Brussels – Turkey remains light years away from EU membership, due to the continued deterioration of democracy, and indeed, its entry should be suspended. However, the neighbourly relations with Ankara remain based on pragmatism, net of human rights and territorial integrity of sovereign states violations, even if they are members of the twelve-star club.
This is, in a nutshell, the gist of the report on the Anatolian Republic, which puts together the 2023 and the 2024 reports, adopted today (May 7) by the European Parliament plenary in Strasbourg, with 367 votes in favour, 74 against and 188 abstentions.
The document, presented by rapporteur Nacho Sánchez Amor during a debate in the House yesterday afternoon, consists of two main parts. In the first, the distance that separates Turkey from joining the Union is reiterated, mainly on the democracy and human rights fronts, but also because of the decade-old Cyprus issue. The second explores the dimensions in which the dialogue between the Twenty-Seven and the Anatolian state can progress, recognising Ankara’s decisive role on the international chessboard.
As Sánchez Amor explained during a press conference, the point of the accession process is that the latter is “normative” and “based on democracy” and not on political, geostrategic or military considerations. But “in the last 30 years we have not had any more good news” from Ankara about compliance with democratic norms and, indeed, “Turkey is the only one among the candidate countries that has taken steps backward” in this area “in a systematic way,” so much so that the current level “is the lowest in recent years” and a “fully authoritarian model” is being built that is incompatible with European standards.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is building “a model of society similar to Russia’s and profoundly different from Europe’s,” notes the Spanish socialist. “We cannot interfere in these sovereign decisions, we cannot turn Turkey into a democracy,” he notes, because “it is the Turkish citizens who must decide that.” Rather, the task of Brussels, which has been agreed with Ankara, is to monitor developments in the country and indicate the areas in which the Turkish government must achieve concrete results if it wants to join the Union.
However, Sánchez Amor explains, it is important to distinguish between the “deep will” of civil society and that of the rulers. “Erdoğan is hiding the fact that there is a whole country behind the president’s shadow,” the MEP argues, pointing out the vitality of the pro-democracy and pro-EU movements, and the courage of those who have been protesting for over a month against the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu, the fiercest challenger to unseat the sultan from his throne.
The Turks themselves are “asking us not to close the door” of membership, and “if the conditions are there, we are ready to assess the political will and commitment” of Ankara’s leadership. “We are not closing the process,” Sánchez Amor maintains, but the latter remains, for all intents and purposes, frozen. And at the moment, no one in Europe seems really interested in reopening it. In short, the door is not completely closed, but the opening is minimal.
On the other hand, the EU-Turkey partnership is a substantially different matter. Through these kinds of agreements— transactional by definition—”one can address so many other issues and investigate what the common interests are,” to establish relations that are “based on mutual trust,” Sánchez Amor said. Turkey remains a crucial neighbouring country, with which it is inevitable to talk about a wide range of issues such as energy, trade, defence, and security.
This last item, specifically, is twofold: Brussels keeps the dialogue with Ankara open both in the field of European military cooperation in anti-Russian terms, and in the management of migration flows, a sweetened formula to make it acceptable to pay billions of euros for Erdoğan to keep at home tens of thousands of desperate people who would like to reach the Old Continent.
Sánchez Amor himself acknowledges this, with stark realism. The EU weaves relations with countries around the world that do not respect human rights, he admits, citing Egypt, Tunisia, and Israel as examples, because “inevitably foreign policy has a realpolitik component.” “We don’t discount membership, but we can’t widen the Bosphorus either,” he reiterates, explaining that the southeastern neighbour represents an important “buffer”between Europe and the Middle East powder keg.
Finally, there is the hot issue of Cyprus. The eastern Mediterranean island has been under Turkish occupation for decades, and Erdoğan himself went in recent days to the north of the country—which virtually only Ankara recognizes as a sovereign state—reiterating his intent to defend the two-state solution, in defiance of international law and the Resolutions of the United Nations (supported by Brussels) that recognise the indivisibility of the Cypriot Republic, one of the 27 members of the EU.
“The more Turkey defends the two-state solution, the more Northern Cyprus looks like a province of Ankara,” punctuated Sánchez Amor, who, during today’s voting session, added an oral amendment to the text of the report, approved by a large majority, precisely to condemn the Turkish president’s “illegal visit”.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
