Alwaght- Turkey's economic situation is moving to worsening several weeks after naming a new cabinet by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to an extent that on Monday national currency lira slumped record low against the US dollar. This is coming while Erdogan has taken first steps of his third presidential term towards de-escalation with the West in a bid to bring back the investment flow to his country.
In this course, one of his main plans is reactivating Turkey's bid for European Union accession and restarting the halted negotiations with the bloc. This agenda of Erdogan showed itself especially after recent NATO summit in Lithuania, where the Turkish president tied Turkish green light to Finland and Sweden membership of NATO to Turkey becoming an EU member.
Now, and despite Turkey's positive vote to Finland joining the NATO, in the preliminary reactions, the European countries treated Ankara's bid coldly and from a position of inflexiblity.
The European Parliament’s (EP) Committee on Foreign Relations in a resolution that was approved on Tuesday with 47 votes in favor, no votes against, and 10 abstentions announced that before Turkish government makes no fundamental change to its policy, the accession talks cannot be resumed under the current conditions. In this statement, Turkey is asked to respect democratic values, rule of law and human rights and to comply with the laws, principles and obligations to the European bloc. Also, this statement in an imperative tone asks Ankara to agree to Sweden's accession to NATO as soon as possible and emphasizes that the accession process of one country to NATO cannot in any way be related to the accession process of another country to the EU.
Since the EU-Russian confrontation began over Ukraine and the country became a scene of a proxy war between the two sides, Turkey sought to embark on a more independent policy to preserve its economic and security interests, and this approach now seems to be the main target of the EP’s anti-Turkish criticism. The recent resolution regrets Turkish decline to commit to the off-the-UN-framework sanctions against Russia. The resolution, which is scheduled to be put to vote in the coming days in the Parliament’s general session, suggests that the rate of Turkish alignment with the EU's foreign and security policy has dropped to record low of 7 percent.
Nacho Sánchez Amor, of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats at the EP, said: “Recently, we have seen the renewed interest of the Turkish government in reviving the EU accession process. This will not happen as a result of geopolitical bargaining, but happens when the Turkish authorities show a real interest in stopping the ongoing retreat from guaranteeing fundamental freedoms and the rule of law.”
This offensive approach by the EP is dimming the prospects about revival of the accession talks. Hurriyet, one of Turkey's leading newspapers, in an evaluation of the EU stance reported that the bloc for now has no intention to take any step towards Turkish accession and does not hide this.
The first Turkish bid to the European Community, later re-branded to European Union, was handed in April 1987, and the membership talks started in October 2005.
The talks for years have gone nowhere and even put on hold due to European complaints about democracy in Turkey and also Turkish geopolitical disputes, including with Cyprus.
Tightening of geopolitical knots
Though in the EP’s resolution Turkey is lashed out at for tying the geopolitical cases like Sweden NATO membership to restart of the negotiations with the bloc, in reality in recent years, Turkey's membership has been increasingly tied to geopolitical issues.
In addition to Cyprus’s opposition to Turkish membership, tensions between Turkey and Greece have heightened considerably in recent months after Ankara accused Athens of human rights violations for abandoning without rescue the immigrants in the Mediterranean.
In response, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece claimed that his country has fallen victim to a “campaign of fake news.” He openly censured Turkey for not fulfilling its obligations to the Greece and the EU.
“Turkey has become an official human trafficker,” he said, adding that “Turkey systemically snuggles regular migrants across the border.”
Ankara's tensions with Athens over gas reserves in the Mediterranean have also been influential in intensifying dispute with Europe. In December 2020, Greece, Israel and Cyprus signed an agreement to build a gas pipeline that ignored Turkey's interests in the Mediterranean.
Responding to the agreement and showing that it does not recognize it, Turkey dispatched a research ship named Oruc Reis with warship escort to the Mediterranean, angering the important European country France.
At the time, the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borel threatened Turkey with sanctions.
Another area of Turkish-European geopolitical difference is Syrian developments, where Erdogan is pushing to return 3 million Syrian refugees home in favor of a major shift and progress in relations with Damascus and also to create a breathing room for the embattled Turkish economy. But the EU still does not recognize the legitimate Syrian government and opposes return of refugees home. On the other hand, the EU has been criticizing Turkey's actions in northern Syria and the pressures on Kurdish militias allied with the US for years, and recently a diplomatic delegation from France visited the north of the Arab country to negotiate with the officials of the Kurdish groups, blacklisted by Turkey as terrorists.
With all these in mind, it seems that even if Erdogan shows more flexibility and alignment with the European expectations, geopolitical gaps will remain in place and this means that Ankara still has a long way in its EU accession course.
Why does Erdogan want to wait behind EU doors again?
Despite the fact that the EU has not showed a receptive face to Turkey's renewed accession bid and it has a record of keeping Turkey behind the doors for several decades, why does Erdogan resort to a failed policy?
To find the answer, we do not need to go a long way and we just need to look back to the atmosphere of the Turkish presidential elections. Erdogan's rivals, who managed to seriously shake the foundations of his power by their consensus for the first time, raised improving the frayed relationship with the West and restarting the accession negotiations with the EU to win the vote of the middle and lower class that are dissatisfied with the economic conditions. The opposition bloc described Erdogan's foreign and home policy the main barrier ahead of conclusion of the talks and vowed a change should they assumed the power.
Undoubtedly, the tendency to become a member of the EU is still a sweet dream for a large part of Turkish society, and therefore, one of the main motivations of Erdogan behind bringing to the surface the EU membership bid is to align public opinion with the policies of the ruling Justice and Development Party.
Also, by showing readiness to return to the negotiations with the EU, Erdogan practically declares that Turkey's foreign policy encompass is reset towards the West, and by sending such signals, he eyes a beef-up to economic ties to the bloc. After returning from NATO summit, the Turkish leader said he delegated to Brussels his senior foreign policy adviser Akif Cagatay Kilic for negotiations on revival of the accession process.
The near goal of Erdogan top aide’s talks in Brussels is said to be the expansion of range of activity of the EU customs union and securing visa-free travels for Turkish citizens to the EU states. Erdogan hopes that in case of reaching an agreement with the Europeans, he can ease the public pressure deriving from a failure to get the economy back on the track several weeks after inauguration of his new government.
