire to membership any more? The economic benefits are suspect now that Romania and co are in the club, and the failure to punish any of the many member states who have been found to have violated EU-wide human rights laws by participating in extraordinary rendition seems to make the “civilising effect” of EU membership similarly worthless.

So, my fellow pro-EU types, why is this (deliberately pessimistic) take the wrong one? What benefits DOES the EU still have to offer – and CAN it still act as a force for good in the wider world, simply by existing, as I have usually always thought?

It’s not just in Ukraine that things are happening. All around Europe’s eastern fringe, people seem to have become a tad unsettled by the onset of Spring.

In fact, the most stable country on Europe’s eastern edge seems to be Turkey, where the economy is booming and EU accession talks are still going on despite all the setbacks last year. The South East European Times has a tip-top overview of the issues and state of play.

A bit north, and Romanian Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu is expected to form a new coalition, having dissolved his unstable government – Edward Lucas is good on how, why, and what the chances are that the new government will be stable, and notes

The government crisis has come just before Romania reports to the EU on its progress. The European Commission will publish its own assessment in June. It is unlikely to trigger the safeguard clauses that allow Brussels to cut aid and stop co-operation with Bulgaria and Romania if either starts backsliding. But it will make uncomfortable reading.

Further north, Estonia’s also just got a new coalition – albeit a a rather more stable one – this year’s elections are the first time since Estonia gained independence in 1991 that voters have seen fit to grant a Prime Minister a second term in office. Britain, take note…

Further north again, it seems Lithuania could soon be following, as the ruling party looks set to dissolve parliament and call elections 15 months early.

Meanwhile, Latvia is also looking a bit unstable, with referenda on the cards following the government’s attempts to introduce somewhat dodgily authoritarian-sounding “emergency security measures”, which would, according to a leading opponent, “open the door to very serious political manipulation… and, ultimately, influence by the so-called oligarchs, which would be very dangerous”. Fun fun fun… (Sounds rather like the UK – which is actually worse off, as it’s now illegal to dispute government policy even within parliament…)

Poland, too, is looking increasingly odd, as Jon Worth notes (with more at the Economist’s excellent new Europe blog). And that’s before you even get started on the highly controversial new law (which came into effect a couple of weeks ago) requiring the best part of 700,000 civil servants, teachers and journalists to sign an oath stating whether or not they collaborated with the secret services prior to the collapse of communism back in 1989. Anyone who lies is set to be fired – a bizarre, McCarthyite step for a country in which the question “are you or have you ever been a member of the communist party” is going to be met with a “yes” from just about everyone over the age of 35…

And in Bulgaria there are likewise signs that all is not right, as the recent arrest of Turkmen dissident Annadurdy Hadjiev seems to show. Hardly the sort of support for free speech and democracy we’d all like to see… There are also ongoing concerns about Bulgarian attitudes to the Roma minority, and Brussels is not at all happy about the progress being made in the fight against corruption and organised crime. Still, that at least plays well for the Bulgarian eurosceptics, who are trying to build support – but Bulgarians all seem to hate their politicians anyway, so I doubt they’ll get far…

Thankfully, Hungary at least is looking a bit more promising, with a new coalition just about to settle into place following recent internal party elections to help stabilise the government, following last year’s riots and unrest caused by the surprising admission from Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany that he deliberately lied to the electorate.

And while all this is going on, Europe’s nuttiest country – the dotty dictatorship of Belarus – is still refusing to meet the conditions required for it to rejoin the Council of Europe – you know, like commitments to basic levels of human rights, democracy, not beating up your political opponents, that kind of thing. But hell – why bother sucking up to Europe when Vladimir Putin’s more than happy to be friends with you? In fact, going by the talk of Russia and Belarus “forming a common economic space, customs union, free labour market, common information, educational and cultural environment”, it sounds almost like a new-style, EU-inspired USSR may be on the cards in the East. Intriguing – and potentially very dangerous to the EU’s economic stability…

OK, so what have I missed while I’ve been busy?

The Centre For European Reform blog has been discussing the failure of the EU constitution and the need for a new kind of “pro-Europeanism”, in relation to that “Europe’s Story” idea to kick off debate from Timothy Garton Ash (which I strongly encourage everyone to get involved with – could be good, so I’ve made my first contribution).

