Turkish Accession to the EU

Satisfying the Copenhagen Criteria

Eric Faucompret, Jozef Konings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9780415457132
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134105663
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Economics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Is Turkey on the way to meet the economic Copenhagen criteria?

The enlargement process that the European Union faced the last decade stirred the debate again about the role Turkey has to play and whether or not Turkey should be part of the European Union. While the enlargement with the Central and East European countries of the former Soviet Union was a logical process, given the strong trade relationships and the political and historical context of these countries, the potential enlargement with Turkey is much more complex and controversial.

The main innovation of the present study is that it unravels the complexity of the Turkish case by approaching the problem from different angles in a comprehensive way. In particular, by tuning in on the historic, political and economic processes, new insights are obtained about the feasibility of Turkish accession to the EU. By combining lessons from the existing literature, the use of new data and the analysis of the political economic processes, a new perspective on the enlargement question – with the key Copenhagen criteria used as a corner stone - is offered.

1
Short survey of the history of Turkey

We will open this chapter with a brief discussion about the Ottoman Empire, before focusing on the establishment of modern Turkey. We will then deal with the events that have been important in the further evolution of Turkey, using a chronological approach to outline events, and basing our analysis in essence on the publications of Kemal H. Karpat and Erik J. Zürcher.

The end of the Ottoman Empire

Diplomatically, Turkey has been part of the European state system since the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire was included in the Concert of Europe. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire fought to survive. It was threatened by outside powers (France, Russia and Austria), while its ally, the UK, wanted to be paid for its protection. Russia, in particular, tried to expand its territory at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. It created satellite states (Serbia, Montenegro, Romania and Albania) in Ottoman territory in the Balkans, and it tried to establish its hold on the strategically important sea lanes of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. The sultan feared for the survival of the Empire. As the Ottoman Empire lost its military superiority, the Ottoman elite began to look to Europe as a model and to import European ideas (Larrabee and Lesser 2003: 45). Like Japan’s Meiji restoration in 1868, Ottoman modernization was going to be a top-down project, where citizens were not directly involved. The Tanzimat edict of 1839 was the turning point in the sultan’s modernization efforts. Reforms covered the army, the central bureaucracy, the provincial administration, taxation, education, communication and judiciary (Karpat 1973a: 43; Zürcher 1997: 59). New penal, commercial and maritime trade law codes were adopted, and the Shari’a was restricted to family law (Zürcher 1997: 64). The period of the Tanzimat also represented a cultural revolution, albeit a limited one. Leading civil servants – having acquired knowledge of the French language – became acquainted with the ideas of nationalism and liberalism. However, the ‘Young Ottomans’ – a small group within the elite – were opposed to the Tanzimat regime, which they considered authoritarian and out of date (Zürcher 1997: 71).

Instead, the Young Ottomans wanted to introduce Western concepts, such as a constitution, a parliament, freedom and equality, without giving up traditional Islamic values. Under sultan Abdülhamit 2 (1876–1909) – though he himself was a tyrant – administrative centralization went further on. More than any of his predecessors, Abdülhamit called upon Islam to unite the people. However, he did not succeed in making the new generation of civil servants and military more loyal to the regime, let alone the people. The new generations were seduced by the liberal ideas as well as the Ottoman patriotism of the Young Ottomans (Zürcher 1997: 90). In Paris those who had been forced to flee the Ottoman Empire set up secret societies. These emigrants attacked the sultan in pamphlets and periodicals.¹ They called themselves ‘Young Turks’ (Zürcher 1997: 91). The re-emigration of Young Turks back to the Empire rejuvenated the domestic opposition. The Young Turks’ uprising of 1908 against the sultan caught the regime by surprise (Karpat 1973a: 47). The Young Turks replaced the sultan with his more progressive brother. The Union and Progress Committee, the Young Turks’ former secret organization, won elections. That committee soon became a mass organization from which Turkey’s future leaders emerged. One of them was Mustafa Kemal (Deringil 2000: 184). In international relations, military defeats are often followed by a change of regime. It was no different in the Ottoman Empire.

Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia in the Balkans Wars and the subsequent loss of Macedonia and Adrianople (1912–13), the army staged a coup in January 1913. The sultan was not officially deposed at this time, but from then on the Union and Progress Committee exercised real domestic power in the country (Zürcher 1997: 115). Barely a year after the end of the second Balkans War, the Ottoman Empire joined Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First World War. The German emperor, William II, had pricked the sultan’s imagination by his megalomaniac ideas on world politics. In particular, his project to build a railway linking Berlin, Byzantium and Bagdad convinced the sultan that he should join the German war effort. For Germany, the entry into the war of the Ottoman Empire was of vital importance: it meant it could block Russia’s access to the Bosporus and the Dardanelles and it could call on the Arabs to rise up against their Western oppressors.² The Empire had apparently been desperate for allies, and negotiations with both France and the UK had led nowhere. The sultan – impressed by the boasting of the German emperor – greatly overestimated Germany’s war capacity. Moreover, like many, he had assumed that the war would be limited to the Balkans and would not turn into a world war. He had never expected the UK to join in the war (Zürcher 1997: 116–17). Public opinion as well as the army was unprepared for war. After four years of intensive war effort, the army was finally defeated. In accordance with the Moudros ceasefire agreement (1918), the Ottoman Empire had to accept the inevitable: the Bosporus and the Dardanelles were occupied by an inter-allied force, led by Great Britain. The European part of the country was going to be occupied by France, Italy and Greece. After the war had ended, the sultan had to accept the humiliating Peace Treaty of Sèvres (1919). The Ottoman Empire lost its Arab territories. It retained Anatolia, but was to grant autonomy to Kurdistan, pending a referendum on independence. Armenia became a separate republic under international guarantees, and Smyrna (nowzmir) and its environment were placed under Greek administration pending a plebiscite to determine its permanent status. In Europe, the Empire had to give up parts of Eastern Thrace and certain Aegean islands to Greece, and the Dodecanese and Rhodes to Italy, retaining only a small strip of land on the European continent: Constantinople and its surroundings, including the Zone of the Straits, which was neutralized and internationalized. The treaty was accepted by the government of Sultan Muhammad VI at Constantinople but was rejected by the rival nationalist government of Kemal Atatürk at Ankara. The First World War brought the end of four absolute monarchies: the house of Habsburg in Austria, the Hohenzollerns in Prussia, the Romanovs in Russia –and the Ottomans in Turkey. It heralded a new time, also, for Turkey.

The establishment of modern Turkey

Unlike many other states, Turkey has never been a colony. It has always been able to exercise a certain amount of autonomy and form a local intelligentsia, which explains the proud nature of its people (Kazancigil 1986: 132–3). Modern Turkey owes a lot to the Ottoman intelligentsia. This intelligentsia knew everything about law, checks and balances, political rights, the free press and the way to govern a country. It was also middle-class oriented. For the Ottoman scholars, a modern state could come into being only if it had a sound democratic and industrial basis. They knew the principles of modern political and economic thought. Modern Turkey’s first generation of leaders was raised in schools set up by the Ottomans and they were taught how to rule a modern state. Moreover, from time to time, the Ottoman Empire itself had had experience with institutions such as a parliament, political parties and the press. Some Ottoman statesmen-historians even favoured a kind of Turkish nationalism (Karpat 1974: 97; Deringil 2000: 178–9). Mustafa Kemal was a product of the Ottoman intelligentsia. He combined a splendid intellect with a far-sighted vision and shrewd diplomatic skills. In the aftermath of the First World War, he saw his chance to unite his people. He succeeded in canalizing the anger of the army and public opinion incensed by the unjust Treaty of Sèvres. When the Greek, helped by British officers, tried to occupy Smyrna, Turkey declared war on Greece.

