Europe, identity and accession

It has long been noted that an important part of the way in which states identify themselves is in relation to difference.Footnote ³ The attributes which political elites ascribe to their own societies are strongly influenced by the presence or creation of potential alternatives. In this sense, ‘collective identity is a relation between the two human collectivities, that is, it always resides in the nexus between the collective self and its others’.Footnote ⁴ So, although such perceptions are not immutable and may give rise to a variety of ideational forms, the tendency to associate definitions of the ‘self’ with characterisations of the ‘other’ endures. As Bahar Rumelili observes, ‘collective identity can expand to include what was previously its constitutive other; however, this expansion of identity will only reproduce the logic of identity in the now broader collectivity's interaction with a new constitutive other’.Footnote ⁵ This article proceeds from the premise that the evolving notion of a European continent exhibits such developmental characteristics. It contends that ‘the very idea of what Europe was from the beginning defined partly in terms of what it was not’ and that ‘the non-European barbarian or savage [has] played a decisive role’ in the construction of a sense of shared distinctiveness.Footnote ⁶ Of course, to suggest that this process of differentiation has established rigid and clearly delimited boundaries would be an oversimplification. Rather, Europe is surrounded by malleable and contingently defined frontiers – what Ole Wæver calls ‘zones of transition’.Footnote ⁷

With the natural barriers of the North Atlantic, Mediterranean and Arctic Circle to its respective west, south and north, it is perhaps unsurprising that Europe's eastern landmass has long been viewed as the primary transition zone. Russia, Byzantium and the Eastern Church have figured strongly in such perceptions, but it is arguably the Turks who represent Europe's perennial antithesis. Since the Middle Ages, the spectre of the hooded hoards just beyond Vienna has had, and continues to have, a significant influence on European thought. As Malcolm Yapp puts it, ‘of all the negatives known to the Europe the nearest, the most obvious and the most threatening has been the Islamic Near East, represented from the fourteenth century onwards by the menace of the Ottoman Empire’.Footnote ⁸ Like the Arabs (narrowly defeated at Poitiers in 732), a combination of military might and Muslim mores has rendered the Turk ‘a particularly relevant Other in the evolution of European identity’.Footnote ⁹ Unlike the Arabian presence in Iberia, though, Turkish control of contiguous lands did not come to end in the fifteenth century; instead, it continues to demarcate part of the continent's eastern frontier. With an enduring emphasis on Greek ethics, Roman jurisprudence and Christian identity as key elements in the demarcation of this boundary, the presence of the Turkish neighbour has generally been understood through what Nuemann and Welsh call ‘a logic of culture’. Renaissance writers resurrected Hellenistic distinctions between civilisation and barbarity and blended accounts of the ‘east’ with romanticised or messianic visions of the older struggle with the Saracen.Footnote ¹⁰ King Christian I of Denmark (1426–1481), for instance, considered the Turk to be ‘the beast rising out of the sea described in the Apocalypse’ while the Piedmontese priest and diplomat Giovanni Botero (1544–1617), implored Italian princes to recall the ‘heroic days’ of the crusades and to ‘unite together with no other interest than the honour of God and the exaltation of the church, and to attack the Turk’.Footnote ¹¹

