BY MEHMET ALI BIRAND
MILLIYET- Like other living organisms, the European Union also makes mistakes in its views and policies but when it sees that it's taken a wrong turn, it changes course. It engages in self-criticism when necessary. This was seen last month in Turkish-EU relations. EU officials are fine-tuning their view of Turkey as a decision in the closure case against the Justice and Development Party (AKP) draws closer. All signals from the European Commission, European Parliament and European Council show the extent of this change.
As you may remember, when the case was brought against the AKP in March, the EU Commission in particular criticized it. On their official visits to Turkey , EU Commissioner for Enlargement Olli Rehn and European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso decried what they saw as totalitarian Kemalists suppressing democratic Muslims. They also said that closing the AKP would hurt democracy and seriously jeopardize Turkey's membership talks.
The European Parliament made almost the same criticism. European Parliament Turkey Rapporteur Ria Oomen Ruijten said that if the AKP were closed, Turkey would be unable to justify this. The full EP issued a similar warning. The EU didn't make these criticisms to damage Turkey's secular system. For them, democracy is indispensable, and secularism is part of democracy. That's why they interpreted things differently from how we did. Now the EU institutions are busy shifting their stances. Officials from the EU Commission, and Rehn in particular, have retreated from their earlier statements, and are now saying that they started to understand the concerns of secular circles and that they don't think that the AKP is doing enough to address these concerns. In Strasbourg, Ruijten told me very clearly that her initial evaluation had been mistaken and that a possible freeze on relations with Turkey wasn't an issue to be decided by the EU, but by Turkey.
Daniel Cohn Bendit, co-chair of the EP's European Greens-European Free Alliance, and MEP Joost Lagendijk, who both generally support the AKP, recently showed that they had changed their stances. They both told me openly that fears that women who don't cover their heads now might be pressured to do so in the future were not without foundation. They added that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had done nothing to dispel these concerns and that this was unacceptable. The change in their stances is telling.
The situation is the same in the EU Council. Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa - fresh from his country's EU presidency - told reporters openly that debates over secularism and the closure case are Turkey 's domestic business and that he sees no relation between the case and the EU membership talks. A few important elements played an important role in this change of stance. Most importantly, secular circles in Turkey spoke to the European Parliament and Commission about AKP policies. They said it wasn't just a struggle between Kemalists and Muslims, but that a great many members of the Turkish public had important and understandable concerns, and this helped change the single-sided interpretations of EU institutions.
Greek Cypriots and Greece also played an important role in this change, because these two member countries are greatly concerned about a suspension of relations with Turkey. They know that if this happened, they would lose their leverage on the Cyprus and Aegean issues, so they're doing intensive lobbying for Turkey. The last and perhaps most important reason is that almost everybody understood that if our membership talks were suspended, restarting them would be impossible. Similarly, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) said that if the AKP were closed, Turkey would be subject to monitoring. PACE's reports would be able to be used by the EU, and this lifted the burden from the EU's shoulders. I have written before that our membership talks wouldn't be halted, and in the end this turned out to be true.