Disappointment, Frustration And Bewilderment

On Monday, I spoke at a debate on Turkey-EU relations at the İstanbul Forum, organized by Suat Kınıklıoğlu and his Center for Strategic Communication (STRATIM).
The first speaker on my panel was İhsan Dağı from Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ) in Ankara, who explained how the Justice and Development Party (AKP) had changed its policy on EU accession after 2010, shifting from constructive engagement to ambiguous distancing. According to Dağı, in its first two periods in government, the ruling party used the EU-inspired reforms to settle old scores with its domestic opponents. Once that was done and the party was in full control of the state, the need to comply with EU criteria disappeared and the EU quickly became a nuisance, all the time reminding Turkey of its ongoing democratic deficits.
Moderator Sinan Ülgen, from the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy (EDAM) in İstanbul, then asked me whether or not I, as someone who had always defended Turkey's EU membership, felt abused by the AKP after it became clear the party's EU appetite was based more on opportunism than on principles.
It is a question that many EU politicians and bureaucrats who worked on the Turkey dossier have asked themselves in the past couple of years. I guess their -- and my -- feelings can best be summarized with three words: disappointment, frustration and bewilderment.
In many previous accession negotiations between the EU and candidate countries there were moments when reforms slowed down or stagnated because the composition of the government changed or the EU demands were met with strong opposition. In the end, a solution was always found because both the EU and the candidate country had an interest in doing so. Even if it sometimes took a long time, eventually every country that started negotiations, finished the process and became a member of the EU. The only exception being Norway, where the population voted against membership twice in a referendum.
Now, for the first time in EU history, we are faced with a situation where during negotiations a candidate country has started backtracking on the very reforms that were introduced to comply with EU criteria. The most notorious examples are the reforms to the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK), which were introduced in 2010 as part of the constitutional referendum package and were strongly backed by the EU because they strengthened judicial independence. Three years later, these positive changes were annulled by the same politicians who proposed them in the first place because the government wants to increase its grip on the judiciary.
From a European perspective, unpredictability has started to dominate relations with Turkey. How to deal with a country where one day the chief negotiator swears to his counterparts in Brussels that his country is still fully committed to EU membership while a few days later the president of that same nation tells the EU he does not care whether accession will ever happen or not. Instead of dealing with a united and determined candidate, as in the past, the EU is now confronted with the overconfident leadership of a country that says "yes" one day and "no" or "maybe" the next day.
To that confusion and lack of understanding among EU officials should be added a growingly hostile public opinion in most European countries, strongly influenced by reports about President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's authoritarian tendencies and megalomania and the distressing repression of freedom of expression and dissent in general.
Normally speaking, this backlash would have resulted in the suspension of negotiations because both EU politicians and European citizens would want to send a clear signal to Turkey: If you continue like this, then forget about EU membership. For reasons I have explained before, that is not going to happen. EU countries need Turkey to tackle urgent problems such as stopping European jihadists or diminishing Europe's energy dependence on Russia. Based on those strategic calculations, most politicians do not want to rock the boat with Turkey.
The result is a negotiating process that is stuck but not broken, with European-Turkish contacts limited to those practical issues where both sides have a clear interest (counterterrorism, customs union, visa policy). Pushing for democracy is out, strategic cooperation is in.
Do I feel abused? No, but I do feel disillusioned and sad about so many missed opportunities to make this country a first-class democracy.

JOOST LAGENDIJK (Cihan/Today's Zaman)