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rfmcdonaldThis posting was originally made in reply to Jonathan Edelstein's posting, at his excellent weblog Head Heeb, of the commentary "Turkey gets shafted again" on the 13th of December.
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I disagree about you about the wisdom of admitting Turkey into the EU. The other applicant states have all had at least a decade to demonstrate that, yes, they possess stable liberal-democratic polities that aren't prone to subversion by military coups or populist political parties (or in Slovakia's case, that they can quickly recover). Turkey hasn't taken nearly as long, and Turkish efforts are much shallower chronologically than (say) Polish or Estonian or Slovenian efforts.
Turkey did play a major role in NATO during the Cold War; then again, so did Greece under the colonels, Salazar's Portugal, and (arguably) even Titoist Yugoslavia. The political requirements for EU membership are much more restrictive than, say, the political requirements for NAFTA membership, and rightly so--the US was able to accept, in the mid-1990's, a Mexico that was basically a one-party state (if admittedly a fairly liberal and pluralistic one-party state) because NAFTa was limited to economic issues. If Mexican politicians were going to be taking up seats as elected representatives in a North American Congress, or Americans and Canadians were going to be providing tens of thousands of millions of dollars in transfer payments for projects in Guerrero and Chiapas, it'd be different.
In 1982, when the Spanish military (like its Turkish counterpart now, then strongly conservative and attached to the values of the prior non-democratic regime) tried to stage a military coup, it returned to barracks when the representatives of the new regime chastised them. I'm not at all sure that if the same thing happened in modern-day Turkey, the Turkish military would obey likewise, or that Erdogan wouldn't meet the fate of Menderes. And until people can be sure that wouldn't happen, Turkey should stay out of the EU.
(To say nothing about other reasons for skepticism about Turkish EU membership: the question of whether the European Union wants porous borders with Iran, Iraq, and Syria; the question of how to incorporate a Turkish Kurdistan that's far poorer and far more alienated from its ruling state than any region in the other EU candidate states; the question of Turkish immigration into the EU (from my readings, the Turkish population seems to be far more mobile than the Polish or even the Romanian, although Bulgaria comes close); the question of whether or not it was at all wise for the US to try to lobby the EU to admit Turkey for narrow geostrategic reasons; and others that I can't think of at the moment.)
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I disagree about you about the wisdom of admitting Turkey into the EU. The other applicant states have all had at least a decade to demonstrate that, yes, they possess stable liberal-democratic polities that aren't prone to subversion by military coups or populist political parties (or in Slovakia's case, that they can quickly recover). Turkey hasn't taken nearly as long, and Turkish efforts are much shallower chronologically than (say) Polish or Estonian or Slovenian efforts.
Turkey did play a major role in NATO during the Cold War; then again, so did Greece under the colonels, Salazar's Portugal, and (arguably) even Titoist Yugoslavia. The political requirements for EU membership are much more restrictive than, say, the political requirements for NAFTA membership, and rightly so--the US was able to accept, in the mid-1990's, a Mexico that was basically a one-party state (if admittedly a fairly liberal and pluralistic one-party state) because NAFTa was limited to economic issues. If Mexican politicians were going to be taking up seats as elected representatives in a North American Congress, or Americans and Canadians were going to be providing tens of thousands of millions of dollars in transfer payments for projects in Guerrero and Chiapas, it'd be different.
In 1982, when the Spanish military (like its Turkish counterpart now, then strongly conservative and attached to the values of the prior non-democratic regime) tried to stage a military coup, it returned to barracks when the representatives of the new regime chastised them. I'm not at all sure that if the same thing happened in modern-day Turkey, the Turkish military would obey likewise, or that Erdogan wouldn't meet the fate of Menderes. And until people can be sure that wouldn't happen, Turkey should stay out of the EU.
(To say nothing about other reasons for skepticism about Turkish EU membership: the question of whether the European Union wants porous borders with Iran, Iraq, and Syria; the question of how to incorporate a Turkish Kurdistan that's far poorer and far more alienated from its ruling state than any region in the other EU candidate states; the question of Turkish immigration into the EU (from my readings, the Turkish population seems to be far more mobile than the Polish or even the Romanian, although Bulgaria comes close); the question of whether or not it was at all wise for the US to try to lobby the EU to admit Turkey for narrow geostrategic reasons; and others that I can't think of at the moment.)
