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I am here this evening to talk to you about the prospects for Turkey to gain entrance into the European Union. This is an important subject, for Turkey is a most strategically positioned country, critical for the United States in many of its dealings with the Middle East. It has long been a partner in peacemaking efforts in that part of the world. And it is celebrated by American policy makers as an island of relative stability in a region of turmoil. It is also important as an economic partner which controls the only oil pipelines from the rich Caspian and Central Asian oil deposits that do not pass through Russia. Its developing economy is one of the largest of any medium sized or second tier country. It is a growing market for Western goods and services. Its global reach is growing, to the extent that a Turkish concern just bought the European Godiva Chocolate firm, outbidding American rivals on the way. And you may be surprised to learn that Turkey has today more billionaires than does Japan. So it is not a country to be ignored. While economically it is still on a par with the poorer Eastern European countries most recently admitted to the European Union, its economy is growing at a faster rate than those of European states and it has stabilized its economy to reduce inflation which was previously a serious problem.

Yet of all those countries which have any prospect of being admitted to full membership in the European Union, Turkey’s course is the most contested and is the most problematic. The Europeans are badly split over whether to take Turkey in, a metter that we will consider in due course. And indeed, what I have seen as Turkey’s assets, its economic strength, resources, population, etc. may equally be seen as liabilities by Europeans. Nonetheless, our government has for many years taken the strong position that Turkey should be accepted in that European body. Washington believes that that would anchor Turkey to the West even more firmly and give primary responsibility to Europe for Turkey. Given the important stakes at issue, it behooves us to delve a bit more deeply into this situation.

Turkey has been on the road to Europe for a long, long time. You can go back to the Ottoman Empire for the first glimmerings of this orientation. But modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, confirmed that Turkey claimed a European identity from early in his years as President. Indeed, the British Government caused an inadvertent diplomatic incident in 1933 simply by issuing what it said was a list of European countries and did not include Turkey in it. The Turkish Ambassador in London happened to be the father of Ahmet Ertegun, later President of Atlantic Records and the number one jazz promoter in the world. Ambassador Ertegun was quick to protest this slight against the Turks. In response, the Foreign Office issued a disclaimer saying that His Majesty’s Government did not mean to imply that Turkey was not part of Europe. That mollified the Turks. And in fact the British have been supporters of Turkish membership in European bodies ever since.

In this context, on the eve of the Second World War the British concluded a defensive alliance with the Turks and undertook to supply arms to that country all during the war. After the Second World War, Turkey was able to start its progress into Europe by joining the Council of Europe as a founding member in 1949. Then, with strong American support, it was admitted into NATO in 1952 over the objections of some Europeans who argued that allowing Turkey in would stretch the North Atlantic concept of NATO to unwarranted limits.

The European Union, as we all know, evolved out of the European Economic Community which Turkey applied to join in 1959. It was accepted, but only as an Associate member in 1963. But thereafter, for some decades, the important socialist-leaning Republican Peoples Party under Bulent Ecevit, with his developed suspicion of European capitalism, was opposed to joining Greece in applying for full membership in this precursor to the European Union. Previously such Turkish parallelism with the treatment of Greece had been the rule in achieving NATO membership and joining other European organs. Greece, for its part, applied for full accession to the European Economic Community in 1975 and was taken in without great scrutiny or difficult negotiations.

Because of sharp policy differences between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus and the Aegean Sea, especially after 1963, Turkish failure to apply to the EEC at the same time that Athens did cost the Turks the possibility of insisting on equal treatment with Greece. Thereafter for decades it was clear that Athens—which as a member of the EU had veto power over other accessions—would veto any Turkish application for full membership. Despite common membership in NATO, for a long time after 1963 the Greeks saw Turkey as a major threat and were constantly—though unreasonably— afraid that the Turks would seize some Greek islands in the Aegean Sea. Hence until the 1980s, Turkish reluctance to adhere to the European Economic Community and Greek determination to keep Turkey out combined to make sure that the Turks did not advance toward Ataturk’s goal of integration into Europe.