The War of Liberation (1919–22) created national unity in Turkey, for it brought together notables, intelligentsia and lower sections of civil servants and the military as well as the population, for the first time since the early days of the Ottoman Empire (Karpat 1973a: 47). In that war, both sides committed many atrocities. Yet the result was more important: under Mustafa Kemal, Atatürk, the Turkish army stood fast, and it drove the Greeks out of Smyrna. This was the military’s finest hour, and it greatly enhanced Atatürk’s reputation. Thanks to Atatürk, the humiliating Sèvres Treaty was repudiated and replaced by the very favourable Lausanne Treaty (1922). Turkey recovered Eastern Thrace, several Aegean islands, a strip along the Syrian border, the Smyrna (İzmir) district and the internationalized Zone of the Straits, which, however, was to remain demilitarized and remain subject to an international convention. In return, Turkey renounced all claims on Arab territories outside its new boundaries. Armenian and Kurdish independence were no longer mentioned. All wartime reparations were renounced. Turkey declared itself ready to protect its minorities, but there was no supervision of this (Zürcher 1997: 170). The remainder of the Greek orthodox population of Anatolia was exchanged against the Muslims from Greece. The League of Nations³ tried to soften the impact of this human tragedy.

A republican regime established in 1923 replaced the monarchy. The decentralization and self-rule that had been typical of the Ottoman Empire were abolished. Geographic regions and minorities were put under one centralized Turkish government, and national political identity was emphasized. This was a clear break with the past if one looks back at the multicultural and Islamic nature of the Ottoman Empire, where the sultan had also been the caliph of the Muslims’ world community. However, this was how modern Turkey would be governed (Karpat 1973a: 48; 1973b: 320).

In Atatürk’s view, moreover, Turkey had to be ruled in accordance with the following principles (Zürcher 1997: 189; Rill 2006: 137):

• The sultanate and the caliphate had to be abolished (1 November 1922 and 3 March 1924) and the republic proclaimed (23 April 1923); the decline of the Ottoman Empire was attributed to the autocratic rule of the sultan and the rule of Islam.
• Religion had to be removed from public life and controlled by the government.
• Modern Turkey had to be a homogeneous state.⁴
• The interest of the people had to be the main concern of the ruling party.
• The state had to be distinct from the person of the leader, and there had to be cooperation between the private and the public sector.
• The state had to be pre-eminent in the economic field and it had to be continuously adapted to the requests of modernization.
• There had to be national solidarity, and the interests of the whole nation had to be put before those of any group or class.

The concept of national sovereignty that inspired modern Turkey was no different from that of nineteenth-century Europe. Many new European states saw the light. Nations felt united because of common race, religion, language, culture, geography and economic interests. Leaders like Cavour in Piemont or Bismarck in Prussia, and intellectual movements like the Burschenschaften in Germany or the Carbonari in Italy, encouraged the rise of nations against oppressors. This was also the case in Turkey. Events like the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the loss of territory in the Balkans and the Middle East (85 per cent of Ottoman territory and 75 per cent of population) and the attempts by Kurds and Armenians to carve out a separate state on Ottoman territory accentuated Turkish nationalism (The Economist 2007e). Out of these experiences came a strong desire for unity, with modernization and Westernization as key elements (Larrabee and Lesser 2003: 22). For Atatürk, Westernization and modernization were synonyms: ‘We cannot shut ourselves in within our boundaries and ignore the outside world. We shall live as an advanced and civilized nation in the midst of contemporary civilization’ (Waxman 1998: 3).

The first Grand National Assembly was elected in 1923, and, one year later, the first republican constitution was passed. Elections were strongly controlled by Kemal’s Republican People’s Party (RPP). The constitution was of an authoritarian nature: it did not provide for a check and balances system and it put a lot of power in the hands of the executive (Özbudun 1998: 230). Under Atatürk, Turkey was a strong one-party state. The event that was used by the president to put an end to political opposition was the Kurdish rebellion in February 1925 (Zürcher 1997: 176). The RPP was made up of the middle-class Muslim bourgeoisie. It governed the state. The elite were made up of the intelligentsia, land nobility and military. Workers and peasants were left out of the system – even if there was some class mobility (Karpat 1973a: 48; Deringil 2000: 180).

