[Comment] Turkey: Copenhagen criteria or Stockholm syndrome?
LAURENT LEYLEKIAN
18.10.2006 @ 11:38 CET
EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - The Armenian genocide has recently come back into the limelight. The September adoption by the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee of a resolution calling for the recognition by Turkey of this genocide as a precondition for EU accession was the initial cause of this comeback.
"Defining what's in and what's out of the Copenhagen criteria certainly goes far beyond the personal opinions of some unelected EU administrators" (Photo: European Armenian Federation)
The paragraph was removed from the final resolution in the parliament's plenary following intense lobbying by Turkey.
The high level of pressure mainly revealed the critical situation of the EU accession process: less than a year ago, the very same position of the European Parliament – considering the recognition of the genocide as a precondition for EU entry – was adopted in the parliament's plenary session without any trouble.
Pro-Turkey MEPs considered at the time that their protégé was strong enough and they merely ignored this paragraph.
This time, however, the episode led MEPs to react strongly and even Mr Barroso, the president of the very pro-Turkey European Commission, stated that "this kind of examination must be voluntary, it cannot be imposed."
Siding with Turkey
A couple of days later, a declaration by French president Chirac, stating that "Ankara should recognize the massacres committed under the Ottoman Empire as genocide if it wants to join the EU" triggered a direct response by Olli Rehn, the enlargement commissioner, who alleged that "the European Union's view on the matter is that the recognition of the Armenian genocide is not a condition of accession to the European Union".
The commission's commitment to siding with Turkey became even more obvious when the French bill penalising the denial of the Armenian genocide led Mr Rehn - for the first time - to grossly interfere in the internal affairs of an EU member state with a long article in the French newspaper Liberation.
The main argument used by the forces favourable to Turkey's accession is that the Armenian genocide "is not among the Copenhagen criteria" [the EU's political accession criteria] and that "the rules of the game cannot be modified once it has begun." Another one is the magic formula "pacta sunt servanda" which is supposed to give a very definitive and very legal ground to their position.
What you get out depends on what you put in
Unfortunately, these "rules" are null and void: the Copenhagen criteria are what is known in French an "auberge espagnole" - what you get out of it depends on what you put in. As with the recognition of the Armenian genocide, neither the abolition of torture for instance, nor the withdrawal of Turkish forces from Cyprus are formally among the Copenhagen criteria which are vaguely worded as respect of the rule of law, human rights and the rights of minorities.
Defining what's in and what's out certainly goes far beyond the personal opinions of some unelected EU administrators. Let's just note that Turkey's denial of the Armenian genocide is a permanent offence to a fundamental human right - the right to dignity of European citizens.
And if "the rules of the game cannot be modified", the European Commission should immediately put an end to the negotiation process because the European Parliament stated in June 1987 - just before Turkey officially applied for membership that:
"The refusal by the present Turkish Government to acknowledge the genocide against the Armenian people committed by the Young Turk government, its reluctance to apply the principles of international law to its differences of opinion with Greece, the maintenance of Turkish occupation forces in Cyprus and the denial of existence of the Kurdish question, together with the lack of true parliamentary democracy and the failure to respect individual and collective freedoms, in particular freedom of religion, in that country are insurmountable obstacles to consideration of the possibility of Turkey's accession to the [European] Community".
Now let's turn to the magic formula "pacta sunt servanda." In fact, the full legal principle is "pacta sunt servanda rebus sic standibus" which means that the treaties have to be respected, all other things being equal.
And all other things have been far from equal. With its EU customs agreement, Turkey still has more privileges and prerogatives than it would have had with a fully-fledged accession to the European Economic Community to which it initially applied.
Hostage to the process
Moreover, the unexpected rejections of the EU constitution by both France and the Netherlands as well as the new rise of nationalism in Turkey have completely turned the situation upside down: the condition "rebus sic standibus" is no longer valid and the incantation of "pacta sunt servanda" is merely absurd.
The truth is that the European Commission is now the hostage of a process in which it invested a lot of effort and that has already nearly failed.
Its high degree of commitment progressively led the commission to depart from its role of fair assessor for the accession process to become the ardent ambassador of Turkey within the union against European public opinion, to which it is supposed to be accountable.
In a move to revive the deadlocked negotiations, it considers the Armenian genocide recognition as a "new obstacle" that it has to sweep out of the road of its oriental abductor. This is no longer a matter of Copenhagen criteria, this is rather a well-known psychological disorder: the Stockholm syndrome.
Laurent Leylekian is Executive Director of the European Armenian Federation