BY FERAI TINC
HURRIYET- This weekend, general elections in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) and the current European Union summit are both hogging the spotlight. However, today I want to bring another issue to your attention. If I hadn’t attended a recent meeting, I might have missed the importance of two paragraphs in the draft European constitution set to be voted on at the EU summit. Gen. Aydogan Babaoglu, the head of the General Staff’s Planning and Principles Department, made an interesting speech at the 13th International Security and Cooperation Conference in Antalya organized by the Turkish Atlantic Council. When I remembered US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s warning at the NATO Foreign Ministers’ meeting last week in Brussels, Babaoglu’s speech looms larger in importance. Powell warned the EU not to establish a second security organization on a par with NATO.
Babaoglu said Turkey was being excluded in certain phases of NATO-European Union relations as it’s not yet an EU member, adding, ‘Turkey should be able to participate in EU mechanisms as a NATO member.’ As we see from the speech, which stressed that non-EU NATO members shouldn’t be excluded from security arrangements, the agreements between NATO and the EU aren’t working as envisaged.
Turkey thinks that the EU-NATO agreements reached during Nice and enacted in Copenhagen last year aren’t being practiced transparently. The Berlin and Nice documents and Copenhagen agreements brought certain guarantees to Turkey, ones to prevent its ‘exclusion,’ as Ankara was included in previous European security policies as an observer. However, in Europe’s new era, France and Germany have started to look for a more independent security umbrella. The proposed EU constitution’s sections on security are being closely followed by defense circles for this reason. Will this constitution prepare a basis for the establishment of a second defense umbrella, one excluding NATO? This is a question which the final document should answer. This is not just a question, but also another problem for Ankara.