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| President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan |
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, once a staunch supporter of the EU criteria, is now telling the EU to mind its own business.
He once carried the ambition to raise Turkey’s standards
economically and politically, but lately he has become more of a Putin –
although I know this is not fair to the
Russian president.
In the first speech he delivered as president earlier this year, Erdoğan said the “New
Turkey” would concentrate on EU talks. However, Erdoğan then boasted of an
“Ankara criteria” that he would put in place of the “Copenhagen
criteria,” and we can now see that what he meant by this by looking at
recent legislation.
While Erdoğan is
defending these steps against European institutions that say there is a
decline in democracy and liberties in Turkey, he tirades like the head of a
self-confident sovereign state. As if the
U.K., France or the Netherlands are not sovereign states. As if Europe’s
driving force, Germany, is a loser that hands over some it its powers
to the European Commission.
The EU has “curb” and
“encouragement” mechanisms; one protects the standards, while the other
encourages raising the standards. If you are setting up a partnership
with the EU, both of these mechanisms step in to do their business.
These mechanisms try to keep you within the corridor of the criteria and
standards that you have already accepted in advance.
What makes
the EU a success story is not its dictation, but rather its negotiating
and reconciling culture. There is no point in embracing the “national
pride” and “independent foreign policy” rhetoric against the warnings of
those who hate these features.
While Erdoğan is pounding the
EU, he is also asking what it has done in Syria, Egypt and
Palestine.
The hand Erdoğan is shaking while scolds the EU belongs
to Putin, who has aborted Turkey’s revolution project in Syria and is
also the person who rolled out the red carpet in front of the architect
of the coup in Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Also, I do not know
what it means to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) - which thinks
of itself as the spokesperson of the Palestinian cause - for some EU
members to recognize Palestinian statehood, as well as the European
Parliament recently. Certain EU members succeed in making
Israel much angrier without
shouting like Erdoğan.
The main issue is that there is no power
present in the Middle East to question Erdoğan in terms of the law and human
rights. The fact that the EU is stepping in as a curbing mechanism gets
on his nerves.
Erdoğan is pursuing methods to eliminate
all domestic break mechanisms, from the media to the judiciary, from the
Parliament to
inspection institutions. All this is to make his government untouchable
and absolute. He is currently in the business of defaming mechanisms the
he cannot get rid of, such as
the Constitutional Court. While he is doing this, inevitably he hits out
at the
EU process that is binding him to the agreements and protocols Turkey
has signed.
Erdoğan tells the EU to mind its own business,
but the job of the European Commission - with the jurisdiction granted to
it by
Ankara - is exactly this: To monitor Turkey’s state of affairs. It
was only possible to end the military tutelage, an achievement that Erdoğan is so proud of, with the EU stick.
The EU process, which Erdoğan has used as a
shield since 2004 against the civilian and military bureaucracy, is now
seen by him as an obstacle in front of his plans. The EU, meanwhile,
which was not able to obtain any results with its regular break
mechanisms, is at the brink of staging a more dramatic reaction.
Read more: Turkey cutting lose from the EU - FEHİM TAŞTEKİN