But the Greeks were not Turkey’s only obstacles to joining the European Union as it evolved. Starting in the 1960s, demand for labor in Germany rose dramatically as its economy took off. To meet this demand, Bonn and Ankara reached an accord on supplying hundreds of thousands of Turkish workers to labor in German automobile manufacturers, to provide garbage collectors and other rather unskilled workers doing jobs the Germans did not wish to do themselves. And France and Belgium and the Netherlands also found need for Turkish labor—though not in the quantities that West Germany did.

These Turkish workers were not integrated into the political and cultural life of the countries in which they worked. They were not granted citizenship and indeed after some years, especially in Germany, efforts were made to repatriate Turks who were not needed or who had retired and were no longer working. Those efforts were resisted by these Turks who wanted to stay in the generally more comfortable circumstances of Europe. And the Turkish population in Germany stabilized at some 2 million. It is important to realize that the children of these Turks were not granted European citizenship, but they remained to the third generation as an undigested lump in the countries where they resided. This is still largely true until this day. These immigrant Turks have lived apart and have been generally looked down upon as less civilized than the Europeans, though the second and future generations spoke European languages rather than Turkish and some had aspirations for political and cultural assimilation by the dominant European culture. But the continuing foreignness of these populations created an antipathy which spilled over into strong feelings especially in Germany, and these feelings were exploited by the conservative parties, especially the CDU, which argued against accepting Turkey into the European Union.

Accordingly, the Turkish issue is now one of fodder for partisan politics in several European countries. France, for one, also witnessed the rise of antipathy against the Turks. Difficulties in integrating North African Muslims who had come to France during the period when French forces ran much of North Africa fed an anti-Muslim immigrant sentiment. This hostility spilled over against the Turks as well. In addition, Armenians, who had long-standing grievances against Turkey for ill treatment during the Ottoman era, generated strong sympathy among important circles in France. Under their impetus, the French Parliament enacted laws against any who would argue that Turks were not guilty of “genocide” in handling Armenians during the First World War.

The situation reached the point where Bernard Lewis, who is now a Princeton University professor emeritus, was hailed into court in France accused of defaming Armenians. In a November 1993 interview in Le Monde, Lewis was quoted as saying that the Ottoman Turks’ killing of what Armenians insisted was up to 1.5 million of their fellow Armenians in 1915— and what Lewis conceded might be up to a million—was not "genocide," but rather a brutal product of war. A court in Paris interpreted his remarks as a denial of the Armenian Genocide and in June 1995 fined him one franc. The court ruled that Lewis had concealed material elements which contradicted his claims in order to insist that there was no Armenian Genocide. In an atmosphere in which such a court case could be brought because of a newspaper article expressing private views, French relations with Ankara were often fraught with tension. And this provides the background against which French President Nicolas Sarkozy currently voices strong opposition to Turkey being accepted in the European Union.

It was the advent of Turgut Ozal to power in Turkey in the 1980s that fundamentally changed Turkey’s politics toward the European Union. Ozal, from his years at the World Bank, had a strong desire to integrate Turkey more closely into the world of nations. He rejected the heretofore dominant economic prescription dating from the Ataturk era. It maintained that for Turkey to assert economic independence required creating an import substitution economy to wall the country off from the rest of the world by high tariffs. In the Ataturkist view, proper economic policy also required seeking to develop the entire range of economic activity within the country, even where the resources would have to be imported. And this economic philosophy reigned in Turkey until 1980.

However, in place of this system, which had been proven unsuccessful in promoting development, even with large amounts of aid from the United States, Ozal sought interdependence with the rest of the world. Taking a leaf from the policies followed by the Asian tigers, he sought to promote exports, ended currency restrictions, welcomed foreign investment, and generally sought to integrate Turkey in the world economy. As part of that general prescription, he presided over Turkey’s formal application to join the European Union as a full member in 1987.

