State of play, Turkey-EU relations, part 1

Finally back after a too long hiatus from posting. Have lots of things happened while The TurkEU Blog has been inactive? Not really. At least not on the Turkey-EU front.

There remain, as I see it, a few major stumbling blocs on Turkey's path toward accession. Here they are, not in order of importance:

1. The pace of the Turkish reform process. 

Turkish reforms have undoubtedly been impressive over the course of the past ten or so years, but the pace has been uneven. And we are now arguably in a bit of a lull with respect to the reforms.

Moreover, recent developments on the media front in connection with the Ergonekon and Sledgehammer investigations (I have blogged about this here, here, and here) in Turkey have given ammunition to Turkey-skeptics in the EU about the sincerity of the AKP towards democratic reforms. It is up to the AKP to allay such suspicions, which, by the way, are shared by many secular Turks as well.

2. Cyprus. 

This of course remains a major impediment. See here for a more thorough discussion of the issue. From the EU's point of view, Turkey must sign the according to the Additional Protocol of the Ankara Agreement and give the (Greek Cypriot) Republic of Cyprus access to Turkish ports etc, but euinside (a Bulgarian online media source) reports the Turkish foreign minister as saying that Turkey has given openings on this issue that have not been taken up by the other side. And from the Turkish point of view, Brussels still has not lived up to the promises it gave in 2004.

3. Visa requirements. 

This is a burning issue right now, with Turks upset about visa requirements for Turkish citizens wanting to travel to the EU. Abdullah Gül and several other Turkish politicians have been pushing this issue publicly recently. The Voice of America quotes a Turkish diplomatic correspondent on the sensitivity of this matter:

"Turks are confronted with visas from Europe even though they are many businessmen who do business with Europe. There are thousands of students who go to Europe and Turkey is being treated as a third world country which has nothing but potential illegal immigrants," Idiz said. "For the government , the state and the population this is a demeaning situation."

It is, however, also a demanding situation for the EU side, as this issue gets to the murkier fears that underly much public resistance in the EU to the prospect of Turkish EU accession. VoA again:

joint head of the European Green Party, Daniel Cohn Bendit, says Ankara has to realize what its asking for.

"Opening a free travel is an immense opening. Turkey is a big country," he said. "This is a debate I have had for 10 years with the Turks."

The EU set up a number of criteria (three, as far as I have been able to tell) for the opening of a dialogue on the visa issue, and Turkey now claims that it has reached or made extensive progress on those criteria. The one criteria where Turkey is openly holding out is the signature of what is known as the re-admission agreement, according to which Turkey would accept all undocumented immigrants that enter the EU through Turkey. Turkey is holding off its signing this agreement as leverage in the dispute over visas. Said Selim Yenel, deputy undersecretary for Bilateral Affairs and Public Diplomacy of the Turkish foreign ministry (also in VoA):

Nothing is happening on the visa question and they want us to sign the re-admission agreement. Well sorry that is not going to happen.

There are a few more points to be made, but I will leave this for a second post on the state of play in the negotiations.

Kurdish problem casts shadow on elections | EurActiv

From EurActiv:

Turkey's top court has decided to bar 12 candidates, including seven Kurds, one of whom is Sakharov Prize winner Leyla Zana, from running in June's general elections. The decision sparked violent protests and led the country's leading Kurdish political party to threaten to boycott the poll. The European Commission deplored the regression of democratic standards in Turkey.

http://www.euractiv.com/en/enlargement/kurdish-problem-casts-shadow-turkish-elections-news-504197?utm_source=EurActiv+Newsletter&utm_campaign=3a0c512ba3-my_google_analytics_key&utm_medium=email

Erdoğan blasts France over burqa ban

EurActiv reports that Turkish PM Tayip Recep Erdoğan blasts France over burqa ban."Today in France, there is no respect for individual religious freedom," Erdoğan told the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on April 13. More on the story here.

Improvements for Turkish minorities

The New York Times ran a story last week that showed some of the positive effects of recent political reforms in Turkey. The focus of the piece is on the significantly lowered barriers to entry into politics for various Turkish minorities - from Alevis to Kurds and Christians.