Also on the future of Europe, the Financial Times’ Brussels Blog has had a couple of pieces on Britain and the EU after Blair (and the follow-up), which nicely update this piece of mine from back in July. FT Blogger George Parker is, however, almost certainly right that “Blair’s critics in Europe may one day look back at his leadership as a halcyon moment in the UK’s engagement with the EU.”

On a similar note, the Open Europe Blog asks whether Peter Mandelson will keep his job at the EU Commission under a Prime Minister Brown…

Also in the world of the EU, there’s been another proposal to revive bits of that damned constitution from French Green MEP Gerard Onesta, but it sounds like even less of a goer than previous efforts. Jon Worth has more – and doesn’t reckon Gordon Brown would ever go for it.

Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema also has some suggestions for the constitution – largely springing from the desperation of knowing that the EU is currently functioning on rules meant for 15 with a membership of 27 – and has also announced that Italy (under former EU Commission President Prodi, at least) “wants the EU to admit all the Balkan nations and Turkey as members”. Hell, at least that’d mean that Italy’s economy looks better in comparison, right?

Italian Minister of the Interior Giuliano Amato has weighed in to the constitutional debate too, sensibly suggesting “let us not wonder whether we need a constitution. Let us ask ourselves if the questions outlined in Laeken are still valid, if the constitutional treaty provides adequate answers and if new responses are necessary.”

Meanwhile, further east and south, nothing’s changed in Turkmenistan – and although that Economist article was written before the election (“blatantly falsified” according to Pravda), as Registan points out, the outcome was such a foregone conclusion that the post-match analysis could easily have been written weeks ago. The only question is, can the new President ever hope to get as nutty as his predecessor, the god-like Turkmenbashi the Great?

Sticking with the Economist and the former USSR (I’m still in a post-Soviet mindset at the moment, unsurprisingly), Edward Lucas on the opposition to Vladimir Putin, which features an interesting – but important – line about old Alexander Litvinenko: “The Litvinenko murder was a disaster for the Kremlin.” You see, a lot of Litvinenko’s case against the Russian security services for their alleged role in planting the apartment bombs that killed hundreds in Russia in September 1999 and kicked off the second Chechen war is simply that the Chechens had the most to lose from launching terror attacks. Same goes for the Kremlin with killing Litvinenko, by my reckoning. Before his death he was just a random conspiracy theorist. After his death he became a martyr, his death itself seemingly proving that his theories about the murderous nature of the Russian regime were true. (They almost certainly are, by the way, but still – I very much doubt that Putin’s lot ordered his asassination…)

It’s all been kicking off with Russia in the last couple of weeks: Is there going to be a new Cold War? Who can say? Mmassive military expansion never does sound good – but don’t believe the hype…

Back west, the French presidential election is hotting up, with Royal launching her manifesto – but she’s now lagging 4-8% behind, having been neck and neck with Sarkozy towards the end of last year, when I made my prediction she would win… Will the huge surge in voter registration be enough to give her back a chance? Should she even get a chance? Methinks Stanlavisbad may not be the only one starting to think Sarkozy’s the better choice…

Then a bit more on the future (and past) of Europe, as that 50th anniversay of the signing of the Treaty of Rome gets ever closer. Via Kosmopolit comes a .PDF from the European Policy Centre looking at the various challenges facing the EU. Articles include French conservative MEP Alain Lamassoure on “Relaunching Europe after the constitutional setback”, the head of the Paris Political Studies Institute’s European Centre, Professor Renaud Dehousse on “Can the European institutions still be reformed?”, Paul Gillespie of The Irish Times and openDemocracy on “Would today’s leaders still sign the Treaty of Rome?”, and many more. Looks to be an interesting read.

That should do it for now, I think…

The BBC has a handy press summary of Europe-wide reactions to the EU’s mind-numbingly tedious and unproductive summit last week (which, like DJ Nozem, I simply couldn’t bring myself to pay any attention to, I’m afraid). EU Observer has a fairly telling paragraph in its summary, though:

“‘There is not yet agreement on the best way to move forward,’ said commission president Jose Manuel Barroso but added that there was consensus that something needed to be done.”

In other words, erm… no progress has been made at all in the last year and a half. Arguably, not since Maastricht, as the problems trying to be solved now are the same as were meant to be tackled with the Treaty of Nice six years ago…

Mark Mardell also has a good overview:

“Thanks to an agreement reached by foreign ministers on Monday, the word “Turkey” was not formally uttered at this summit. But that is what it was all about.”