As he explained, “it is vitally important that a unified Europe should conceive of its identity in the broadest possible form by incorporating all geographic and historic dimensions.” By this he meant that Europe should not reject Turkey because it was different, for it had for centuries been part and parcel of European politics and life.

The European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union under the strong leadership of Jacques Delors, took two years, that is until 1989, to issue its response to the Turkish application for full membership. It then announced agreement that Turkey should in the long run be admitted to the European Union. But the Commission also put off further action on the grounds that Turkey was in the first place still too far from being able to harmonize its economy with that of Europe. In the second place the Commission found that Turkey’s democracy remained too fragile having been disrupted in 1980 by a military takeover that lasted for three years. Finally, it concluded that because in their foreign affairs the Turks had not patched up relations with Greece and because the Cyprus issue remained unresolved, the time was not ripe to begin negotiations on the terms of membership in the European Union. As a result, no further action was taken on the Turkish application for some years.

In the meantime, Turkey joined the Western European Union in 1992 as an Associate Member again under the impetus of Turgut Ozal, who was the main engine behind pushing for acceptance by Europe. But Ozal then died suddenly in April 1993, leaving weaker and less resolute successors. But he had also, as a personally pious Muslim, helped create greater acceptance of Islamic politics inside Turkey. And this would be worrisome both to the entrenched secularists, especially in the military establishment in Turkey, as well as to Europeans who were increasingly troubled by the rising number of their own Muslims resident in Europe.

Nonetheless, in 1995, Turkey, under the staunchly secular woman Prime Minister Tansu Çiller, was able to conclude a Customs Union with the European Union. The Europeans seemed to see that instrument as a sop for not proceeding directly to consider further the Turkish application for full membership. But in Turkey in 1996, elections, which had accorded no party a majority in Parliament, brought an Islamic-oriented party under Necmettin Erbakan to power at the head of a coalition. It was the first time a religiously oriented party had ever held the Premiership and that caused unease among Turks and concern in Europe.

After watching Erbakan court the Muslim world, the Turkish military decided that Erbakan’s orientation threatened Turkey’s secularism. Accordingly, in a soft coup in 1997, the generals appealed for the fragmented parliamentarians to band together to bring down the Erbakan government and install a secularist successor. The civilian politicians complied.

But concern at the role played by the generals in Turkey led the European Union in December of that year to leave Turkey off the agenda at the Luxembourg meeting where it considered admitting former Soviet Bloc states in central and Eastern Europe and even Cyprus. The Turks, however, were left wondering how former Soviet bloc states could be advanced ahead of them in the queue to join the European Union since Turkey had been working on its democracy for three quarters of a century, had held a long string of honest contested elections. The Turks had indeed followed the letter of democratic procedure in giving a no-confidence vote to the Erbakan government and giving a vote of confidence to the successor regime.

Further in regard to the Luxembourg summit’s failure to consider Turkey for EU membership, the Turks also noted that the founding documents for the independent state of Cyprus in 1960 had prohibited Cyprus adhering to any pact in which Turkey was not a member. So in Ankara’s view, the European Union was violating its own rules by considering Cyprus for membership before Turkey was a member. And the United States had to deal with this Turkish pique which led Ankara to threaten withholding NATO enlargement to hold NATO hostage to admitting Turkey to the EU. Under this pressure from the US, Turkey backed down and let NATO enlargement proceed.

At the same time, in reaction to the Europeans failing to consider Turkey for membership, some nationalists in Turkey wondered aloud whether joining Europe was an appropriate course for their country and in Turkish nationalist circles that lack of enthusiasm persists. The derogation of national sovereignty inherent in joining the European Union violates their sense of Turkey’s national identity.

After ignoring Turkey at the 1997 Luxembourg summit, the European Union reconsidered its position. The Christian Democratic Union had been voted out of power in Germany and then in 1999 relations between Greece and Turkey had begun to improve. Hence, at the Helsinki summit meeting of the European Council in December 1999, Turkey was officially recognized as a candidate for full membership. But gaining this prize was still to prove an elusive process. Doors did not magically open for Turkey in Germany and France. And negotiations did not begin immediately to confront the many hurdles the Turks would have to jump over to attain membership.

