In the wake of the agreement between the EU and Turkey to begin accession negotiations, both sides appear to be waking to the fact that they do not really want each other after all, writes Gareth Jenkins from Ankara Olli Rehn, the European Union (EU) commissioner for enlargement, arrived in the Turkish capital Ankara last Thursday in the first visit by an EU representative since the official opening of accession negotiations on 3 October. Yet, far from the visit being hailed as heralding the beginning of a bright new era and cause for national celebration, the public mood was strangely muted. Beneath the official protocol and platitudes lurked an uncomfortable sense that 3 October marked an end to a beginning; and that, far from a love match, relations between Turkey and the EU were more like a reluctant betrothal that both sides know will never end in marriage. Ever since the 19th century, Turks have looked to Europe as representing a standard to which they should aspire. In recent years Turkey has tended to see membership of the EU as a seal of approval, confirmation of its place amongst the leading nations of the world. As a result, acceptance or rejection has been regarded as a matter of national pride rather than a technical question of compliance with the 80,000 pages of rules and regulations by which all EU members are theoretically supposed to abide. It is only in recent months, as their country has moved closer to actual membership, that reality has begun to kick in and Turks have woken to the price that they would be expected to pay. In the EU, support for Turkish accession has been mainly confined to the ruling elite. In some countries, such as Britain, Turkey has been seen as a potential ally and a counterweight to Franco-German domination of the EU. While others, particularly on the liberal left, have seen Turkish membership as a means of stabilising the EU's eastern flank and a counterbalance to claims that the Christian and Muslim worlds are inevitably mutually antagonistic. But the ruling elite's enthusiasm for Turkish accession has failed to filter through to the general population. Recent opinion polls indicate that in none of the 25 current members of the EU does a majority of the population support Turkish membership and in some countries the proportion in favour falls to around 20 per cent. Sometimes this is because of practical concerns, such as fears that an influx of young impoverished Turks will increase unemployment; more often it appears to be simple religious and racial prejudice. These tensions surfaced in discussions in Luxembourg earlier this month as EU members tried to finalise the text of the framework document which was to be used as the basis for the opening of accession negotiations with Turkey on 3 October. Although they eventually produced a text, agreement came after 30 hours of often heated debate with Austria in particular arguing that an alternative to full Turkish membership should be included in the final draft, noting that the overwhelming majority of the Austrian population were opposed to Turkish accession. The final text was, in the best EU tradition, something of a fudge: keeping open the possibility of something short of full membership for Turkey, regardless of whether it fulfilled all the accession criteria, without stating so explicitly. The wrangling in Luxembourg further eroded already declining support for EU membership inside Turkey. An opinion poll conducted in late September 2005 showed that 57.4 per cent of Turks wanted Turkey to join the EU, down from 67.5 per cent one year earlier. Nobody doubts that if another poll was held today, support would be even lower. Nor was it just a question of popular disenchantment. Since the EU announced on 17 December 2004 that it would open accession negotiations on 3 October this year, the flurry of reforms to try to bring Turkey into line with EU standards has ground to a halt. Perhaps more significantly, neither has the Turkish government taken the necessary measures to ensure the effective implementation of the legislative reforms that it passed before December 2004. When Rehn arrived in Ankara last week he bluntly told his Turkish counterparts that they still had much to do. "This means vigorously implementing political reforms in the areas of the rule of law, human rights, women's rights, the rights of religious communities and the rights of trade unions," he said. But with the official opening of accession negotiations secured, and given that most Turks doubt that the EU will ever admit Turkey regardless of whether it fulfils all the membership criteria, the Turkish government has little incentive to press ahead with reforms. Perhaps more worryingly, recent months have witnessed a rapid rise in virulent, often blatantly chauvinistic, nationalism in Turkey. The EU has already warned that accession negotiations will be suspended unless Turkey opens its ports and airports to Greek Cypriot ships and planes in 2006; something which, given the current public mood, it would be impossible for any Turkish government to do. While EU insistence on the granting of greater cultural rights to Turkey's substantial Kurdish minority comes at a time when simmering ethnic tensions between Turks and Kurds have, for the first time in recent history, begun to surface in riots and attempted lynchings on the streets of the cities of western Turkey. As Turkey and the EU finally embark on what will be a long and difficult negotiating process with the end result increasingly in doubt, the situation is beginning to resemble the joke that was doing the rounds in Brussels a couple of years ago in which a EU diplomat takes aside his Turkish counterpart and says: "Why don't we come to an agreement on Turkish accession to the EU. You pretend that you want to join and we'll pretend that we want you."
