Thinking Outside the European Box
By John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus, March 17, 2016
http://fpif.org/thinking-outside-european-box/
Europe has a deal on the table to address the current refugee crisis.
This week, European leaders are gathering to discuss the particulars.
Although the rough outline has already come under some withering criticism
for being incompatible with international law, it may represent the best
effort to achieve some consensus among an EU membership that has wildly
divergent views.
The proposed deal involves three major elements.
The first is a swap. For every migrant currently stuck in Greece who is
returned to Turkey, a place will be made in the EU for one Syrian migrant
now in a Turkish refugee camp.
Then there’s the money. Turkey will get the $3.3 billion that the EU pledged
earlier to help with the refugee crisis. And Ankara is angling for another
$3.3 billion to cover costs through 2018 for border control, cooperation
with Greece, and accommodating refugees. By some estimates, Turkey has
already spent more than $7.7 billion on addressing the crisis. That’s fully
half of what the entire EU has spent.
And the third part involves Turkey’s relationship with the EU. As part of
the deal, Turkish citizens would be able to travel visa-free around
Europe--a perk never before denied to an EU membership candidate. More
controversially, discussions around Turkey’s accession to the EU, which have
been in process for nearly three decades, would begin again.
Virtually every element of this deal has raised concerns--from human rights
activists upset at the forcible removal of refugees from Greece to
Euroskeptics aghast at the possibility of Turkey becoming an EU member any
time soon. But Europe has to come up with some solutions--not only for the
current refugees flooding into Greece and Turkey, but also for the next
waves that will come now that the weather is improving. Meanwhile, the
violence continues in Syria and Iraq, and refugees in Lebanon remain in what
amount to miserable holding cells.
Greece is struggling with its own economic problems, so it’s unrealistic to
expect it to single-handedly absorb the 43,000 refugees currently stuck in
the country. Turkey, which already accommodates more than 3 million Syrian
refugees, obviously needs resources to handle the flow. And the EU already
agreed in the fall to visa-free travel for Turkish citizens--this deal would
only make it happen sooner.
The real problem with the deal isn’t the relocation of refugees from Greece
to Turkey, where they don’t generally face risk of persecution. Rather, will
the EU actually be able to follow through on its promise to find a home for
those Syrians in Turkey according to the one-for-one formula when it’s
managed so far to handle only 600 of the 66,000 refugees in Greece it
promised in September to relocate? Germany took in over a million refugees
in 2015, and the backlash is building. And recalcitrant EU members--Poland,
Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic--show no signs of sudden generosity.
But the ultimate sticking point in the deal is its most ambiguous part:
Turkey’s accession to the EU. The reopening of these negotiations in many
ways couldn’t come at a worse time. The British are planning a referendum on
their own membership in the near future, and the prospect of Turkey coming
on board might tip the balance in favor of the supporters of Brexit. Cyprus
has threatened to veto any refugee pact that accelerates accession without
Turkey recognizing its nationhood.
Meanwhile, developments in Turkey make accession seem a remote possibility.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been on an increasingly
autocratic trajectory.
He’s been attempting to concentrate more power in the presidential office.
He’s waged battle against journalists, with the government most recently
seizing the offices of the newspaper Zaman, which often printed articles
critical of Erdogan’s policies. And he’s both reignited the war against the
Kurdish population in the southeast of the country and taken aim at Kurdish
militias in Syria as well. The bombings in recent months in Ankara and
Istanbul represent blowback from this government attempt to wipe out Kurdish
opposition in both its legal and paramilitary forms.
And yet, despite all of these reasons for leaving EU membership out of the
current refugee deal, getting the accession talks back on track has never
been more important.
Europe, you see, has been at this crossroads once before. At that time, in
early 1990, it made a fatal mistake. And the cost in lives and resources was
enormous.
Europe now has a second chance. Will it blow it again?
The Yugoslav Mistake
By the beginning of 1990, Communism had crumbled throughout East-Central
Europe, and the mandarins in Brussels were already beginning to think about
expanding the European Community’s borders eastward.