While the use of such terms as infidel and heretic has gradually declined, a focus on the ‘other's’ faith and culture, increasingly bolstered by more general social observations, has continued throughout the modern era. Owing much to Montesquieu's eighteenth century association of religion with climate, government and territory as the explanatory basis of ‘the liberty of Europe and the servitude of Asia’, a ‘subtle shift of emphasis from the moral to the material’ emerged and came to underpin ‘new secular markers’ needed to distinguish ‘Europe from the Turk and other Asian societies’.Footnote ¹² Alongside confessional determinism, a sense that progress had reinforced a ‘natural’ divide between an industrialising and liberalising West and a moribund and stagnant East arose in which Europe was ‘given an honorific identification as the […] dynamic motor of modernity, with a spirit of rationality, liberty and justice’ and contrasted with ‘the “Orient” or Asia [as] the realm of despotism, fanaticism and historical fixity’.Footnote ¹³ In resisting parliamentary calls for aid to the Porte in 1816, Edmund Burke, for instance, stated that all ‘that was holy in religion, all that was moral and humane, demanded an abhorrence of everything that tended to extend the power of that cruel and wasteful empire. Any Christian power was to be preferred to these destructive savages’.Footnote ¹⁴ More recently, Frits Bolkestein (the outgoing European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Taxation and Customs Union) summed up these concerns more succinctly by simply dismissing Turkey as ‘too big, too poor, too different’.Footnote ¹⁵

Plainly demonstrating that the ‘perception of Turks as “other” in Europe is […] deeply embedded in Europeans' collective memory and colors European views of Turkey today’, Bolkestein has also warned that, partly as a result of Turkish immigration, ‘Europe is being Islamicised’ to a point where ‘the liberation of Vienna in 1683 will have been in vain’.Footnote ¹⁶ Furthermore, Pope Benedict XVI chose his first general audience in St. Peter's Square in April 2005 to affirm ‘the irrefutable Christian roots of European culture and civilization’ while former German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, has warned that ‘the politicians recommending Turkey's membership [of the EU] […] know little about the history of the Ottoman Empire’.Footnote ¹⁷ In all, it is clear that, in the minds of many of its leaders, ‘Europe is not the creation of geography or political culture but rather the modern reincarnation of ancient Christendom’ which acts ‘not only [as] an integrating factor, but a means also of differentiating Europe from Islam, initially as a creed, later as personified by the Turk’.Footnote ¹⁸ Particularly questioned is ‘the degree to which Turkey's Islamic religious and cultural traditions are compatible with “European” values’.Footnote ¹⁹ Nicole Fontaine (European Parliament President between 1999 and 2002) has, for instance, noted that, within debates over Turkey's accession to the EU, it is ‘not possible to evade the problem of cultural integration’.Footnote ²⁰ For many, this ‘problem’ lies in Islam's supposedly immutable incongruity with the Western ‘way of life’. As former Dutch Foreign Minister, Hans van Mierlo, puts it ‘there is a problem of a large Muslim state. Do we’, he goes on to enquire, ‘want that in Europe?’Footnote ²¹ Not Wilfried Martens, the President of Europe's largest transnational political party, who believes that the EU represents ‘a process of building a civilisation in which Turkey has no place’ – a sentiment reiterated by former French President, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing who stated that Turkey has ‘a different culture, a different approach, and different way of life’ and thus its accession would constitute ‘the end of Europe’.Footnote ²²

Since the electoral victory of a less secularist government led by the Justice and Development Party (JDP) in 2002, commentaries on Turkey's prospective accession have become particularly focussed upon ‘essentialist, primordial, cultural arguments highlighting the differences between Turkey and Europe based on questions of identity’.Footnote ²³ According to Edgar Lenski, for example, the incoming leadership's religiosity can be ‘seen as proof of Turkey's non-European culture [and] […] may reasonably be considered to be alarming’.Footnote ²⁴ The Party is described by Paul Kubicek as having ‘Islamist roots but a decidedly pro-EU agenda’, while its decision to ‘ban discrimination against homosexuals’ and introduce ‘harsh punishment for “honor killings”’ are, he continues, ‘surprising’ given the party's ideological orientation.Footnote ²⁵ Despite the new government offering no evidence for such supposedly endemic homophobia and misogyny, it ‘has been required to forswear any desire to introduce religious elements into its law while […] the Union has been markedly reluctant to interfere with the important symbolic and institutional roles held by certain culturally entrenched Christian denominations in many Member States’.Footnote ²⁶