“There has been a kind of rapprochement” between the Turkish state and its religious minorities, Mr. Aktar [professor of sociology at Bilgi University] said, citing steps like the recent appointment of an Armenian to the Foreign Ministry in Ankara, a first in the history of the republic.

“Minorities are now more at ease in politics,” he added.

The article, written by Susanne Güsten, is well worth reading as a counterweight to the negative reporting on what I termed the Turkish "media wars" that has tended to dominate recent coverage of Turkey in the EU and the US. The truth about Turkey is, as usual, more complex than it seems at first glance.

Big Changes Open Politics to Turkish Minorities - NYTimes.com

Roger Cohen vs. religion?

Roger Cohen has a self-professed "angry" column in today's New York Times (the International Herald Tribune for those of us outside the US). In it, he laments the hateful use of religion by zealots across the world - in the United States, Afghanistan, and Europe - in light of Rev. Terry Jones's Qur'an burning and the resulting fate of

Joakim Dungel, a 33-year-old Swede slaughtered at the U.N. mission in Mazar-i-Sharif by Afghans whipped into frenzy through Jones’s folly.

There's plenty of blame to go around, and Cohen doesn't spare anyone: The IRA, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the Islamophobia-peddlers in the Republican party, and right-wing European extremists all get a dose of Cohen's ire.

To be frank, I was particularly impressed by Cohen's admission to being a "nonbeliever." Being open about one's non-religious "preferences" is not a big deal to a Swede like myself (and yes, I am an atheist) but it is something few American journalists and pundits willingly flaunt. There are of course a few well-known professed atheists; Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens being the two front-figures of the atheist intellectual assault on superstition. But Cohen's atheism is more appealing to me: less firebrand polemics and more empathetic understanding of the extraordinary powers of faith to inspire a whole range of human emotions, behavior, and social practices; both good and bad.

In fact, my forthcoming book attempts to delve deep into Christian theology and the webs of meaning woven by Medieval to Reformation era Christians in their effort to make sense of their world. In doing so, I hope to have taken their beliefs seriously and to have approached them with respect, even while lifting forth the highly problematic aspects of their depictions of the members of a competing faith: Islam and its adherents.

Of course, the hateful use of religion is something atheists, agnostics, and most believers could all agree to denounce and combat, and there are atheistic as well as religious bigots. In Europe, anti-Muslim bigotry is a complex combination of (secular) xenophobia and sometimes secularized, sometimes expressly religious Islamophobic imagery, both versions of which have their roots in Medieval Christian polemics and apologetics. Perhaps my only qualification to Cohen's rightfully angry piece, then, is that the bigger "enemies" of peace and coexistence are bigotry and xenophobia in general, not just religious-inspired hatred. But I'm sure he'd agree.

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Post Scriptum: Here is a tribute to Joakim Dungel, and here is a story in a Swedish English-language newspaper.

Tatlises shooter may have PKK links

Picture of Nihat Şimşek published in several Turkish newspapers
on March 23.

According to Radikal and other Turkish news sources, the man suspected of having attempted to assassinate Turkish singer, İbrahim Tatlıses, has ties to PKK. Pictures of the man - Nihat Şimşek - in green fatigues, holding an AK47 are said to show him at a PKK training camp. The police are also supposed to have found emails on suspects' computers instructing PKK-related actors to “find Nihat, let him finish the job.” According to one theory, Tatlıses, as a prominent Kurd, would have been a victim of PKK anger for not supporting the organization. But he is also reputed to have connections to organized crime and personal conflict with the person who is alleged to have ordered the assassination, so these theories remain speculation at this point.

Press review Turkey, France, and Nato

The Economist thinks that Turkey is wobbling on how to deal with the protests spreading in its neighborhood. Erdoğan was among the first to call for Mubarak's resignation in Egypt, but he first failed to support the no-fly zone in Libya, only to then sent four frigates, a submarine, and another warship to support Nato's efforts there. As the protests and the violent crackdowns spread, the Economist warns that "When it comes to Syria, sitting on the fence may not be an option." Turkey's EU Minister, Egemen Bağış, has a different take (from Word Bullentin):

Turkey did not take a U-turn over Libya. But we have prevented a fait accompli in Libya. An unplanned and unprogrammed NATO intervention would have taken place weeks before before waiting for a United Nations resolution.