Expansion in that direction, however, was not going to be easy, and not
simply because of the economic gap between east and west. There were already
hints of potential violence in the former Soviet bloc. In Romania, for
instance, the revolution turned bloody in December 1989, and tensions were
brewing between ethnic Romanians and ethnic Hungarians.
But it was Yugoslavia where the potential for conflict seemed greatest.
Serbs and Albanians were squaring off over Kosovo. A strong nationalist
movement was resurfacing in Croatia, and ethnic Serbs in that republic were
pushing for their own autonomy. Slovenes, too, were itching for more
independence.
Prior to the revolutionary events of 1989, Yugoslavia was widely considered
the first in line from the region for membership in the European Community
(later the European Union). It’s not inconceivable that European leaders
could have offered federal Yugoslavia a timetable for accession in early
1990.
That didn’t happen, of course.
Instead, the region went through four successive wars: over Slovenian
independence, between Croatia and Serbia, over Bosnia, and between Serbia
and Kosovo. It’s difficult to calculate the costs of those wars. In the
Bosnian conflict, for instance, nearly 100,000 people died. Sarajevo alone
suffered 14 billion euros of damage. And the bill for the brief war in and
around Kosovo was $100-150 billion--including the air war, dealing with the
refugees, rebuilding Kosovo, paying for the peacekeepers, and helping the
surrounding region recover economically.
In comparison, a program of economic assistance to Yugoslavia, to help it
approach European standards, would have been a bargain in comparison. In
1992, the total assistance going to Poland and Hungary under the PHARE
program was just a little over $1 billion. Total capital inflow to
East-Central Europe in 1991 was less than $10 billion. Between 1990 and
2003, total development assistance for Romania was $4.6 billion.
In other words, the costs of the wars ran into the hundreds of billions of
dollars (at least). The costs of bringing Yugoslavia up to the level of the
rest of Europe was only in the tens of billions of dollars. And that doesn’t
take into account the loss of life.
Yugoslavia was in many ways a weak candidate for EU membership, but it was
no weaker than the other East-Central European countries. Unlike its
neighbors in the region, Yugoslavia didn’t experience a political upheaval
in 1989. But it did hold elections in 1990, as part of fulfilling the
democratization requirements connected to the minimal aid package that
Europe extended to the country. Those elections, however, didn’t take place
at the federal level. Rather, elections in each republic favored the only
parties that managed to prepare in time--namely the nationalist parties,
which only accelerated the fragmentation of the country. A timetable for
accession could have prioritized democratic elections at the Yugoslav level,
which would have provided political legitimacy to federal institutions.
Accession could have addressed other issues as well. There were demands for
greater autonomy in the republics, but those could have been dealt with as
part of the decentralization requirements. There was growing anger within
the country over the economic disparities among the republics, but the
economic rewards of membership could have served to divert the attention of
the population from the agendas of nationalist extremists. Indeed, Europe
could have used membership as leverage to induce positive change, just as it
delayed accession for Slovakia over its authoritarian turn under Vladimir
Meciar, or with Romania over its policies on orphans.
Membership in the EU is no panacea. It can’t solve all problems in a country
(indeed, as with Greece, it might accentuate problems). And it might not
have prevented the outbreak of violence in Yugoslavia or kept the country
together. But chances are that it could have radically diminished the level
of violence associated with nationalist aspirations.
Europe can’t pretend to ignore what’s happening in Turkey as if it’s taking
place on another continent. For better or for worse, Turkey is part of
Europe, and the refugee crisis has only underscored that fact.
Talking Turkey
When Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came
to power in Turkey in 2003, joining the EU was high on their agenda.
The country had formally applied for membership in 1987 (it had missed an
opportunity to apply along with Greece in the late 1970s). The AKP, despite
its roots in a conservative Islamist tradition, was a party of modernizers
eager to boost economic growth, improve the country’s relations with its
neighbors, and reduce the power that the military had long held over
political institutions. Membership in the EU offered what seemed to be a
shortcut to achieve those goals. Negotiations around accession began in
2005.