This discriminatory approach is rooted in a broader association between a homogenised perception of Muslim ‘values’ and an objectified worldview that ‘carries with it an image of Islam as a “conception of the world” which is incompatible with Europeanness’.Footnote ²⁷ Turkish accession (a prospect ‘drawing on far deeper cultural antipathies’ than candidates from Eastern Europe) thus primarily represents a threat to ‘our values’ and ‘our way of life’ and only secondarily challenges ‘our’ economic and political policies.Footnote ²⁸ Such ‘culture talk’, as Mahmood Mamdani's calls it, ‘assumes that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it, and then it explains politics as a consequence of that essence’.Footnote ²⁹ Domestic politics in Turkey is thus not to be considered a consequence of material considerations akin to those of the West, but ingrained within a singular and immutably obdurate cultural reference point – the reactionary tents of Islam – defined by its supposed ‘vehement rejection’ of the ‘secular, scientific, rational and commercial civilization created by the Enlightenment’ and its virtues of ‘freedom, democracy, tolerance and diversity’.Footnote ³⁰ As Paul Kennedy explains, ‘if one needed an example of the importance of cultural attitudes in explaining a society's response to change, contemporary Islam provides it’ – a fact which apparently reveals why the ‘Muslim world appears to have difficulty in coming to terms with […] laissez-faire economics, trans-national industrial and commercial linkages, social change and intellectual questioning’.Footnote ³¹

Such essentialism is in keeping with older discourses on the heathen and uncivilised character of the Muslim ‘other’ and is part of a wider effort to disaggregate the Mediterranean region's shared heritage. As Talad Asad notes, the people of its southern and eastern shores ‘are, in great measure, the cultural heirs of the Hellenic world […] [and thus] must therefore be denied a vital link to the very properties that define so much of what is essential to “Europe” if a civilisational difference is to be postulated between them’.Footnote ³² Fundamental to the rejection of Turkey's European identity, then, is the supposed immutability of an ancient cultural divergence. From this perspective, ‘the Europe of freedom of thought, of the rule of law and of democracy has its roots in the Christian Middle Ages […] not in the Muslim world’; it therefore follows that the ‘Age of Enlightenment has not even touched Turkey – just as the harem culture has never touched us’.Footnote ³³ Such primordial distinctions are ‘given and, therefore, cannot be changed by voluntary action. […] Consequently, it is argued that Turkey as a Middle Eastern country could only […] imitate European values […] [and that, while] reforms could certainly be imposed […] they could never be rooted in people's mentalities’.Footnote ³⁴ ‘A credible and consistent policy of stressing the common European norms’ may thus be a necessary means of ‘developing’ Turkey, but any resultant modifications must be regarded as ‘mere implants, not organically integrated into the […] “deep structure” formed by the historical and cultural dynamics at work in political life’.Footnote ³⁵ Change is therefore possible, but this needs to be extraneously devised and implemented on the assumption that the ‘other’ ‘cannot be converted or adopted because they simply lack the essential preconditions of understanding’.Footnote ³⁶ So, while it is certain ‘that the historical dimension is indeed very significant with regard to [the] decision on whether or not to start negotiations between the EU and Turkey’, eternal incompatibility does not necessitate inaction.Footnote ³⁷ Frits Bolkestein, for instance, has made it ‘clear that before Turkey can enter [the EU] it will certainly have to go through a transformation. At the time of its accession it will have to possess a completely different identity’.Footnote ³⁸