Also on the Turkish front, some vaguely promising indications that we are not a continent of bigots, a poll suggesting that although support for further EU enlargement is falling, it is not thanks to the prospect of a Muslim country joining (hell, we’ve already got an ex-Muslim country as a member, and umpteen different brands of Christianity, many of which have had much fun killing each other during various religious wars over the years, why should there be any problem with another bunch of God-botherers joining in?) Meanwhile American Prospect has a quick book review/article on Muslim assimilation in Europe, which may be of interest.

Oh, and this article on US involvement in post-Soviet Eastern Europe from the Monthly Review is worth a gander, as the American angle usually seems to be ignored by most coverage of the EU’s newest members, not to mention the various Eastern European wannabes.

Over in France, meanwhile, the presidential race continues to heat up, with the spectre of Jean Marie Le Pen’s National Front raising its ugly head once again – something the socialists need to remember about, considering Le Pen beat them to the final two last time around…

Those who know more about energy markets and economics than me might be able to explain the significance of the Norwegian oil/gas merger. Likely to be moderately significant, though, considering the various difficulties the EU’s having thanks to the growing reliance on Russian gas supplies and all that…

Utterly unrelated, but this made me chuckle – a bunch of Germans expelled from Poland after WWII are apparently trying to seek, erm…, compensation for their loss… Up next: Germany claims compensation from Britain, France, America and Russia for the death of so many of its citizens, and from the Jewish people for the extortionate gas bill run up during the early 1940s… Oh, and should you even vaguely care, EurActiv has a run-down of the priorities for the German EU Presidency, taking over on 1st January. (Update:More on German aspirations at Atlantic Review.)

Almost finally, new discovery The Evil European has the perfect paraphrase of some of the nuttier anti-EU types’ general worldview which bears repeating following the news that EU Referendum won the “Best UK Blog” category in the Weblog Awards:

“If you correct people on the factual information, as in the European Union is not being run by Hitler’s re-animated corpse which seeks to force evil communist-fascist agenda like making all British people drive on the left side of the road or only eat straight bananas, you are being an arrogant snob and elitist liberal blah blah blah.”

The thing to do, old boy, is try to ignore them. Much as our dear leaders were trying to do with that damned summit last week. Maybe this is the way forward for the EU – we all try to pretend that it doesn’t exist, and they in turn pretend that we don’t exist. Everyone’s a winner.

Finally finally, via Erkan, EU Digest (which I’d forgotten about due to their RSS feeds seeming to be screwed, but is rather good) has a run-down of the European politicians who made an impact in 2006. That they can only come up with three names – one of whom some would argue is not “European” anyway – speaks volumes about the waste of time 2006 has been for the EU…

Everyone’s focussing on the collapse of the talks about Turkish entry (Guardian, Independent, Times, Financial Times, Le Monde (in French), Le Figaro (in French), EU Observer, Deutsche Welle (German press review – in English), EurActiv) – but, let’s face it, this was pretty inevitable. Turkey is still a long way from even the lax entry conditions the EU allowed for some of the 2004 accession countries – and as long as the Cyprus situation continues (not to mention the refusal of Turkey to formally acknowledge the Armenian genocide), there is blatantly going to be little progress. It will be some years yet before Turkey will be in any position to join the union.

Still, thanks to a combination of the sheer tedium of covering the EU and the fact that the potential for Turkish entry allows lazy leader writers yet more excuses to trot out the same old editorials about the potential problems/benefits/dangers of an islamic country joining the EU (hoards of dusky-skinned Mohammedans and the collapse of western European society vs. a long-overdue acknowledgement of the importance of Ottoman, Arabic and wider Islamic cultures on the development of the European identity, take your pick), this Turkey spat means that much of the other EU news of the last couple of days is going to be ignored.

Potentially most importantly, the ongoing extraordinary rendition investigations are about to finish, and everyone’s doing their best to ignore them, as 11 EU states will come in for criticism in the final report:

“Italy, the UK, Germany, Sweden and Austria saw terrorism suspects snatched on their territory the report by Italian socialist MEP Claudio Fava will say, while the UK, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Romania and Poland hosted hundreds of secret CIA flights.

