BY MURAT YETKIN
RADIKAL- If Turkey had been able to elect a president, he would have been sworn in yesterday. We didn't have a swearing-in ceremony in Ankara, but there was one in Paris. Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) leader Nicholas Sarkozy took over the presidency from his predecessor Jacques Chirac.
Sarkozy is currently the most anti-Turkish leader in Europe. He believes that Turkey should be excluded from the European Union due to its `Asian' origins, Muslim population, poverty, high unemployment, etc.
This situation seems to have resulted in serious concern in both Europe and the US. Even the Europeans who want Turkey to be a `privileged partner' rather than a full EU member are trying to convince Sarkozy to change his attitude. Among these is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who also proposed a privileged partnership for Turkey but then announced that she supported Turkey's full membership goal in the context of pacta sund servanda (contracts must be honored). As soon as Sarkozy took over the presidency from Chirac at the Elysee Palace, he went to Germany to meet with Merkel. One of the issues they took up was Turkey. Merkel had touched upon Turkey in a speech she delivered last week on the occasion of Europe Day. Turkey was still preoccupied then with the General Staff statement and its intervention in politics, as well as protest rallies and the annulment of the first round of the presidential election by the Constitutional Court. But in remarks that may have shocked some, Merkel said that if Turkey is a Muslim country walking a path towards modernization, it is thanks to reforms made by Atatürk and Turkey's secularist system. She stressed that the EU shouldn't lose Turkey. I see no reason she would have taken a different position yesterday.
Also yesterday Daniel Cohn-Bendit, co-chair of the European Parliament's Greens Group, warned leftist Bernard Kouchner, Sarkozy's likely foreign minister, not to oppose Turkey's membership, as he has previously supported it.
Yesterday Sarkozy also got a transatlantic warning. John Negroponte, US deputy secretary of state, said in a speech at the French-American Foundation that they hoped the new French government wouldn't be prejudiced against Turkey and would be ready to discuss the issue with the US and other related parties. He added, `We know Sarkozy thinks differently about this issue, but Paris should evaluate the risks of closing the door on Turkey.'
What are those risks, then? How can Turkish-EU relations be on the top of the international agenda but far from the top of Turkish priorities? And why have the political leaders of the US and EU started to talk about the risks of losing Turkey instead of delivering a ultimatum to Turkey saying that relations between the military and civilian leadership aren't democratic?
The first of these risks is Turkey's centrifugal force in Europe and its impact on Turkey's domestic affairs ahead of our July 22 elections. Secondly, the leaders of the US and the EU are taking seriously the possibility of a clash of civilizations and see Turkey's integration with the Islamic world as a danger. Maybe for the first time they have noticed the role secularism plays in Turkish democracy, which is trying to mature.
And maybe for the second time since the 1999 Helsinki summit (where Turkey got EU candidate status) they are trying to bring Turkey in rather than shut it out.