The civilisational disparity between the two entities can thus form a basis for the latter to emulate the former. This is particularly so in the perceived need to lessen the social efficacy of Islam – a ‘developmental’ direction intermittently pursued by Turkish political elites for much of the last three centuries.Footnote ³⁹ Frustrated by what they perceive to be the antediluvian religiosity of their countrymen (40 per cent of whom still work in the agricultural sector), Turkey's urban intelligentsia contend that, given the obscurantism and stubborn patrimonialism of domestic politics, institutional change ‘requires policy making at a supra-national scale of governance, i.e. the EU’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Here, aspiring to ‘Europeanness’ is typically presented as ‘a key motivating factor favouring modernization’ and an important means of containing anti-Western extremism.Footnote ⁴¹ Sharing Western discourses which ‘tend to see Muslim societies in terms of a lack; the absence of technology, the absence of rationality, the absence of civil society, the absence of modernity’, Turkey's comprador class argues that such a ‘lack can only be filled by imports from the West’.Footnote ⁴² Similarly ‘requir[ing] an Eastern “other” in order to give content to the[ir] concept of modernity’, such arguments have long held that ‘the only hope for reform is through the prodding provided from outside’ and that ‘the only really successful reforms in Turkish history have been in the context of a response to outside pressure’.Footnote ⁴³ Conforming well to the guiding conceit of European expansionism – that Turkey can be encouraged ‘to start to live by the rules which the EU holds sacrosanct’ – ‘the question of accession […] [thus becomes] an opportunity to get done what the Turks cannot do on their own’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The following sections will consider what implications emerge from European discourses on a favourite target for such remedial attention – Turkey's beleaguered public sector and its apparently endemically corrupt culture.

Turkish corruption

The rise of the anti-corruption industry is largely a product of the post-Cold War era. Before this, no ‘programs dealt specifically with corruption’ and, in most cases, the imperatives of maintaining the accessibility of client states, as well as bloc unity, overrode concerns about the integrity of recipient public sectors.Footnote ⁴⁵ So long as aid-recipient administrations ‘were in the right the camp, there was a tendency to overlook obvious cases of high-level corruption’ as ‘Western financiers knowingly tolerated irregularities in the public projects that they funded’.Footnote ⁴⁶ ‘Such lenience was openly shared by Western businesses and governments, which turned a blind eye in order to secure lucrative deals’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Indeed, many writers believed that corruption was an inevitable corollary of modernisation which could, in some instances, overcome public sector inertia, assist in social integration and promote economic development. By removing rigidities that tend to obstruct investment, by augmenting salaries, thus allowing governments to reduce tax burdens and by promoting time efficiencies, the payment of bribes could, it was suggested, ‘assist in capital formation, foster entrepreneurial abilities and allow business interests to penetrate bureaucracy’.Footnote ⁴⁸

However, concerned by the scale of these transactions (one study revealed that ‘more than 400 [American] corporations [117 of which ranked in the top Fortune 500 industries] ha[d] admitted making questionable or illegal payments […] [worth] well in excess of $300 million’), Congress declared that disbursing ‘bribes to influence the acts or decisions of foreign officials, foreign political parties or candidates for foreign political office is unethical […] [and] erodes public confidence in the integrity of the free market system’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The resultant 1977 Foreign Corruption Practices Act ‘prohibit[ed] American firms and individuals from paying, or offering to pay, bribes’, and thus placed them at a comparative disadvantage when competing with other multinationals – many of which continued to submit such transfers as tax-deductible expenses.Footnote ⁵⁰ A 1996 report by the Department of Commerce, for instance, found that American companies had lost more than $11 billion in unsuccessful tenders over the preceding two years through these statutory restraints.Footnote ⁵¹ This, coupled with allegations of corrupt business contacts with the nuclear industry, organised crime, terrorism and narcotics, prompted Washington to use its influence within international institutions to impose a ‘globalization of American-style anti-corruption standards’ during the 1990s.Footnote ⁵² Supported by multinationals seeking to protect the integrity of their brands while competing with those with no reputation to lose, came to be seen as ‘a hidden form of protectionism’ in which domestic companies used their superior local knowledge and social networks to out-manoeuvre foreign investors.Footnote ⁵³

