Tag Archives: Turkey

Sorry, you’re just not European enough

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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.

Why is Bulgaria in the EU again?

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Bulgaria map, shamelessly leeched from the CIA World FactbookIt’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?

NATO, Russia and Europe

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Hunting around for a handy overview of just what’s been happening at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, depending on who you read you’ll get some wildly different ideas. I’ve been confused for much of the morning. Here’s a brief indication of why:

Der Spiegel‘s “Germany Puts the Brakes on US Expansion Plans” is countered by the International Herald Tribune‘s “NATO backs U.S. missile defense plan for Europe”

EU Referendum‘s claim that “NATO has thrown Ukraine and Georgia to the bear. President Bush’s attempts to put them on track to future and very distant membership of NATO has failed” is then contradicted by Radio Free Europe‘s report that “pro-NATO forces in Ukraine and Georgia celebrated the announcement, which offered stronger-than-expected support for their entry bids”

Repeat for pretty much every issue under discussion at the summit (for which, see this very handy round-up).

People always like to look for tangible, obvious outcomes from these things. But this is international diplomacy. Worse than that, it’s strategic military international diplomacy where all but one of the permanent members of the UN’s Security Council are involved (and we know how infrequently that lot manage to get along). Making compromises left, right and centre – leading to a stalemate in which, well, the status quo has largely been maintained – was the only sensible course of action. The thing was always going to end up a waste of time and money.

NATO flagBut the real fun is that despite the fact that NATO is now overseeing operations in Afghanistan (that well-known North Atlantic power) and looking to a more global role, this summit has made one thing increasingly apparent: the Cold War may have ended, but NATO’s principal opponent remains Russia.

Pretty much every compromise on the European front, every bit of backing down, appears to have been done to placate the Kremlin – because the principle areas to which NATO is looking to expand its influence (largely under the prompting of the US) lie in former communist countries, be it Ukraine and Georgia or Croatia and Albania.

As you’ve no doubt noticed, there’s been a growing tension between Russia and the West in recent years – from ex-FSB men assassinated in London to the resumption of patrols by Russian nuclear bombers through the vendetta against the British Council in Moscow. Then there’s the war of words with Belarus, Europe’s oft-forgotten fanatically pro-Moscow wildcard (a country that misses the USSR so much its secret police are still called the KGB and there are constant rumours that it is planning to formally merge with Russia), cyber-warfare against Estonia, and the ongoing standoff over Kosovo’s independence. Even the EU’s (and NATO’s) difficult relationship with Turkey is getting caught up with the Russian situation thanks to the Russo-Turkish partnership in the Bluestream and Nabucco pipelines, both of which are helping to make Europe increasingly reliant on Russian energy supplies.

The relationship with Russia, in other words, increasingly seems to dominate all European diplomacy. Where during the Cold War the presence of the USSR may have ensured that western Europe and the EU was operating under the constant fear of nuclear attack, Moscow’s then lack of engagement in western European affairs allowed everyone to get on much as they pleased. Since the end of the Cold War – and especially since Putin came to power – Moscow’s long-sought-after engagement with the West has if anything caused even more problems.

During the Cold War it was America who stood guard and kept watch, now Europe (both the EU and non-EU countries) has to be constantly on the alert for far more subtle Russian encroachments than columns of Red Army troops or falling H-bombs – encroachments largely economic, and mostly achieved through that strange form of diplomacy at which Putin so excels: smiling with fangs.

With such a large, unpredictable neighbour to the east – especially one with the ability to shut down a sizable chunk of the European economy on a whim (as has already happened to Ukraine) – little wonder there seem to have been few major advances at this latest NATO summit. In fact, I can barely see the point of holding these things until Russian attitudes to the West shift further in the direction of friendly cooperation (no signs of that any time soon) – because Russia’s never going to accept public humiliation, which is how the current regime seems to see any kind of outside involvement in what remains of the bear’s sphere of influence.

So the real points of interest after such standoffs between Russia and the West are never going to be the big issues. We’re not suddenly going to have a Kremlin change of heart on any of the major issues any time soon. And if and when such a change of heart comes, it’s certainly not going to come at one of these big public summits – far too humiliating. Where such shifts in Russian attitudes – either pro-engagement or heading towards hostility – are first going to be seen is in the details. The precise wording, the precise terms of any diplomatic agreement between Russia and the EU, US, NATO or individual European countries – the small print that the journalists rarely have time to scan in their rush to hit deadlines and get an angle that gives the subs a good shot at an interesting headline – that’s where we’ll first spot the changes when they come.

These summits are, in other words, little better than MacGuffins. The real diplomacy is going on off the radar, with lots of little standoffs in places like Armenia, Moldova, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

NATO may well be starting to look globally – but Europe needs to do the same to keep tabs on just what its unpredictable neighbour is up to, because Russia has more ability than any other state to screw Europe over. If Russia’s got its fingers in a lot of pies, we need to be keeping an eye on all of them, and not get distracted by the occasional fuss over the more obvious ones like Ukraine and Georgia (both of which have had high-profile popular pro-democracy uprisings in recent years, which are always of appeal to the press). To do so would be to fall for the oldest trick in the book.

Military dictatorships are brilliant – FACT

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(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.

EU membership aspirations – a force for good?

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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?

Talking Turkey

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(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”…

“Politically incorrect, xenophobic, racist and who knows what else”

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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.