October 21, 2004
Turkey and the EU
And excellent article on Turkey’s future membership of the EU:-
“That Turkey will change the EU for the better is clear — the bigger the Union, the greater the centripetal forces within it, and the more difficult it will be to create a United States of Europe ruled from Brussels. When the former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, author of the controversial new European constitution, said that Turkey’s accession would be ‘the end of Europe’, he meant the end of an introspective, protectionist, over-regulated, Franco-German-dominated Europe. That’s exactly the reason why the French — with the rather odd exception of President Jacques Chirac — continue to oppose Turkish accession, and why British prime ministers have consistently supported it.Sadly, the deal doesn’t look so good for Turkey itself. As Daniel Hannan has so forcefully argued in these pages, countries like Iceland and Norway, which have chosen to stay on the fringes of the Union but not be in it, can reap great economic benefits. This is especially true of Turkey, which, unlike the above-mentioned countries, has the added competitive advantage of a huge, cheap labour market. Turkey has the best of both worlds — it is in Europe’s customs union, and can trade freely with the EU while remaining outside its constrictive practices such as the social chapter, the 48-hour week and the crushing raft of health and safety and environmental legislation which make it so expensive to do business inside Europe. Turkey is ideally placed to be Europe’s outsourcing paradise.”
The fact is that the countries that joined the EU late saw their rates of growth slow, as the graph below illustrates. Given that Turkey already ahs access to EU and EFTA markets beyond the carrot of structural adjustment funds, its hard to see what the EU ahs to offer Turkey beyond reproaches, regulations and meetings
