During approximately a decade that started in the early 2000s, the attention of international observers on Turkey’s politics and policies fast increased as the country took a prominent role, economic, political and cultural, in a vast area stretching from North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, Iran and Central Asia. Two factors were crucial in such a development: that a leadership of Islamist background was now in charge in Ankara (a leadership perceived as culturally consistent with much of that large region) and that the country was on its way to become a member of the European Union (EU), and thus a bridge between the region and that economically most advanced and democratic part of the world. “To have a country like Turkey, where the culture of Islam and democracy have merged together, taking part in an institution such as the EU, will bring harmony of civilizations,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then the country’s prime minister, was suggesting in 2004 while challenging Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” And a senior Lebanese official was explaining in 2009 Turkey’s growing popularity and influence by stressing how “Turkey’s [present] Islamic character plays an important reassuring role.”1
In those years, both the academic literature and the media were talking about a “Turkish model” of significance to that vast area—the exemplarity of a country fast improving its democratic standards and of political conditions capable of producing rapid economic growth and solid domestic stability. Turkey’s role as an industrial powerhouse increasingly shaped relations within the area, reduced the level of conflict in its neighborhood while increasingly forcing the logic of economic prosperity as the basis of leadership legitimation and of support of even authoritarian regimes. Most visible such an evolution was in Syria’s case, an old adversary of Turkey, with Turkish exports to that country growing manifold in the second half of the 2000s, Damascus abandoning important territorial claims vis-à-vis its neighbor, and renouncing military threats and switching to diplomacy to deal with the dispute over the reduced flow of the Tigris and Euphrates. During those years, the difficult process of accession to the Union drove a profound transformation of Turkey’s institutions and politics while the perspective EU membership was a key component of Ankara’s international authority. Relatedly, the synergy generated by those EU–Turkish relations was a crucial element of the then fast improving regional and broader international order.
Today, we only have a weak memory of that past—with Turkey instead in the news for its undemocratic politics, for being at odds with European and US interests, and being in contrast, or at war, with many of its neighbors and having turned into one of the sources of the present, critical instability in that region.2
But even so, in the context of the unending spillover of Syria’s brutal civil war into the region, of a long-lasting presence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), of armed conflict and alarming tensions in the Gulf area and the broader Middle East, of millions of refugees and migrants moving from there toward Europe, and of recurrent, shocking terrorist attacks even on the European continent, in recent years Western policy-makers and international observers have again turned their attention to Turkey—a key NATO ally and formally still a prospective member of the European Union (EU)—to its unique geopolitical relevance and the influence that Turkey is considered capable of still exerting upon various regional actors in the present circumstances. Ankara’s present collaboration with Moscow and Teheran in Syria only increases the concern of and pressure on EU capitals and Washington about the necessity to carefully manage their present, difficult relations with the country.
“Never have the European Union and Turkey needed one another more, and yet rarely they have been so distant […] Europe has never had a greater interest in a stable, democratic and Western-oriented Turkey,” former Finnish President and Nobel Peace Prize-laureate Martti Ahtisaari was writing (with co-authors) still in March 2015, while lamenting, on the one hand, the conflicting Turkish and Western policies with regard to developments in the Middle East and, on the other, the deterioration of rights and freedoms in Turkey in a context of moribund negotiations for that country’s accession to the Union.3
That difficulty arising from Turkey’s ever more undemocratic nature and growing political instability was only exacerbated by the failed military coup of mid-July 2016 and the chance that offered to President Erdogan for a major shake-up of the country’s armed forces, the judiciary, the educational system, and other institutions, in an effort to strengthen his increasingly authoritarian rule. Those developments were followed, in April 2017, by Erdogan’s victory in a referendum he had called to expand his powers and the duration of his presidency—that, in turn, further increasing the disquiet of Western capitals concerning the future of their necessary cooperation with Ankara.
