BY DERYA SAZAK
MILLIYET- As next month’s European Union summit looms closer, Turkey’s strategies for its membership talks and intellectual preparations over its problems are being discussed on various platforms. A meeting organized by the Economics and Foreign Policy Forum which started in Brussels last month continued in Istanbul yesterday. Some of those in attendance were Czech Republic European Commissioner Pavel Telicka, Republican People’s Party (CHP) Deputy Kemal Dervis, Koc University’s Professor Fuat Keyman, former World Bank Turkey Country Director Ajay Chhibber and Sinan Ulgen, who collaborated with Dervis on a project on ‘The European Transformation of Modern Turkey.’
Ankara is worried that the process of its EU accession talks will be open-ended. An approach voiced by Czech Commissioner Telicka, one also accepted by many Europeans, states that this situation doesn’t include special provisions for Turkey. Now which Union will Turkey integrate with, then? Which Turkey will enter the Union? Strategies for these two fundamental problems are considered in Dervis and Ulgen’s study, a paper prepared at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels:
* The Union which Turkey will join will be a ‘postmodern’ Europe seen through a third vision. The third vision suggests that the Union should develop with a multi-level administrative system. Its borders should be well defined, but not fixed forever.
* There are some doubts about how Turkey will deal with its ‘share of sovereignty,’ despite its desire to enter the EU. If Turkey’s elite and general public are confident that they will have a share from Europe’s shared sovereignty, then they will be ready to relinquish a part of their own. That’s why special conditions and a ‘special partnership’ are both out of the question.
If we get through this historical threshold, then we’ll have the opportunity to understand the parameters of a Europe with Turkey’s membership.