“The density of the flights – suspected of being used for ‘extraordinary renditions’ or transfer of prisoners without trial or legal redress to sites such as Guantanamo Bay or Uzbekistan – was the greatest in Germany (336), the UK (170) and Ireland (147).”

So, 170 rendition flights from UK airports. Despite the government having denied knowledge of any of them? The UK is also going to be branded “uncooperative” by the report. And, it is worth noting – if unlikely that it will come to this,

“EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini has in the past clarified that any EU member states caught violating ‘fundamental human rights’ could face suspension of EU voting privileges under articles six and seven of the EU Treaty.”

Meanwhile, while the current EU members are busy obfuscating in an attempt to hide their close collaboration with the US in the war on terror (the EU? Working closely with the US? Surely not!), the problems of enlargement and what to do next continue to hang around in the background, largely unaddressed.

Even so, we have news that the current Finnish EU presidency has been conducting research to try to work out ways of reviving that damn constitution, which “could be a useful step in keeping the constitutional process alive”. They’re going to present the findings of their research at a summit in a fortnight’s time, prior to handing over the presidency to Germany, (where Chancellor Merkel looks to be facing all kinds of domestic political disputes that will most likely result in the German EU presidency achieving even less than did Blair’s).

So, a year and a half after the rejection of the constitution by French and Dutch voters, the message still hasn’t been fully received. Reform is necessary – even vital – but not THAT reform. But as long as the dithering continues, the more screwed the EU is going to get.

As it is, the failure to work out how to split the budget between 25 member states rather than 15 – something, one would have thought, that it would have been sensible to work out BEFORE enlagement – means that the EU is now having to rely on its neighbours for charitable donations. Yup, the Swiss people have just voted to contribute one billion Swiss francs (c.£440,000) to help out the 10 accession countries, who are all still waiting for the promised cash that was supposed to help them bolster their economies enough to actually be worthwhile partners (just as the likes of Britain, Spain, Portugal , Ireland and Greece have all been helped out in the past). Instead, the EU seems to be more concerned with developing its core – again something that should, surely, have been done before expansion?

The EU, it would seem, is in sore need of some fresh blood and some fresh ideas if all its political leaders can do is continue to attempt to recycle the failed d’Estaing constitution and strive after further expansion. I’m not sure if George Soros is quite the right person to look to, but we must be able to learn SOMETHING from the United States (other than how to cooperate with the CIA in whisking terror suspects off to be tortured, of course). The US, after all, is surely the federation whose success Europe should try to emulate, even if not its precise form?

The original aims of the EU’s founders have in part come to pass – after all, France and Germany are unlikely to go to war any time soon – and in part failed utterly – for there is little sign of complete political union ever happening. The current aims of the EU are, however, at best unclear.

Having expanded its territory to cover most of the continent, the union is having a major mid-life crisis in the run-up to its 50th birthday. As so many 50-year-olds seem to discover on reaching their half century, it’s sort of done what it set out to do, but just not quite as well as it would have liked.

So – is it going to buy a fast car, dye its hair, and go cruising for fresh excitement and challenges; simply accept what it is, buy a cozy cardigan and pair of slippers, and get on with the few things it can actually do well; or get so stressed out by its decades of little failures that the mid-life crisis turns into a full-scale breakdown?

Something is going to have to happen soon. Although, with Merkel’s current precarious position in Germany and the French presidential elections not happening for another few months, it is unlikely to kick off until at least the latter half of next year. In the meantime, every little scrap could be important.

(Sorry, my subbing skills seem to have gone out the window today – a truly terrible title…)

Voting has been postponed on extending Turkey’s association agreement with the EU to the ten new member states, although the European Parliament has voted that accession negotiations can start on October 3rd as planned. Just one more bit of confusion with the whole Turkish thing which has been knocking around for years – and yet another excuse for wildly differing interpretations of what the hell’s going on.

So, is Europe’s attitude to Turkey hypocritical, as one letter in the Guardian has it today? Is the Armenian Genocide question just an excuse, disguising latent racism and Islamophobia, as the Guardian’s second correspondant would seem to have it? Is it fair to bring up something from 1915, when the Turkish Republic was only founded in 1923, or should the focus be on current concerns, like alleged stifling of human rights and ongoing accusations of torture? (Not that Britain has any right to complain about torture these days, thanks to our delightful Home Secretary’s love of sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and the extraction of fingernails with pliers… This may be why our support of Turkish membership threatens to cause so many problems with our European partners.)