David Judson at Hürriyet thinks that the current events in the region highlight Turkey's significance to the EU. In his view, most

issues fade... behind Turkey’s growing profile and its assets that can help solve the region’s increasing turmoil.

And he quotes Swedish foreign minister, Carl Bildt, who noted that “The Turks

Why the French extreme right is making "historic" gains

Le Pen's far right party has made "historic" gains in the first round of the French local elections, amounting to a nation-wide tripling of its votes so far (from 5 % in 2008 to 15%). It is only trailing Sarkozy's UDP party by a couple of percentage points.

Marine Le Pen - outsmarting the
center? (Wikipedia Commons)

This, to me, is but the latest in a series of Europe-wide election results that suggest the following lesson: Attempts by mainstream parties to appropriate anti-immigration rhetoric in a desperate attempt to steal votes from the extreme right, thus preventing it to make electoral gains, are more likely than not to backfire. When established parties move to the right on immigration, this does not seem to reduce support for the xenophobic far right.

Why is this? Using the traditional tools of political science - quantitative or formal - we would expect these kinds of maneuvers to work. When your opponent moves away from the center, you should move toward it and capture the more centrist of your opponent's voters, all things equal. The reason why this logic is flawed, in my view, is that it discounts the power of discourse and narrative framing.

By moving to the right on immigration, centrist parties across Europe have appropriated the rhetoric of the extreme right, making essentialist cultural and identity-based arguments an acceptable and normal part of the daily public discourse. By embracing some of the extreme-right's demands and focusing national attention on the kinds of issues that they "own" politically - immigration, integration, Islamophobia, and xenophobia - centrist European parties have allowed themselves to be lured into playing on the extreme right's home turf. Or rather, they have allowed the extreme right to frame the nation's political discourse, which is a sure way of boosting their respectability and credibility. "After all, haven't they long been raising the issues that the centrist parties only now are addressing?"

Paradoxically, therefore, what seems like a smart move by the centrists amounts to ceding ground to the extreme right instead of taking political territory from it. Not the way to go.

French far right makes serious gains

Turkish superstar Ibrahim Tatlıses shot in the head

Turkey's "Frank Sinatra," Ibrahim Tatlıses (literally, sweet sound or voice), was shot in the head Sunday and is in critical condition at a hospital in Istanbul. He is apparently awake and speaking today, however.

Tatlıses, Wikimedia Commons.

20 suspects have been rounded up, two of which can supposedly be linked to the location of the crime due to their cell phone records. Tatlıses's car was sprayed with bullets from an AK47 Kalashnikov and the suspected rifle has apparently been found at the home of the wife of one of Tatlıses's known enemies.

Like Sinatra, Tatlıses is reputed to have had ties with organized crime, and has been the subject of previous assassination attempts. He was, however, extremely popular in Turkey and also in the Arab world.

Turkish superstar Ibrahim Tatlises shot in head by unknown attackers - The National

Effects of Fox News' Muslim Bashing

Media Matters has an interview with John L. Esposito, Georgetown University, about the deleterious effects on public opinion of the Muslim bashing on Fox News. In an email to Media Matters, Esposito wrote:

The cumulative effect of the confrontational rhetoric of Fox commentators like Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity who hammer away at portraying Islam and Muslims as fundamentally different contributes to a popular culture in which seeing 1.5 billion Muslims as potential enemies has become embedded. Too many Americans are developing an intolerant, irrational fears and even hatred not simply of extremists but of Islam and Muslims which has led to discrimination, harassment, and violence.

In particular, he focuses on the space and sympathetic treatment given to anti-Islamic crusaders like Brigitte Gabriel, on Fox, whom I have blogged about recently. Esposito describes a Gabriel as:

an entrepreneur, a professional Muslim basher. She, like [Pamela] Geller, [Robert] Spencer and company have no expert credentials in Islam or Muslim history and cultures, the very topics that they speak about. She is a fear monger pure, an Islamophobic culture warrior, and plays fast and loose to get the limelight and a career. What she and others excel at are simplistic generalizations and assertions, often choosing selective texts, individuals or events as if they were representative of the entire community.

Instead of focusing on extremism in America or Muslim extremists as a dangerous but very small percentage, she chooses to target the