BY NURAY BASARAN
AKSAM- German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s latest statements and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s current visit to Paris have put our European Union membership bid at a crossroads. With the drift of domestic political expectations, the issue of our EU membership seems to be a ‘heaven or hell’ scenario. Turkey’s EU perspectives have a host of meanings. Firstly, we have an ideal of high civilization shaped around EU and American values. In other words, there is a close relationship between the ‘modern civilization’ criteria laid out by Ataturk and EU values. We should make this ideal come true by adopting, assimilating and implementing a system of values, something we have been doing for nearly 200 years. The EU is facing us as an economic, political, social and cultural institutional organization established around these values. If Turkey can reach its aim of political integration, it can also effect social and cultural integration in the near future. However, certain discussions of social and cultural integration are stuck on concerns about the future of the Turkish-EU relationship.
Actually the key problem concerns getting stuck on decisions on the process of political integration. The most critical issue in terms of messages both from France and Germany is that their views about political integration don’t coincide with Turkey’s expectations and the government’s priorities. France is undecided due to social and cultural concerns and Germany is also hesitant because of the politics of population and relations. Other EU member countries are similarly undecided as well. This impasse on our date expected to be given during the December EU summit should be resolved, but there are problems. For this reason, meetings between Turkey and other countries turned out to be bargaining sessions. Their outcomes might not be overcome easily either in terms of foreign political projections or domestic political expectations.