Something Seems To Be Working

Posted on by

According to the Turkish news agency Hürriet Turkish Deputy prime Minister and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul spoke last night to the NTV news channel regarding:

“the recent wave of legal battles being held against Turkish intellectuals and a senior member of the European Parliament. Gul criticized the actions that were being taken under the controversial article of the country’s new penal code and said, “There seems to be a chain of systematic complaints. There appears to be a mentality deliberately aiming to create chaos.”

The FT quotes Mr Gul as saying:

“There may need to be a new law. As a government we’re watching closely how the existing laws are being implemented.”

The law in question is the one which makes it an offence to insult “Turkishness”. This law has been highlighted recently by the Orhan Pamuk case and now by the strange threat to prosecute Joost Lagendijk, a Dutch member of the European parliament, for suggesting the Turkish army provoked Kurdish rebels in the hope of extending its influence. Interestingly enough Joost Lagendijk supports Turkish membership of the EU. State prosecutors are reportedly studying the complaint against Lagendjik.

Now I have to say that not of this surprises me. Turkey is a society in transition. Fortunately the transition is from a bad equilibrium to a batter one, and we in the EU are doing our bit. I feel that Gul’s statement confounds the fears of the sceptics. In this case EU pressure will be rigourous, and change will be far reaching, but the process will, obviously, have its ups and downs.

So I was really surprised to read in the FT:

“Turkey knows that gaining entry to the EU will become an increasingly arduous task in the coming years, because of widespread antipathy inside the 25-member club towards future enlargement. “

No! Turkey gaining entry to the EU will be an arduous task because it is good for Turkey and good for the EU that it be so. If some people are using their ‘enlargement fatigue’ as an excuse for trying to make things more difficult, then they are the ones who will end up even more fatigued (and frustrated) as time after time Turkey complies with their demands.

This could be another example of shooting-yourself-in the-footism as in complying with the demands Turkey will become an increasingly modern and economically competitive society, which means, of course, that when it does join in 2014 it will, as the largest member state, have even more influence :).

This entry was posted in A Few Euros More, The European Union and tagged , , , , , by Edward Hugh. Bookmark the permalink.

About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".