Even in the context of those troubling events, of the erosion of the country’s democratic standards, and relations with EU countries increasingly contentious, international observers and scholars kept stressing that “the strategic and geographic roles of Turkey remain essentially unchanged.”4 “Mr. Erdogan may now be a bitter disappointment to [President Barak Obama],” the New York Times wrote after the coup, “but he is still better than any other option – and, like it or not, remains a linchpin in the campaign against the Islamic State and in a host of other critical issues.”5 Four out of five respondents to a survey conducted in March 2018 by the European Council on Foreign Relations (mostly officials in EU member-states) similarly maintained that their countries viewed Turkey as “a strategically important partner,” even while they favored that the country’s accession process remained “frozen.”6 The European Council of June 2018 stressed Turkey’s importance as a “key partner” in critical areas of cooperation, even as it was ruling out advancements in the negotiations for membership.7
As a consequence, already in 2015, when over a million Syrian, Afghani and Iraqi refugees moved through Turkey to reach Central and Northern Europe, straining capabilities, generating major political difficulties and even endangering common EU institutions such as Schengen, Berlin and other EU capitals proved ready to tone down their criticism of the deterioration of rule of law and freedoms in Turkey, to promise visa-free travel for its citizens, a revitalization of the EU accession negotiations, and offer substantial financial resources in exchange for Ankara’s willingness to keep the migrants on its territory and turn Turkey into a sort of buffer zone that could stop the chaotic mass migration toward the countries of the Union.8 After the July 2016 botched coup , a row of senior European officials travelled to Ankara in the attempt to correct the perception of an EU’s ambivalent response to that development. Already in October 2015 the European Commission had exceptionally delayed the publication of its annual “Progress Report” on the country’s advancement toward accession to avoid criticizing the Erdogan presidency on the eve of Turkey’s all-important November 1 parliamentary election and jeopardizing the priority objective of Ankara’s cooperation in the migrant crisis.9 However, when Brussels also attempted, in March 2016, to attach some political conditions to its promise of visa-free travel for Turkish citizens and to the possible resurrection of the country’s accession process, it could only verify the complete loss, at that point, of all political influence it had once had on Ankara.
That attempt was a weak echo of the conditionality applied systematically and with great success on Turkey, in the early 2000s, and that had produced a most positive political convergence with the Union and progress toward democracy in the country. At that time and most conspicuously with the coming to power of the AK Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or Justice and Development Party , in office since November 2002), Turkey had worked eagerly at reforming its institutions and rights-system in accordance with the strict requirements of the then ongoing process of accession.10 A dozen years after it had first applied for membership, in December 1999 Turkey had been granted the “candidate to membership” status. It had then obtained a conditional assurance for the start of “membership” negotiations (December 2002) that eventually became a commitment in late 2004. Ankara’s foreign policy had also increasingly converged on that of the EU member-states.
Therefore, also in recent years, under the pressure of the migrant crisis and based on that recognized correlation between Ankara’s democratic reforms and its earlier progressing toward EU accession, quite a few international observers and policy-makers were still suggesting a revitalization of that process, largely suspended since 2006, as a way to recreate an indispensable partnership, and even save Turkey from its present, dangerous backsliding into undemocratic politics and into a source of regional instability. And while some were insisting that the lack of democracy in the country warranted a formal suspension of the accession negotiations with it, in 2015 Ahtisaari, for example, was still suggesting that the EU “redouble its efforts, strengthening both its criticism of Turkey’s democratic backsliding and the credibility of its access process.”11
Unquestionably, the visibility and credibility of the accession process had been crucial conditions for the EU’s ability to exert political influence on Turkey in the past. However, in recent years—and most noticeably since 2013—the political context in the country has changed to such an extent that, even before the 2016 coup, Brussels’ attempt to attach the just mentioned (mild) conditionality to the promised visa-free travel to EU countries was unceremoniously rebuffed by Erdogan: “I am sorry, we’re going our way, you go yours,”12 And Omer Celi...