Talking Turkey - James Bennett

Talking Turkey - James Bennett of UPI discusses Turkey, and their misguided goal - perhaps obsession - of getting into the EU.

What's wrong with these hopes and dreams, even assuming the EU would ever fulfill them, is that the price of EU entry has risen higher and higher, while the potential benefits are becoming more and more meager. With the potential entry of poor Eastern European nations, the claims on EU transfer payments increase, while the budget-pressed rich members grow more and more unwilling to increase spending.

Most critically, however, the EU grows more and more burdensome each day. The requirement that each new member adopt the crushing load of EU regulations, uncompetitive and archaic labor practices, and the one-size-doesn't-fit-anybody single currency would be a disaster for a still-developing nation like Turkey. These practices drag down highly developed economies like Germany's and France's. To impose them on a much poorer economy may be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Still, Turkey has come to view EU membership as a sort of validation, and the American State Department has become the loyal friend that keeps trying to help fulfill that dream. The problem is that the U.S. ends up expending political capital with the Europeans in helping Turkey, in a quest that will probably disappoint by failing, and still disappoint if it succeeds.

The article confirms some truths - that Turkey's membership in NATO helped it become the closest thing to a genuine liberal democracy in the Moslem world.

But the nation's history of "Westernization by decree", going back to Ataturk, is rife with examples of clinging to the letter of some key western ideas while ignoring their spirit. Ataturk's secularization policy - which to be fair has so far helped Turkey avoid most of the problems of its Islamist neighbors - adopted the full rigor of western liberal "separation of church and state" with none of the tolerance the civilizes that drive.

Similarly, the drive to join the EU takes what is an admirable attempt to focus outward - and combines it with a stultifying, top-down regulatory bureaucracy of the exact type that has proven to be a destroyer of developing economies over the last seventy years.

Read the article!

Posted by Mitch at December 9, 2002 11:44 AM