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Turkey: The Aspiring Man of Europe
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18569 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
2,841 Words |
| Author
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Lincoln Allison
Lincoln Allison is senior lecturer of politics at the
University of Warwich in England. He is author of A Journey
Quite Different: Collected Walks, Manchester University Press
(1988). |
The Turkish government's application for full membership in the EEC is something of an embarrassment, like one of those promotion applications where you might draw lots to explain to the chap that the time isn't quite ripe. A country with an Anatolian population of twenty-five million peasants, and whose main products are wheat, barley, maize, sugar beets, and citrus fruit, is hardly an appealing addition as far as the Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, or even the Provencals are concerned. West Germany will scarcely welcome the free movement of population from a country its own size, with close economic ties and a GDP per capita one-tenth the German level. The Turks can be grateful, perhaps, that the Bulgarians and Armenians have no clout in the EEC, but in this game one enemy is enough and the Greeks are not only a historic foe but a very present one because of events in Cyprus.
The application itself has been a complicated procedure. In 1973 Turkey signed an association agreement with the Community, with the aim of achieving full membership by 1995. Turkey has not made the progress its patrons had hoped for, neither economically nor politically, and the 1980 military coup set its status back considerably. To bring matters to a head, in April 1987 the Turkish government formally applied for full membership; the issue is not expected to be resolved quickly.
Turkey remains a Third World country, if that term has any meaning at all. Half the population live on the land, and 40 percent of all Turks are under fifteen. Given its debts and structural problems, there are many Western European norms the Turks cannot meet. For example, on the matter of roads, they have only sixty-eight miles of motorway and no driving test; a majority seem to disobey such rules as do exist. Turkey is, perhaps, unique in being a former world and European power that is now a Third World country. The GDP per capita is well below two thousand dollars.
As I drove into Anatolia from Istanbul on the E5 (its less prosaic name is the Baghdad Road) I was doubly shocked. The first surprise was the spread of the city--more than twenty-five miles of factories and flats, all of them new since the first Bosporus bridge opened in the seventies. But a greater shock was that for about the last ten of these miles the buildings are derelict and unoccupied although more or less complete. The explanation is that the government has lost its battle against inflation. It believes, as the head of the central bank put it, that a government without monetary targets is like a religion without a god. Inflation is 80 percent, the basic rate of interest is 85 percent. So the herds of
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