But in one important dimension, however, things improved for Turkey at this time. Since the 1980s the Ankara government had been facing the PKK Kurdish terrorist organization that had been fomenting violence and attacking government forces in Turkey. Its aims were nebulous but seemed to envisage carving a Kurdish state out of eastern Turkey. It was led by Abdullah Ocalan, who used it as his own personal vehicle for power. After decades of hit and run strikes, Ocalan had had to take refuge in Syria to avoid capture. When Turkish diplomacy then forced Ocalan to leave Syria he ended up secretly sheltered in the Greek embassy in Kenya in 1999. That lair was discovered, and Ocalan was captured in a sophisticated Turkish operation.

As a result of the ensuing embarrassment because he had been given refuge by the Greek diplomatic establishment, the extremely anti-Turkish Greek Foreign Minister was forced to resign. He was replaced by a pragmatic moderate, who soon came to believe that Greek security might be improved if Turkey were inside the European Union rather than left on the outside. Accordingly, since 1999 a gradual rapprochement between Greece and Turkey began to develop. As a result, while many problems remain, it can no longer be taken for granted that Greece would automatically veto Turkey’s accession to the European Union. Indeed, toward the end of January 2008 the Greek Prime Minister paid an official visit to Ankara for the first time in 49 years and he called for renewed Greek-Turkish cooperation in seeking a solution to the Cyprus problem.

Following the Helsinki summit, it took until 2002 for the next step on Turkey’s tortured path to membership in the European Union to take place. At Copenhagen at the end of 2002, the Europeans agreed to open negotiations with Turkey if the European Council at its 2004 meeting agreed that Turkey met the so-called “Copenhagen criteria.” These criteria require first a state to have institutions to guarantee democracy and human rights, second that it possess a functioning market economy, and third that the state accept the obligations and intent of the European Union. And indeed the Europeans did agree in December 2004 that Turkey had met the basic requirements to begin negotiations on the 35 chapters or subjects that had to be successfully dealt with for membership to come about.

Meanwhile in 2002, the Justice and Development Party had come to power in Turkey. This party under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan emerged from a moderate Islamic milieu. It won an astonishing almost two thirds of the seats in Parliament in the 2002 elections. That did not, however, mean that a substantial majority of Turks had abandoned their secular orientation. Even though Erdogan had been earlier jailed for referring to minarets as bayonets of the faithful, his party won because of the vagaries of the Turkish election prcess. In fact, his party was able to garner only about 34 percent of the total vote. Half the ballots were discarded because they were for the 16 secular parties that did not exceed the required ten percent of the national vote needed by any individual party to elect any deputies. So the Justice and Development Party’s victory was not a majority movement.

Instead it reflected disappointment with decades of secular parties guilty of corruption and failure to provide effective government. The party seemed hopeful because its leader as mayor of Istanbul had given good government to the largest city inTurkey. In other words, many who voted for it were giving a chance to the one figure running whose party was not tainted by the past. Indeed, it appears that up to half the support for his party was protest against failure and corruption by the secular parties.

Justice and Development leaders clearly understand this and that is in good measure why they moved only very, very slowly along a religious course in the five years in office. Rather they surprised many by moving more actively and vigorously than any of their predecessors toward adapting Turkey to the requirements of the European Union. There was a perfectly good reason for that. Erdogan and his colleagues recognize that joining the European Union would form a strong bulwark against the influence of the generals in politics and thus guarantee more freedom of worship than they had been able to take for granted in the past.

And also, and perhaps not less important, the Justice and Development party stands for a free market economy based on the Anatolian tigers, entrepreneurs from central Turkey who draw strength from the Gulen movement’s approach to modernizing Islamic teachings through scientific education and business activity.

