October 08, 2004

Turkey and Europe

Posted by Montagu Norman


The news that the EU Commission has recommended opening accession negotiations with Turkey can scarcely have come as a surprise. Over the past year, the Turkish government has made it clear that it will not let any of the longstanding obstacles - Cyprus, the role of the military, penal code reform - stand in the way of its case for admission. The remaining obstacle is the EU Summit in December. Based on the past behavior of the EU, the most likely outcome of the Summit is inglorious muddling through, with negotations opening subject to some sort of backdoor being left open for a withdrawal on the EU side. But the nature of the process is such that the moment to use the backdoor will probably never come. And by the time the negotation process is finished in 2015 or so, the EU (assuming it survives more immediate challenges like the constitution) will have moved beyond the point where a single-country veto is feasible.


The problem for the opponents of Turkish admission is that they are relying on a mixture of arguments that would work well in a standard political process, but not in the more rule-bound setting of the EU. The arguments that get popular backing are those based on racial and religious prejudice - Christian Europe and the claim that Turkey is not a European country. The arguments that can be avowed explicitly are those concerned with economic impacts. In general, racialist politics relies on a mixture of the two, with openly stated economic concerns allowing coded appeals to racism. But the EU process tends to push these things into separate components.

Leaving aside its evident historical falsity, the argument that Turkey is not part of Europe has already been lost. The EU rejected Morocco's application for candidacy on this basis, but accepted Turkey's.

As the debate over the EU Constitution showed, there is no way Europe is going to reclaim the mantle of Christendom. And while local politicians can ignore the geopolitical folly of rejecting Turkey on religious grounds, a summit meeting of EU heads of government cannot. So the best the opponents can do is raise as much trouble as possible over the economic problems of admitting Turkey.

The economic arguments are mostly weak. The biggest issue is that of labour mobility. Opponents raise the spectre of a European labour market flooded with unskilled Turkish workers. Given the precedent of the latest entrants, it's likely that full labor mobility will be delayed for some time after accession. This is unfortunate, but probably a necessary political concession. But the idea of a permanent restriction on mobility, which has been floated, is both deplorable and unnecessary.

Because of the guest worker programs of the past, there's already a significant degree of integration between the Turkish and EU labour markets. The best estimate of immigration arising from accession is 2.7 million people substantially less than the number of Turkish (and Turkish-descended) people already living and working in Europe. In addition, Turkey formed a customs union with the EU in 1995. Standard trade theory (the factor price equalisation theorem) says that free trade in goods evens out wages (for workers of a given skill level) even in the absence of factor mobility. If you add free movement of capital, the result is even stronger. Complete labor mobility would make little difference to thae actual outcome.

The other issue is the pressure on the EU budget associated with an additional poor country. A lot of this pressure arises from the workings of the Common Agricultural policy and the answer here is simple. The time between now and Turkey's admission ought to be enough to kill off this relic once and for all. The CAP may have been useful as a force for European unity when there was very little else that could be called Common, but those days are long past. The CAP is a financial and environmental nightmare and an international disgrace. In the absence of the CAP, Turkey would get some EU money as regional assistance, but the likely amount would be of the order of 10 billion euro a year - a problem for finance departments, perhaps, but not a big economic issue.

The real problem, one that the EU needs to deal with sooner or later in any case, is that of maintaining national welfare systems in a system of common European citizenship. This problem is difficult in any case,and is made worse by the fact that most of the national systems are badly underfunded. Differences in the average income levels of member countries sharpen up some of the issues, and close off some possible solutions, but the problem needs to be addressed in any case.