Turkey: It’s about the journey, not the destination

ZEKI ÖNDER, THE charismatic senior vice-president of Turkey’s Sekerbank, tells an anecdote about a busy Chinese development banker he was having a drink with in Beijing recently.

Their conversation turned to Turkey’s perennial tilt at European Union membership, and Europe’s lukewarm attitude to Ankara’s westward ambition. The Beijing banker questioned why Turkey even wanted to be there. "He told me that he felt sorry for European bankers," Önder recalls. "He said it was because there is nothing left to do there. ‘Look at us,’ he said, ‘we have a huge future to get excited about.’" Önder laughs. "And he was right."

Thoughtfully drawing on a cigar as he tells the story, Önder casts a philosophical eye from his eyrie over Istanbul’s fast-rising Levent financial district east to the Bosphorus and beyond, across Turkey’s great Anatolian steppe to Russia, central Asia and the Middle East and, as he imagines, to India and China.

"I more or less feel the same about Turkey," Önder says. "We have a lot to get excited about – we have a huge task that we can picture and plan, and so many things to be done."

In relating his encounter with the Chinese banker, Önder has jabbed a metaphorical finger at the Great Dilemma that faces thrusting Turkey and its relatively moribund European neighbours to the west.

Islamic Turkey has aspired to be part of the Christian-run European club longer than most of Turkey’s 71 million people have been alive. A near-original member of the Council of Europe in 1949, and a Nato member since 1952, Turkey first applied to join the then European Economic Community, the EU’s forerunner, in 1959, two years after the EEC’s creation. In 1962, it signed the Ankara Agreement with Brussels, a customs union that, Turks thought, would fast-track it to the full membership it craved, achieving the official European-ness that eluded modern Turkey’s early 20th-century republican founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and the Ottoman sultans before him.

Önder, who describes himself as something of a Euro-sceptic, says Turkey has an important role to play in "the bigger vision of Europe". However, he says: "If Europe wants to stay with less-dynamic, less-ambitious targets, that’s a different story. But I think common sense will prevail. Turkey will enrich the EU at so many levels."

Perhaps, but for near half a century, Turks have watched powerless and abandoned as the then six-member EEC expanded into today’s 27-member EU edifice, embracing the still-fragile democracies of former communist states. It has been only seven years since Turkey passed through its last crippling crisis, which anti-accessionists in Europe like to use as a reason why Turkey isn’t ready. But, as Önder and others note, Spain joined the EU in 1986, not even five years after a near-successful military coup attempt in Madrid.

Today, many Turks see EU membership as being as remote as it was in 1959. Now that Serbia has given up Radovan Karadzic, even the recently demonized Belgrade seems to have vaulted ahead of Ankara. Turks are getting impatient. And as the Middle East, Russia and east Asia booms, more and more Turks are wondering why they should be in a club that doesn’t seem to want them.

"Turkey is ready for Europe," says an emphatic Suzan Sabanci Dinçer, the 42-year-old recently appointed chair of her family’s Akbank, one of Turkey’s big-four private banks. "The EU should have Turkey as an exciting new member because it will add excitement and growth to Europe," she says. "The big EU powers are slowing down. The world is shifting from west to east, and the EU needs a growth story, an emerging market within its borders.

"We have gone through five to six years of economic and political stability. Turkish people have seen the positive effects on their life – that their currency became valuable, that there is an appetite for their country, that they could buy houses, increase their standard of living.

"They have tasted this better life, and the prospects of it being even better. There is a consensus in the country that Turkey should be part of the EU, and I believe that Turkey has had to do these reforms for the EU. They don’t want to go back."

Mehmet Besimoglu, chief economist at Oyak Securities, agrees. "We in Turkey have been working on this European project for 50 years, so we are a country that is ready."

Not new to capitalism

If it’s not Islam, which Brussels unconvincingly says it’s not, what is Europe’s problem with Turkish membership? It’s not as if Turkey doesn’t know capitalism, which is more than can be said for some of the EU’s newer members. Harder-headed bankers ascribe Turkey’s embrace of the market to 1980 and the liberalization of the Demirel-Ozal team but Turks, be they Ottomans or Byzantines, have been active in business since Julius Caesar was a boy, and even longer. Straddling Europe and Asia, Istanbul’s standing as an international trading centre is measured in millennia. Taken alone, Greater Istanbul and its near-15 million people, the world’s third-biggest city by some measures, would be a medium-sized economy in the EU, as wealthy and as big as The Netherlands. Some 75% of Turkey’s trade is already with Europe. International banks, mostly European, now control as much as 40% of Turkey’s banking assets, most of them having profitably arrived in the country since the crippling financial crisis of 2001. Istanbul boasts more billionaires than Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Tokyo, and ranks alongside London, the EU’s financial centre. Turkey is a robust and well-debated democracy, boasting a solid and growing consumerist middle class informed by vibrant media, often over cold Efes beer and raki, Turkey’s potent anise aperitif, in a lively meyhane tavern. What’s not to like?

"We have a lot to get excited about – we have a huge task that we can picture and plan, and so many things to be done" Zeki Önder, Sekerbank