Who was nice to the Turks?
The European Union has a nasty habit of being trapped by its own promises. For all the proclamations about history in the making, most officials in Brussels are approaching the imminent enlargement of the EU with trepidation. Of course, it could still be severely delayed by the second Irish referendum on the Nice treaty (the Irish were voting on 19th October, as Prospect went to press). But never fear, the ten candidates due to agree deals by December will get in. The EU made the promise in 1993 and has repeated it so many times since that it would be an unthinkable loss of face to back down now.
Next in line for enlargement are Romania and Bulgaria. They are pretty certain to get in too, perhaps by 2007. That leaves the great looming question of Turkey. The Europeans first dangled the prospect of membership before the Turks in the 1960s. Every now and then, a European politician pops up and says in public that the prospect of Turkish membership is a terrible idea (most recently, Edmund Stoiber). But it is much more usual for such reservations to be expressed behind closed doors.
At the European Commission meeting, where it was agreed to recommend that ten countries should sign deals by next December, anxieties about Turkey were already doing the rounds. Loyola de Palacio, a commission vice-president, revealed the ancient Spanish fear of the Moors by comparing the Bosphorus with the Straits of Gibraltar. According to Loyola, they are similarly narrow stretches of water which divide Europe from non-Europe. We're not about to let the Moroccans in, she pointed out, so why are we considering the Turks? There was muffled support for this argument from Frits Bolkestein, the Dutch internal market commissioner, who was complaining about the impact of Muslim immigrants on the Netherlands a decade before Pim Fortuyn.
The commission's answer to all these misgivings is that a promise is a promise. But some officials are wondering which bright spark first decided to give the Turks the prospect of membership back in the 1960s. A search through the archives has revealed no definitive answer. But the best guess was that it was the idea of Emile Noel-who served as secretary-general of the commission from its birth until 1987. Noel was born in Istanbul and had a soft spot for the country. Another triumph for the accident theory of history.
Ukraine bad, Serbia good
It is not only the Turks who are at the gates of Brussels. A trip to the World Economic Forum meeting in Salzburg was enlivened by a sort of beauty contest, in which heads of state from wannabe EU countries sat on a stage for a panel discussion with G?nter Verheugen, the EU's commissioner for enlargement. Leonid Kuchma of the Ukraine more or less said that he wanted his country to join the Union; and Verheugen more or less told him to piss off. The sight of a European commissioner publicly humiliating a head of state in front of an audience of 1,000 people was startling-"hallucinogenic," enthused one French delegate.
But if Kuchma did the Ukraine no good by coming across as an unsophisticated apparatchik, Zoran Djindjic, prime minister of Serbia, wowed the audience with a smooth-talking and sophisticated performance. Djindjic has a doctorate from a German university, but spoke only rudimentary English a few years ago. In between extraditing Milosevic and trying to right the Serbian economy, he must have crammed in a few intensive lessons.
As well as making a polished speech, he later participated in a seminar on European identity. The usual waffle was flowing back and forth among the academics and businessmen, when the moderator turned to Djindjic, who had been working quietly on some papers, and asked him for a "Serbian perspective." The prime minister looked up and said-"Well, to get anywhere in this debate, you really need to define identity. Modern societies are defined by three elements; political democracy, market economy and social identity. It's in this third aspect-their attitude to social solidarity-that the Europeans seem to have an identity that is distinct from either America or Asia." It was rather marvellous that the sharpest and most academic contribution to the debate should come from the only politician in the room. If Djindjic loses his job in Serbia-as he may well do-someone at the LSE should snap him up.
The right drops federalism
Not much appeared in the papers about a meeting of European conservative leaders, hosted by Silvio Berlusconi in Sardinia in September. The meeting was significant for two main reasons. First, Jos? Mar?-a Aznar, the Spanish prime minister, made it clear that he has his eyes on the putative "president of Europe" job. Second, Aznar's pitch for the presidency revealed a growing split in the European People's Party-the umbrella organisation for European right-of-centre parties. Traditionally, the EPP has been strongly "communitaire"-its tone in recent years was set, above all, by Helmut Kohl. But Aznar and Berlusconi are much less keen on the integrationist model for Europe, and instead are clearly drawn to the idea of intergovernmental co-operation-provided of course that Italy and Spain get their seats at the top table. The EPP traditionalists in Sardinia-in particular Wilfred Martens, the Belgian president of the party-were appalled.