As Turkey starts dropping hints it may give up on EU entry, sparking fears of a shift towards a more Islamic polity, there’s a good, if fairly lengthy, look at Turkey’s relationship with Europe over at the New York Times which helps point out some of the complexities, while the Economist has a superb intro to the problems of Turkish membership which may be worth a look first:

“Turkey first applied to join what was then the EEC in 1959. The two sides signed an association agreement in 1963 (implicitly accepting that Turkey could be a candidate); a customs union in 1995; and the EU officially accepted Turkey as a candidate for entry in 1999. Turkey has, in short, been asking to join Europe for so long that its application is starting to look old and moth-eaten�so much so that some diplomats and politicians seem to have forgotten the strategic reasons for entertaining it…

“Yet rejecting Turkey’s bid for membership would do little to solve the difficulties its application raises. The budget needs to be reformed whether Turkey is in or out. Europe’s economies must create more jobs whether or not Turkish workers get free movement of labour (which they probably won’t). Popular dissatisfaction with the EU exists regardless of Turkish membership. A majority of Europeans say they are undecided about Turkey, rather than actively hostile.”

Count me among the undecided. No matter what the outcome, there could be serious problems. Full EU membership, we get the introduction of a vast country with a vast, largely impoverished population, who would have full rights to live and work anywhere in the EU, and borders on some of the most unstable and dangerous nations in the world. The proposed “privileged partnership” and we risk fostering resentment and feelings that Europe is patronising our semi-European neighbour, which could help revive nationalist and/or radical Islamist political groups within the country, destabilising the one (relatively) sane and stable Islamic country we’ve got on our side. End all talk of membership, and the likelihood of a shift towards radical Islamist politics is even more likely, with all the concurrent increase in security risks that would threaten.

Is there a way out? Who knows? All I do know is that this seems a very odd area for Labour to suddenly rediscover the concept of “principle”…

Nope, not the usual UKIP suspects, but – supposedly – European politicians’ real reactions to the proposed Turkish accession to the EU:

Even after 40 years of attempts to get closer, Brussels and Ankara are still strangers. That could be due to the fact that many correspondents don’t know Turkey and the Turks from first-hand experience. For many Germans, the image of Turkey is still dominated by their experience of Turkish immigrants, many of whom came from rural areas of Anatolia with limited education and a tendency to stick closely to their own cultural circles.

Even for those in Brussels who’ve actually been to Turkey, the image doesn’t improve much, often limited to the stereotype of gold-chained rip-off artist who preys on tourists in resort hotels.

Few know much about Turkey’s up-and-coming business elite, the new hipsters with money to burn, the students in Istanbul’s trendy neighborhoods or the successful businessman, who exports his products throughout the world.

Add to all that a hysterical fear of an emergent, “dangerous” Islam, and the picture loses any semblance of truth.

There are a lot of reasons to be concerned about possible Turkish membership, which is why the debates will be heated, but this sort of silly attitude is the most counter-productive it’s possible to take.

I mean yes, obviously Turkey has some major social problems (a friend of mine was robbed, stabbed and left for dead by a taxi driver when on holiday there), but shouldn’t the real fears be about the suddenly massively-extended border, which would be touching on a number of unstable, supposedly terrorist-supporting states? Shouldn’t we be worried about the state-sponsored torture and human rights abuses? Shouldn’t the real concern be the Turkish economy?

If we’re going to start attacking countries because of national stereotypes and the experiences we had on holiday, why the hell is mafia-dominated Italy part of the EU, zooming around on their scooters? Why have we allowed the militaristic Germans in with their tendency to put their towels on the best seats by the pool? What about the new states of Eastern Europe, packed full of wideboy cowboy builders in shell suits? What about Greece, riven with corruption, and where sweet, innocent English girls are raped every summer in their resorts? How about Britain, with her snobby, holier-than-thou attitude, rising teenage pregnancy levels, and soaring gun crime?

This sort of thing is bad enough when it comes from the Daily Mail, but if this kind ignorant petty-mindedness can’t be overcome, there will be little hope of sorting out the on-going social problems withing the EU, let alone those outside its borders. Turkey blatantly isn’t ready to join the EU yet, but for reasons of economics, human rights and security, not because Turkish people are a bit dodgy.