Should Turkey be allowed to join the EU?

[laurentius]

Offensive or nick names?


Ok, so he called you wancker? It's common practise here...How much I miss all the fruitless flamewars with Fez

[Az]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten


Does this mean I'm supposed to troll Azazel now?

oh no, troll Paiktis. But he won't be able to actually reply.

He can counter-counter-troll you by PM, though.

[Drake Tungsten]

Naw, he's not even that much fun to troll directly. It certainly isn't worth the extra effort just to hear him call me a "redneckie" for the thousandth time.

[axi]

Turkey is still very far from being a democracy. The current regime was formed after the 1980 junta ceded power to the parliamentary parties, during a process of "democratization". This means that the turkish democracy is tailored to suit the needs of the Kemalist "Deep State" and whenever the people votes for any serious change in the status quo, the military or the high courts intevene to put all reforms "in plaster". This is what happened in Chile and in Spain too: when the junta judged that it was "safe" to restore democracy, it stepped back and handed power to the right-wing parliamentary parties. On the other hand, in Portugal and Greece, the junta was more or less overthrown, which resulted in much more "true" democracies. (Although this is a moot point if one examines it deeply: no capitalist state would ever allow a peaceful progress to socialism organised by an elected socialist party.)

Turkey however is a real basketcase and I will explain why:

Erdogan's party only marginally escaped being declared illegal this time, while Erdogan himself had to wait for a supplementary election in order to get elected and before that, the Prime Minister's seat was held by Abdullah Ghiul, who is currently foreign minister. Erdogan's party has been banned 2 times before that and it had to mutate politically into something much more pro-EU and less islamic that what it originally was. In fact it is a splitter faction of the original islamic party of Netsmedin Erbakan that had been elected and assumed office a few years ago but was consequently overthrown by the President of the Republic and was declared illegal too. The current effort in overthrowing Erdogan is based in declaring illegal the Kurdish party DEHAP (a party that despite the extensive election fraud against it by the turkish state got 7% of the votes), so that it's votes are analogically redistributed to the other parties, thus helping a third party reach the (incredibly high for any democracy) 10% limit for electing representatives, in which case Erdogan's party will lose the 2/3 majority that it has right now, which will reneder them unable to alter the constitution, making it impossible to legislate the reforms that are needed so that the country may be eligible for joining the EU. We should also mention that DEHAP is a reincarnation of HADEP, the pro-curdish party that was banned and had it's 6 representatives jailed a couple of years ago. Also illegal, apart from the PKK of course, are 3 communist parties (DHKP-C, PRG-Rizgari, TKP-ML) that have their members rot in the turkish jails.

So what kind of a "democracy" is this, which has the left, the national minorities and the islamists banned frrom political representation?

Of course, I wonder if the EU does really have any qualms about that kind of undemocratic manipulations. Spain f.e. has recently banned Eru Batasuna but the EU did not react in any way.

[Dinner]

Isn't Eru Batasuna part of the ETA's political wing?

[BeBMan]

Yeah, why was there no outcry in Europe when evil Spain did something against terrorists...

[Rufus T. Firefly]

axi - Turkish democracy is indeed a basket case, but I feel like I should offer a couple of expansions on what you wrote.

First, it's a bit deceptive to suggest that the current regieme has been in place since the end of the 1980 coup. The coup ended with the adoption of the current constitution, which was written by the military and adopted in an undemocratic manner. But since then the country has been ruled by a variety of parties with different political agendas. There hasn't been one twenty-year regieme.

Second, yes -- the 10% margin for entering Parliament is absurdly high, and undemocratic. It was clearly put into place to disempower the Kurdish party and small ultra-left parties. But, in the recent election, it also served to keep out all of the country's establishment parties, and to keep the nationalist right -- the strongest supporters of the military -- from being seated in Parliament. So it's a crazy rule, but there is an attempt to apply it fairly on its own terms.

The case you bring up with Spain and Eru Batasuna is an interesting one, because what it points to is the feeling in Turkey -- largely but not entirely unfair -- that the EU is willing to put up with behavior from European countries that it won't put up with from Turkey -- like banning political parties linked to terrorism.

The history of Turkey since 1980 (to say nothing of before) is a sad one, but I do think things are changing. It may not seem that way if you look at all the attempts to disempower Erdogan's AK Party; if, on the other hand, you look at the way that all those attempts have failed, something different seems to be going on -- I hope.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Oerdin
Isn't Eru Batasuna part of the ETA's political wing?

It has much the same relationship to the ETA as HADEP had to the PKK. But Turkey's ban on HADEP was seen as a sign that Turkey didn't belong in the EU. That's the problem.

[axi]

Eri Barasuna (I misspelled it, I'm afraid) is not the political wing of the ETA, meaning that they are not the same organisation and the one does not depend on the other in any way. They belong to the same movement of course (the basque separatist movement) and lots of people probably belong to both organisations, but, seeing as Batasuna did nothing illegal on it's own, merely banning it based on suspicion that it is related with ETA is preposterous. The same more or less applies to HADEP/DEHAP and the PKK.

The problem here isn't if the EU should accept such undemocratic behaviour from Turkey just because it accepts it from Spain. The problem is if the EU should accept such behaviour at all.

As for the post-juntist regime in Turkey, I did not say it is the same thing, but that this is a regime that has evolved out of a dictatorship and not a democracy that was created by overthrowing one. In the first case the political system lies still under the supervision of the military, while in the second, the "deep state" is crushed and can no longer "hold the stick" over society (so the system has to rely solely on the "carrot" in order to control the situatioon).

[Az]

Many democracies have evolved from autocracies.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Azazel
Many democracies have evolved from autocracies.

Name some, that don't still have authoritarian features today.

[Az]

European parliamentary monarchies.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Azazel
European parliamentary monarchies.

[Az]

You know what I mean.

[Saint Marcus]

at the moment, Turkey is too backwards to join the EU. It's society, it's politics, it's human rights record, it's economy, all prevent it from being a part of the EU.

Should they change all this around, they're free to join.

Till then, I'd rather have Croatia or Iceland in.