The Republicans

Kemalism was a top-down modernization project. The state took charge of cultural and socio-economic development. It had, therefore, to be modernized, which meant it had to import cultural and socio-economic concepts of Western civilization (Rumford 2003: 379). Yet elements of the Western political system were not introduced straight away: representative government, pluralism and freedom of thought and expression lagged behind (Zürcher 1997: 197; McLaren 2000: 118; Yavuz and Khan 2004: 389). Atatürk’s view of Westernization clashed with Turkey’s Ottoman and Middle Eastern Islamic traditions. Turkey adopted the Swiss civil code, Mussolini’s Italy penal code and the Latin alphabet.⁵ The Islamic dressing style and courtesy titles (except in the army) were abolished. Shari’a rules leading to the discrimination of women or prohibiting conversion were no longer valid.⁶ However, in rejecting part of the Ottoman past and in turning against popular religion and against minorities, the Kemalists created unnecessarily opposition, particularly in the religious countryside and in the south-east, where the Kurdish minority lived. Whereas the Ottoman Empire had favoured a religious and multicultural society, Kemalism was opposed to the Islamic past and defended a strictly national identity (Zürcher 1997: 200; Waxman 1998: 7; Rumford 2002: 262).

During the first years after independence, Turkey’s economy was in bad shape. Greek and Armenian traders were no longer there; Turkish industry was very weak. Only the recovery of the agricultural sector in those early years was spectacular (Zürcher 1997: 205). At the Economic Congress of İzmir in 1923, Turkey favoured rapid industrialization based on private entrepreneurship (Karpat 1968: 330; Lejour et al. 2004: 17). Before the 1929 economic crisis, things went relatively well. The Anatolian new bourgeoisie found common ground with the old bourgeoisie in the West (civil servants, officers, teachers doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs of larger commercial enterprises). They both dominated the RPP (Zürcher 1997: 203; Boratav and Özugurlu 2006: 159). But with the1929 economic crisis, ‘statism’ was enforced as the government’s official economic policy. In Atatürk’s view, ‘statism’ was neither collectivism nor economic liberalism:

The statism that we are implementing is a system peculiar to Turkey, engendered by its own needs. It means that while recognizing private entrepreneurship as the main basis, but realizing that many activities are not undertaken, the state must be given the control of the economy to face all the needs of a large country and of a great nation … (Karpat 1968: 330–1)

In reality, after 1929 Kemalism became a policy of protectionism and import substitution. The first investments were in basic consumer goods, previously imported from the West. When, in 1932, a Soviet delegation visited Turkey and the Soviet Union made available a loan to aid the Turkish industrialization programme, the involvement of the state in the economic life became stronger. Yet private ownership remained intact. The state established industries in which the private sector was not interested. The economic policy was liberal in the sense that it was based on private ownership and initiative. But it was not liberal in the sense of non-interference on the part of the state. The state bought out railroad companies, created state monopolies and took interest in banks (Zürcher 1997: 204–6; Boratav and Özugurlu 2006: 163). Soon statism became state capitalism, and state economic enterprises became an economic asset in the hands of private interest groups that controlled the government (Karpat 1968: 332). (This is a still a problem besetting today’s Turkey.) During the second half of the 1930s, there was a steady increase in Turkey’s GDP. Living standards of workers improved and industry profits boomed. There was room for some tepid social legislation, but surprisingly the government implemented it only in foreign-owned firms employing large numbers of workers (Boratav and Özugurlu 2006: 166). The industrialization process brought wealth for new classes, like the captains of industry and skilled workers (Karpat 1973a: 52–6). Yet it hardly influenced the life of villagers, who made up the bulk of Turkey’s population. The Kemalist state sided with the industrial elite. The Labour Law of 1936 was a copy of that of Fascist Italy, prohibiting strikes and the formation of trade unions (Zürcher 1997: 209).