At first, the discussions seemed to go well, and Turkey implemented various
reforms to get its house in order. But there have long been pockets of
serious resistance within the EU to the idea of Turkey as a member--because
of its size, the nature of its political institutions, and, most
importantly, the adherence of a majority of its population to Islam. The
incorporation of Turkey represented a challenge to all those who continued
to think of Europe as a fundamentally Christian entity. The obstacles that
some European countries placed in the way of Turkey’s accession coincided
with a slowdown in Turkey’s own internal reforms and the dimming enthusiasm
of Turks for the enterprise.
So, why do Erdogan and the AKP suddenly have renewed interest in EU
membership? Some critics imagine that the Turkish government simply wants to
use European desperation over the refugee crisis to buy EU silence over
Ankara’s crackdown on the press, war against the Kurds, and efforts to
create a presidentialist political system.
But that doesn’t make sense. The AKP knows full well that the accession
process will involve the EU more deeply in Turkish politics, not less, and
Brussels will use its leverage to demand significant reforms before the
process can proceed. Those reforms will involve some rather sensitive
issues, such as decentralization (including the predominantly Kurdish areas
of the southeast), freedom of the press, and the rule of law.
Here’s a more likely set of reasons for Turkey’s renewed interest in EU
membership. The Turkish economy averaged 7.2 percent growth between 2002 and
2006. After the global financial crisis, growth rates were near double
digits in 2010 and 2011. Since then, however, the economy has cooled
considerably, and growth for 2015 dropped to around 3 percent. The reentry
of Iran into the global economy, the impact of falling energy prices, and
the spillover effects of war in the Middle East have all made the Turkish
economy more vulnerable to global trends.
Turkey’s good-neighbor policy of the 2000s has also hit a wall on virtually
every side. Relations with Russia have soured as a result of the Syrian war.
The winter of discontent that followed the Arab Spring has jeopardized
Turkey’s relations with a broad swath of northern Africa and the Middle
East. Reconciliation with Armenia has stalled. The Cyprus issue has yet to
be resolved. Tensions have even increased with Washington over Ankara’s
attacks on the same Kurdish forces in Syria that the United States backs.
Turkey is boxed in by the refugee problem, its cooling economy, and the
failures of its good-neighbor policy. For economic and geopolitical reasons,
the EU is looking like a more attractive option to help Turkey out of its
predicament.
But Europe is boxed in, too. The flow of refugees challenges the EU’s
commitments to principles of human rights and social welfare. Euroskeptic
parties are gaining at the polls. Austerity policies are tearing at the
fabric of countries on the periphery. The newest members in East-Central
Europe are bridling at what they consider interference from Brussels.
Economic growth has been elusive. Where once countries were clamoring to get
into the EU, now they are eyeing the exit.
Bringing Turkey into the mix would be a way of getting out of this box.
Given the size of its economy and its geostrategic location, Turkey could
reenergize the EU at a time when the body is so desperately in need of a
blood transfusion. It could also be a way of getting out in front of a
number of problems--refugees, the war taking place with the Kurds, the
relationship between Christianity and Islam--in a way that Europe failed to
do with Yugoslavia 25 years ago. Accession can help stabilize Turkey before
it descends further into autocracy and war.
It’s not an entirely risk-free strategy. The Islamophobes will have a field
day. However, as long as the process proceeds at a deliberate pace and
produces real results inside Turkey, the critics will have nothing to fall
back on except their own intolerance.
Imagine that we’re at halftime in a game where the EU, after a strong
opening, just fell behind in the first half. The coach stands before all the
members of the squad to deliver a rousing speech. "Coming up is our
make-or-break moment," the coach says to the fractious and demoralized crew.
"From here out, the EU had better go big or we might as well go home."
Turkey is the big running back sitting on the bench. It’s time to bring
Turkey into the game.