This interesting religious movement in Turkish Islam takes a leaf from Protestant missionaries in attempting to spread its message through example rather than precept. It has organized schools in more than 80 countries to give high standard education without overt religious instruction, teaching in English and stressing science. While many of its schools are in the former Soviet Union and Asia, some are in Western Europe as well, including one in London. It preaches tolerance and love, yet it arouses suspicion among secular circles in Turkey that it is dissimulating and represents the camel’s nose of Islam in the tent.

However one judges this relatively recent movement, more opening of the European market would help this core support group for the Justice and Development Party.

The Erdogan government has embarked on a political reform program in its effort to meet European demands for change. It has abolished capital punishment, and notably did not execute PKK leader Ocalan who is being kept in a prison in the Marmara Sea where there is no chance that his suppporters can raid the jail to free him. The government changed laws and moved at least vocally to prohibit torture of those incarcerated. It has provided more linguistic rights for its Kurdish population. In addition, a panel of experts is currently at work drafting a new Constitution to codify guarantees for human rights and to assure civilian political control. In the economic field it has successfully brought inflation down to single digits from the annual levels of 75 percent during the mid-1990s.

In foreign policy, it has been less successful. After the Turkish side for the first time in November 2002 voted to accept a plan by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for solving the Cyprus issue, the Greek Cypriots rejected it. Nonetheless, the Greek Cypriots still were able to see their Cyprus government recognized as the sole government on the island and have that regime admitted into the European Union in defiance of the principles agreed at the formation of the independent Cyprus state in 1960. In reaction to this disregard for treaties, Turkey refused to agree to extend to the Cyprus state rights granted to all other EU members to use Turkish ports and airfields.

On the other hand, thanks to other Turkish efforts to fulfil European criteria, however, the EU leaders agreed in 2005 to finally start negotiations on the 35 chapters that must be agreed. After screening all 35 chapters only 4 were opened for negotiation, and of these one was subsequently frozen in 2006. Not one of them was of great substantive importance, but the fact that they were opened at all, and two more were added in 2007, was a testimony to the possibility of further advance. These chapters were found mostly to require “further efforts” and some were even judged “very hard to adopt.” That means that negotiations will inevitably be slow. Some additional progress in resolving these issues this year can be expected, however. But when France takes over the Presidency of the European Union, things will stop to await further developments, because Sarkozy is not disposed to move ahead.

What can the United States do to help? Already over the years Washington has put its weight behind the Turkish case for entering the European Union. It will certainly continue as that is acknowledged by all administrations to be in the United States national interest. There is one thing that would help the Turks enormously if it could be accomplished. That is to find some solution to the Cyprus problem. In this regard the United States can help by appointing a new Cyprus coordinator to help devise proposals that can bridge the gap. The Turks cannot assure progress by standing on the fact that they accepted a UN-sponsored plan. They will have to go further, bitter medicine as that will seem to them. The stakes are large. It looks as though the Turks would have as a minimum to come up with a concession to allow Greek Cypriote vessels and planes to use Turkish ports and airfields, something Greek Cypriots have not been allowed to do since 1963. If that were a deal-maker on Cyprus it would probably be worth it to the Turks. But it will take creative diplomacy by both the United States and Turkey to adapt the Annan plan without seeming to give more than any Turkish regime can accept.

Under the best of circumstances, Turkey hopes to enter the European Union by 2013 when the new European budget will be adopted. But outsiders do not think that speedy an outcome is at all likely given the number of subjects still to be negotiated Some time around 2025 seems more realistic and that is only if all goes reasonably well and France as well as other European nations do not insist—as some have suggested they will—on a referendum of its people before letting Turkey in.

So we are at a point where it is difficult to judge how things will come out. The betting is still that Turkey will get into the European Union eventually, but that remains far from certain. It may be that over time Turkey’s economy will become more closely allied with that of Europe for geographical reasons and it might become more European in culture to the point where membership in the EU would seem to give little further advantage. In that event, the pressure for Turkey to join could evaporate and the Turks would maintain the independent existence that Ataturk forsaw for them. And in that event their ties with the United States would become even more valuable to the Turks than they are.