Südosteuropa 58 (2010), H. 3, S. 363-388 CHALLENGES OF EUROPEANIZATION GERALD KNAUS / EKREM EDDY GüZELDERE Generals, Christians and Turkey’s European Revolution Abstract. This paper discusses the process of political change in Turkey since 1999. After a first phase of numerous EU-inspired reforms, this process after 2004 has shifted to a domestic debate over the meaning of these reforms. Understanding how this process unfolds not only is crucial to understanding Turkey, but also to bettergrasping the dynamics of Europeanization. The article looks at two issues in particular that illustrate Turkey’s Europeanization efforts: the position of non-Muslim minorities and the position of the Turkish military. In both fields, reforms have been carried out between 2001 and 2004 followed by signs of serious tensions: a wave of attacks against Turkey’s Christians, culminating in a series of assassinations in 2006 and 2007; and an effort by an important fraction of the military hierarchy to reverse the Turkish armed forces’ loss of political influence. Europeanization in Turkey clearly has become a domestic struggle. Gerald Knaus is the founding Chairman of the European Stability Initiative and Associate Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy / Harvard Kennedy School. Ekrem Eddy Güzeldere is a political scientist who has worked as an analyst in the Istanbul office of the European Stability Initiative since 2007. After the Helsinki Moment Europeanization has a long history in Turkey and deep roots in the history of the 19th century, but it has meant very different things at different periods. The dramatic power struggles between various elites that are currently shaking Turkish politics are also shaped by different understandings of what a “Euro- pean Turkey” is supposed to look like and of the importance of democracy in this context. In the first Ottoman reform period under Sultan Mahmut II in the 1830s most institutional changes “in one way or another had to do with the chang- ing relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Europe”.1 The 19th century saw far-reaching changes in Ottoman law, education, finance and government 1 Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey – a Modern History. New York 2007, 23. 364 Gerald Knaus, Ekrem Eddy Güzeldere institutions that were inspired by the great powers of Europe. European ideolo- gies – secularism, nationalism, constitutionalism, and by the early 20th century also feminism – spread to the Ottoman elites. All of this laid the groundwork for the Kemalist revolution of the 1920s, which followed the collapse of the Empire at the end of the First World War and made Turkey a republic. The new republic adopted the Western calendar, introduced a modified version of Latin script, passed European-inspired penal and civil codes, and endorsed the symbols of European lifestyles – from classical music to bathing suits and the open enjoyment of alcohol – as a pathway to modernity. With the promulga- tion of the Law on the Maintenance of Order in March 1925 Turkey became an authoritarian one-party state. At a time when liberal democratic systems were on the defensive in Europe, Turkey’s authoritarian nationalist system was a recognizably European model of government. Another wave of Westernization set in after the Second World War. Consider- ing itself under various unwelcome pressures from the Soviet Union, Turkey joined the Cold War on the side of the West. Again, the country tried to keep pace with a changing Europe – this time, a democratizing one – by adopting a multiparty regime. This led to Turkish membership in several Western/European organizations. Turkey became a founding member of the Council of Europe in 1949 and joined NATO in 1952. Soon it became a member of most European organizations. Turkish elites viewed European integration as the next stage in their country’s Westernization. Neither the Turkish leaders nor other members of NATO made much of the obvious peculiarities of Turkish democracy: the regular recurrence of military interventions, the division of sovereignty between elected functionaries and appointed ones, and recurrent tensions between the parliaments and the governments on the one hand and the bureaucratic guard- ians of Kemalist ideology on the other. The early association agreements with the EU did not contain provisions for mandatory political dialogue and did little to encourage Turkey to improve its human rights record. Turkey finally applied to become a member of the European Community in 1987. The application was doomed from the start, coming as it did at a time when the armed confrontation between the Turkish Army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) in the Kurdish regions of the country was gaining in intensity. In fact, with the end of the Cold War, an ever wider normative gap opened up between Turkey and the rest of Europe. As Philip Robins puts it, Turkey did not share Europe’s democratic euphoria of the early 1990s: “The 1980s saw the beginnings of a new norms based approach to international