|
|
|
|
CONTRIBUTORS:
|
|
|
JOURNAL:
|
Europaeische Rundschau,
34(1),
121 -
132.
|
|
|
|
YEAR:
|
2006
|
|
PUB TYPE:
|
Journal Article
|
|
SUBJECT(S):
|
European Union studies, Turkish studies
|
|
DISCIPLINE:
|
Political Science
|
|
HTTP:
|
http://www.europaeische-rundschau.at/
|
|
LANGUAGE:
|
German
|
|
PUB ID:
|
103-426-106
(Last edited on
2006/04/19 08:17:20 GMT-6)
|
|
SPONSOR(S):
|
|
|
ABSTRACT:
Starting from the certain impasse that was reached during and after the Luxembourg "marathon" of 2005, the article critizes the Austrian government's position (as the key player in the Turkish marathon) and analyses the trajectory of European, especially Christian democratic policies on Turkish accession to the EU ever since the days of Konrad Adenauer and argues strongly in favor of a return to the clear-cut pro-accession policies of the "founding fathers" of the Union (article 28 of the Treaty of Ankara, 1963), among them Konrad Adenauer. Referenda on Turkish accession would contradict the "Acquis", which very clearly established already in 1963, 1997, 1998, and 1999 a Turkish membership perspective. The author also shows that the "European founding fathers" obviously felt no problem in accepting colonized Muslim Algeria, from 1958 to 1962, as a member of the Community. By the way, no mentioning of the "Copenhagen criteria" etc was made at that time concerning Algerian membership (as a French Department) in the EC; more than 400.000 French soldiers fought a brutal counter-insurgency war against the Algerian uprising at that time.
Re-analyzing Eurobarometer data the author then shows that the same negative mass opinion attitudes that today reject Turkish accession would also have blocked for example Polish accession in several EU-15 member countries in 2004, and also would have prevented the signing of treaties allowing Bulgaria and Romania to join.
The Austrian position is even more contradictory when one is considering the case of Croatia: also a semi-agricultural, relatively poor country (Turkey is said to be a critical issue for the EU's "absorption capacity", why then easily accept Croatia with its 8 per cent of GDP in agriculture?), whose accession is also hardly supported by public opinion in several major EU-countries (in Germany, more than 50 % of the population reject Croatian accession, so how are "future accessions ... to be broadly supported by public opinion" as the argument is used against Turkey).
The author then surveys the most important recent accession studies on Turkey (Barysch, Clesse and Tashan, CPB, Flam, Hughes, IBS Consultancy, Lejour, Pöschl, Quaisser et al. and comes to the conclusion that the costs of Turkish accession (16.5 billion to 27.6 billion Euros per year) and future migration flows (2.7 million people to all EU-15 countries) by far are being outweighed by the future world political and demographic benefits that the aging European continent will reap from Turkish accession.
The author finally proposes very concrete high-level mutual specialized attaché diplomatic postings (in the migration control policy area, police and intelligence attaches and customs attaches) for future accession work, comparable to Sweden's creative policies during the Polish and Baltic accession 1995 - 2004. The author also proposes, from a special Austrian viewpoint, trilateral cooperation projects between Austria, Turkey and Israel to commemorate the great sephardic heritage present in Turkey since the expulsion of Spanish Jewry to the Ottoman Empire in 1492. As a further confidence building measure, the present Turkish government party AKP should be admitted to the association of Christian (to be renamed: religious) democratic parties in Europe (European People's Parties), just as the present opposition CHP is already a member of the Social Democratic International. Confidence building and not the capitulation in front of populism are the duty of stateswomen and statesmen today. A Clemens Holzmeister chair in Ankara and Elias Canetti professorships at major Universities in Istanbul and Vienna should be created.
|
|
|
|
STATISTICS
|
|
Click on # to view
|
|
Citations
|
|
0
|
|
References
|
|
0
|
|
Comments
|
|
0
|
|
Quality
|
|
0/0.00
|
|
Interest
|
|
0/0.00
|
|
View(er)s
|
|
5/427
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Prev |
Next |
|
