The Fake Turkey Story . . .Not That One, The Other One
By Diplomad
From the Vice Chief Diplomad for European Affairs:
This week we saw the European Union offer to begin accession negotiations with Turkey some time in 2005, negotiations that probably will drag out for ten years or so, even under favorable conditions. Paraphrasing a Ronald Reagan joke about Soviet Union inefficiency, we wonder whether the EU welcome wagon, when it schedules its visit to Ankara in 2015, will plan for a morning or afternoon arrival. Eurocrats are certain to hash this out in every detail, including making sure that the welcome wagon does not produce emissions that violate the Kyoto Accords, or has ever been used in any way to transport people or documents associated with a criminal trial where the death penalty might have been invoked.
Allowing Turkey into the EU seems a wise decision for all concerned, in the sense that it sets a good example for the Islamic world. Which makes it interesting that Muammar Qaddafhi described the concept as a Trojan Horse. (Note: We assume this is a reference to Greek mythology and not a brand of condoms, but you never know with Qaddafhi.)
But for all his looniness, Qaddafhi raises a fair point: Entry of Turkey into the EU could potentially bring down the EU. Not necessarily because the EU has to take in 70 million new Muslims, but rather because it has to take in a big, relatively poor country that will place serious economic and political strains on the organization. Anti-Americans out there think that this is probably the reason the United States supported Turkey getting into the EU. They're wrong. The United States supported Turkey getting into the EU for noble, and sensible geopolitical reasons. But if, in the end, Turkey helps bring about the unraveling of the EU, that might not be so bad either.
The Diplomad would like to use this as the beginning of a multi-parter, devils-advocate column mind you, to wonder aloud whether dismembering the EU would be a smart policy, aiming for full dismemberment soon after Turkey gets in.
This is not an easy question. U.S. policy has, at least in public, hewn to the policy that Europe should be "whole and free," meaning that the European Union should, as Spock would put it "live long and prosper." The State Department even has a new award, named after our current Ambassador to the European Union, for personnel who do the most to promote healthy US-EU relations (Note: The Diplomads have never won this award; we don't know why.)
On the generous side, the existence of the EU makes it theoretically possible that war can be avoided in a part of the world that has been a generator of wars for centuries, and has sucked the USA into those wars and their aftermath at great expense of soldiers and economic resources. The EU has had some good chances to prevent wars, in the Balkans for example, but was incapable of doing so without US and NATO help. To be fair, the EU learned from these mistakes and has done well to deploy in Macedonia and just this month took over (sort of) the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia.
As Robert Kagan recently wrote, referring to Ukraine, the EU is also a good advertisement for democracy and freedom, and holds out a kind of attraction for countries in the EU minor leagues eventually to meet membership criteria and join. Large chunks of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc have done so or are in the process. This is good, and it helps in a place like Ukraine, where there's some place to turn for inspiration and trade other than Russia -- now going through its Darth Vader phase of post-communist development.
But the EU is also an enormous pain in the rear. Its bureaucracy is overly French or French-influenced, and is much worse in the aggregate than the sum of its national parts. It fights us tooth and nail on trade matters: Boeing vs. Airbus, biotechnology, contracts in every imaginable business area, not to mention the current retaliatory sanctions it has imposed because of our Foreign Trade Corporations, which the WTO ruled as an unfair export subsidy. OK, we lost that one, but the EU still hasn't lifted its sanctions even after we repealed the export subsidy. To say, as we do when we have US-EU high-level meetings, after the ceremonial holding hands and singing Kumba Ya, that US-EU trade exceeds 7.8 gazillion dollars, really is not that impressive, since the EU is not responsible for the trade. The Diplomad's own number-crunching department has put together a model that demonstrates that trade between the US and the 25 individual EU countries would actually be greater than 7.8 gazillion dollars if the EU did not exist, and in some cases, actually restrain trade.
Let's stop it here today, since this is already going on long enough as it is. Subsequent articles could deal with geopolitical costs/benefits of EU-dom, and maybe a glimpse into the reasoning of Europe's own "Euroskeptics" who could (will?) themselves unravel the EU by voting down its new draft constitution. |
