Better for Both of Them by Ruprecht Polenz

Author:Ruprecht Polenz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-3-89684-380-7
Publisher: Körber-Stiftung, Hamburg 2012

The EU Commission’s 2009 Progress Report

The EU Commission issues regular, exhaustive and detailed reports in which it examines the situation in Turkey on the basis of the political and economic membership criteria. The most recent 2009 progress report describes (on 104 pages) developments up to September 2009. 58 It is thus probably the most objective evaluation of the situation.

The report states that Turkey is not as yet ready for membership of the European Union. But that is not the point. No one is actually assuming that Turkey could join the EU tomorrow. The accession process will take many years to complete.

Driven by the goal of EU membership, Turkey has embarked on profound governmental and societal reforms. In this the corridor provided by the accession negotiations gives it a much-needed kind of directional security. As a result of the decision to start with the negotiations leading to membership, the EU has given Turkey an opportunity within a certain period of time to transform itself into a country that complies with EU norms and values. This is the only way in which Turkey can become a member of the EU. Turkey deserves to be given a fair opportunity to continue with the reform processes which have now been set in motion. As far as the EU is concerned, it is a win-win situation. 59

The AKP Caught Between Nationalism and Islamism

Since the AKP came to power it has been engaged in a struggle with hard-line Kemalists on the future shape of Turkey. The core issue is about how the two sides construe the state, about the relationship between the state and society and between the state and religion, and about the role of women. As a result of the EU process the occasionally bitter power struggle between old and new elites is taking place within the constraints of democracy and the rule of law, which keep the country on a reformist line between the Scylla of exaggerated nationalism and the Charybdis of Islamism. The AKP is a culturally conservative and pro-market economy middle class movement. Its members reject the idea of an Islamist revolution, and favour integration into the system and social advancement. 60 The Erdogan government is demonstrating that Islam and democracy go together much better than democracy and unadulterated Kemalism of the traditional variety. 61

The foundation of the Turkish republic on 29 October 1923 was supposed to be an answer to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. With the six arrows (Alti Ok), which Kemalists revere as being sacrosanct to this day, the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, pointed the way ahead. Republicanism and popular sovereignty; nationalism as an answer to the multiethnic Ottoman Empire; populism as the expression of policymaking in the interests of the whole nation; revolutionism in the sense of ongoing reforms; secularism, i.e. the separation of state and religion; and statism, which signified partial state control of the economy.

Nationalism was a kind of glue and was supposed to stop the remnants of the Ottoman Empire from disintegrating even more.

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