European Union remained frustratingly closed.
Would progress at home continue to be stymied?
In Turkey there was suddenly fresh hope of
human-rights reforms during the early years of the
new millennium. The elections held in November
2002 resulted in a political earthquake. The old
parties and their leaders did not gain enough votes
to hold a single seat in the parliament. The voters
had turned to a new party founded in 1997, the
conservative Justice and Development Party, ak
for short meaning white or clean, which gained a
large overall majority and so could govern without
having to rely on coalition partners. It was led by
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former mayor of
Istanbul. He had earned the suspicion of the gen-
erals for his earlier Islamist Party association.
Imprisoned for four months on a pretext, he was
at first barred from politics and the premiership, so
his nominee for the first few weeks held the post
for him. Erdogan promised reform and to follow
a pro-Western secular policy that would make it
possible for Turkey to join the European Union.
Early on, reforms were passed by parliament, the
Kurds were granted rights to language and educa-
tion, there had already been increasing economic
investment in Asia Minor to win over Kurdish
moderates, and the generals in 2003 promised to
respect the wishes of the Turkish electorate. The
dire state of the economy was the most serious
problem facing Erdogan’s administration in 2003.
The situation was not helped when, despite
Erdogan’s urgings, parliament narrowly refused to
grant a right of passage to US troops wanting to
open a northern front in the Iraq war; the US
retaliated by withholding loans. After the war,
relations mended and an IMF loan linked to a
reform programme came to the rescue. The failure
of the long-drawn-out UN-sponsored mediation
efforts in the spring of 2003 to reunite Cyprus was
disappointing. The generals remained opposed.
Forty thousand Turkish troops are on the island,
but even on the divided island the situation eased
when the ‘green line’ was opened in April 2003 by
Rauf Denktasch the Turkish Cypriot leader per-
mitting Greek Cypriots to visit their former
homes. Greek Cyprus joined the European Union
in May 2004; the island remained divided; the
Turkish Cypriots’ northern population were left
outside although they had voted for the union
plan. With the new government in Ankara rela-
tions with Greece improved, but Cyprus remained
an obstacle. Unless the Turks recognise Cyprus,
the Greek-Cyprus government threatened to
block accession talks. Erdogan’s reforms and
promises of further reforms took Turkey one step
nearer in 2004 to join the European Union when
agreement was reached to open accession negoti-
ations. There was still a long way to go. It will take
at least ten years before Turkey will be judged to
have been able to meet all the political, economic
and human-rights criteria and much can happen
in that time. Some members, especially France,
harboured strong misgivings over admitting
another poor nation of over 70 million mainly
Muslim people and extending the EU’s frontiers
into the volatile Middle East. But neglecting
Turkey’s claims would undermine its reforms.
The Democratic German Republic, of course, was
barred from the European Community, but West
Germany was allowed to extend trading benefits
to it. With the death of the DDR and its incor-
poration into a united Germany in 1990, the ter-
ritory became a part of the EC without, of course,
adding to the number of members.
One of the major achievements of the European
Community was the strengthening of democracy
in the poorer nations of the West – Spain, Portugal
and Greece. Membership of the club is open only
to countries that respect civil rights and abjure
totalitarian forms of government. Once brought
in, no country has suffered a relapse, and such an
eventuality is difficult to imagine. Thus, not only
has the European Community become an associa-
tion promising greater prosperity to the poorer
West European nations, but it is also a powerful
bastion of freedom in the world.
The habit of close cooperation and negotiated
settlement of differences has become the norm of
national relations within the Community. With
the removal of trade barriers, 1 January 1993
marked the beginning of a new phase of increas-
ingly close Community cooperation in the sphere
of trade to the benefit of the 340 million people
whose countries are its members.
France and Germany, leading an inner group,
were urging closer cooperation to be spearheaded
by supplementing the Common Market with a
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