The Democrats

In 1940 the liberal Mustafa Ïsmet Ïnönü succeeded Atatürk as president of the republic. Under his influence and in part as a result of pressure from the USA and the new economic middle class, Turkey introduced a multi-party democracy (Karpat 1973a: 53). At the same time, the state capitalist system remained intact. Turkey learned from the past mistakes of the Ottoman Empire: it remained neutral in the Second World War until June 1944. It concluded a Treaty of Mutual Assistance with the UK and France (19 October 1939) as well as a Treaty of Friendship and Non-Aggression with Germany (18 June 1941) (Deringil 2000: 219). On the one hand, the war increased Turkey’s foreign reserves: it got a large gold loan from the allies in 1939 and it exported strategic commodities to both sides. On the other hand, during the Second World War Turkish GNP dropped sharply. It did not reach its 1939 level again until 1950 (Zürcher 1997: 208). The state deficit reached alarming proportions. The government introduced all kinds of taxes and other draconian measures to finance it. This hurt the bourgeoisie in particular.

There were both internal and external causes for the political and economic changes in Turkey after 1945. Domestically there was widespread discontent. Farmers and industrial workers had suffered severe income losses (Zürcher 1997: 215–17), and reforms were needed to save the system. Moreover, whereas throughout the 1920s and 1930s a close relationship with the USSR (which had helped Atatürk in the struggle against Greece) had been the cornerstone of Turkey’s foreign policy, this changed after the Second World War. Turkey identified itself with the American ideals of multi-party democracy and liberal capitalism (Zürcher 1997: 218–19; Deringil 2000: 245). So Turkey moved to a multi-party system, but it did not take long before all left-wing parties were banned and their leaders prosecuted (Boratav and Özugurlu 2006: 171). The USA did not seem to object to this.

There were two rival factions in the RPP: the so-called revolutionaries favouring statism and planning and the ‘moderates’ favouring liberal capitalism (Boratav and Özugurlu 2006: 169–70). Formal opposition to the RPP first came from within its own ranks over the question of land reform (Karpat 1973b: 320). The Democratic Party (DP) was founded in 1946 mainly to unseat the ruling RPP. Whereas the civil servants and the military led the RPP, landowners, industrialists and the free professions assumed the leadership of the DP. Even so, the ideological differences between the DP and the RPP should not be exaggerated. Both parties represented the interests of the economically dominant classes, not the workers or the peasants. More than the Republicans, the DP favoured individual rights, respect for private property and freedom of economic enterprise (Karpat 1973b: 321; Boratav and Özugurlu 2006: 171). In the first multi-party elections (July 1946), it won only 62 of the 465 seats in the Assembly (Zürcher 1997: 222). In 1950, with the electoral victory of the DP, it was clear that a significantly different section of Turkey’s elite had come to power (Karpat 1973a: 58; Zürcher 1997: 231). In the 1954 elections, the DP increased its majority in Parliament.

In order to stay in power, the Democrats favoured populist policies. Their measures included new infrastructure, cheap credits and high prices for farmers, municipal services for the urban poor, legislation on industrial relations and social security, and free education and health services. Agriculture was modernized and large-scale industrial firms were set up that are today still dominating the Turkish economy. All these measures cost a lot of money. Domestic savings were too small and foreign investors did not come to Turkey – a perennial problem in Turkey – so the government had to contract loans. Despite the liberal economic ideology of the DP, the state’s role in the economy increased. Between 40 and 50 per cent of investment came from the state and privatization of large state-owned enterprises proved impossible. Successive democratic governments had to take the demands of the lower classes of society into account. All kinds o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Map of Turkey
• Introduction
• 1 Short survey of the history of Turkey
• 2 History of Turkey–EU relations
• 3 The Copenhagen economic criteria
• 4 The Copenhagen political criteria
• 5 Other conditions
• 6 Final conclusion
• Notes
• References