affairs, especially in Europe and the developed world. […] The ideological change related to the emergence of a hegemony of liberal values, with their emphasis, in the political domain, on democracy, pluralism, human rights and Generals, Christians and Turkey’s European Revolution 365 civil society. […] Turkey just did not connect with the spirit of these normative changes. […] By the early 1990s, however, rather than being transformed by liberal, exogenous factors, Turkey was retreating from such values as a process of de-democratization began to take hold.”2 This normative gap undermined Turkey’s standing in Europe. In the 1990s, relations between Turkey and the international human rights community de- teriorated precipitously. Between 1991 and 1994, human rights organisations cited evidence of several thousand cases of torture; thousands of mysterious killings took place; by the spring of 1996, some 3,000 villages had been razed to the ground in southeast Anatolia, as the state battled the PKK. In 1996, Freedom House labelled Turkey as “partially free”, placing it in the same category as Kuwait. National policies were set not by elected parliaments and governments, but by an unaccountable “deep state” (derin devlet) or “national security state”. This was justified with the need to fight Turkey’s internal enemies, meaning particularly, but not exclusively, the PKK in southeast Anatolia: “The methods of the deep state involved the use of force, physical and psycho- logical intimidation, extra-judicial killings, and the creation of a cordon sanitaire through the razing of villages and the displacement of rural populations.”3 The decisive turning point for Turkey’s most recent wave of Europeanization was the December 1999 EU summit in Helsinki, when Turkey obtained EU candidate status. By this time, democratic values and respect for human rights had become central to the very notion of “Europeanization”, and had been in- cluded in the 1993 Copenhagen accession criteria. Nonetheless, the 1999 historic decision on Turkey’s candidate status was taken by EU governments despite the fact that Turkey’s human rights record had improved very little. In 2000, the European Commission’s annual report still concluded that “the situation on the ground has hardly improved and Turkey still does not meet the Copenhagen political criteria”.4 It was also understood, however, that without meeting the Copenhagen Criteria Turkey would not be able to commence formal accession negotiations. The Helsinki decision triggered a whole new wave of reforms, especially after 2002, when the newly-formed Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) came to power. From the outset of its mandate, the party eagerly embraced the EU agenda. Many reasons have been given to explain this choice. 2 Philip Robins, Suits and Uniforms: Turkish Foreign Policy since the Cold War. London 2003, 29-31. 3 Ibid., 39. 4 Commission of the European Communities, 2000 Regular Report from the Commission on Turkey’s Progress towards Accession, 8 November 2000, 20f., available at <http://www. dpt.gov.tr/DocObjects/Download/2472/2000%20(En).pdf>. All internet sources cited here were accessed on 10 November 2010. 366 Gerald Knaus, Ekrem Eddy Güzeldere Hakan Yavuz stresses the importance of underlying changes in Turkish society: the emergence of a new bourgeoisie in Anatolia that was both distrustful of old Turkish elites and integrated into the global economy, and also supported the emergence of a new independent intellectual class.5 Ihsan Dağı underlines the insecurity of the AKP’s leaders, whose previous (Islamic) political parties had all been banned by the courts. He explains that AKP’s needs to reassure wary secular elites, to broaden its legitimacy internationally, and to reduce the army’s influence coincided with the EU’s demands for democratization. The Copenhagen criteria allowed the AKP to question almost all key aspects of the traditional Kemalist understanding of the state. The AKP wanted to make the banning of political parties more difficult, to limit the influence of the military – exercised through the National Security Council – and to strengthen civil society, including pro-Islamic associations. The first EU-harmonization package passed by the AKP in January 2003 made it harder to outlaw political parties by requiring a three-fifths majority in the constitutional court. This law actually was to save the AKP itself from being banned in 2008. In April 2004, state security courts were abolished, start- ing a process of dismantling the system of parallel military and civilian courts. International treaties were accorded precedence over Turkish law, challenging an often deeply nationalist judiciary. The state-owned broadcasting service TRT started to broadcast programmes in the Kurdish language, an initially small step that was to lead to a much broader acceptance of the use of Kurdish within a few years. In 2004, the European Commission found that Turkey had sufficiently fulfilled the criteria to recommend the start of accession talks.