The issue of how to address corruption thus moved ‘from being the scarcely regarded topic of specialist academic tracts’, to what James Wolfensohn, former President of the World Bank, claimed was the world's ‘largest single inhibitor of equitable economic development’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The 1990s were, for Robert Williams, ‘the decade of corruption as an academic and policy topic and there is no indication that popular, academic, professional or political interest is beginning to flag’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, by 2004, the anti-corruption industry had grown to an estimated global value of $100 million. Although still abbreviated by the imperatives of Great Power politics (the strategic importance of Kazakhstan and oil wealth of Equatorial Guinea have, for instance, largely shielded both states from international scrutiny), a greater focus has generally been placed on issues of fiscal scrutiny and reform within aid-recipient states – frequently amid hyperbolic levels of moral opprobrium. In 1996, for instance, Wolfensohn urged donors ‘to deal with the cancer of corruption’, while Roderick Hills, writing in the World Bank's in-house journal in 2006, claimed that ‘corruption and related problems of governance […] present at least as great a threat to the democratic way of life that we value as that we once attributed to Communism’.Footnote ⁵⁶

In keeping with this general pattern, concerns over Turkish corruption have only recently emerged with any significant political importance. Previously, Turkey's credentials as the single Muslim member of NATO and a key element in John Foster Dulles' northern tier of defence against the Eastern Bloc meant that conditionalities tied to the aid it received from its Western allies were more focussed on regime stability than public accountability.Footnote ⁵⁷ Indeed, the fact that Turkey's first application to join what was then the European Economic Community in 1959 was immediately succeeded by a bloody takeover by Chief-of-Staff General Cemal Gürsel did not obstruct the signing of the 1963 Ankara Agreement, envisaging the progressive establishment of a customs union ‘in recognition […] of the sacrifices it [Turkey] has made in defending our [western Europe's] shared ideal’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Neither this, nor an additional protocol signed in 1970 (briefly pre-dating another military intervention) setting out a timetable for the abolition of tariffs and quotas on goods circulating between Turkey and the EEC, made any mention of corruption. While concerns were raised by members of the European Parliament over the gross violations of human rights which followed the 1980 coup, the reaction of the Council of Ministers was ‘softened by the need to maintain Cold War alliances’ and amounted to ‘more a reassurance to the new regime and less a condemnation of the military intervention’.Footnote ⁵⁹ It maintained the terms of the Ankara Agreement (as well as other economic, legal and political ties), as the generals replaced what they called ‘an autarchic import-substitution model’ with ‘the operation of market forces’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Neither did the Turkish state's excessive response to ongoing Kurdish activism obstruct an application for full membership submitted in 1987 and the confirmation of eligibility in 1990.Footnote ⁶¹

Indeed, ‘there were and remain important reasons for accepting Turkey's application, if only to open further the large Turkish market to EU exports while encouraging its pro-Western stance’.Footnote ⁶² By the mid-1990s, though, the end of the Cold War had begun to move European priorities away from military deterrence and towards cultural and economic factors. As Meltem Müftüler-Bac puts it, ‘the disappearance of the Soviet enemy eroded Turkey's position in the Europe [sic]. It no longer served a clear function and was shunted to the back of the line of candidates for EU membership’.Footnote ⁶³ The result of these contradictory forces was embodied in the dual political and economic entities of the 1993 Copenhagen Criteria and 1996 Customs Union. These offered European corporations ‘an increasing share in Turkey's foreign trade relative to other countries’ while setting out how full membership might one day be achieved in a way which ‘the Europeans believed […] would preclude Islamicists from coming to power’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Since these aims were part of a broader ‘containment policy objective of anchoring Turkey to the EU, as a stable and secular country with a large market, while maintaining a clear preference for delaying the prospect of Turkish membership for the foreseeable future’, the terms of Turkey's prospective accession have, unsurprisingly, remained ‘pretty vague’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Issues of accountability and corruption within the Criteria are particularly nebulous and are mainly referred to obliquely within catch-all phrases such as the requirement to maintain ‘institutions guaranteeing democracy [and] the rule of law’ and a ‘functioning market economy’. In general, ‘neither the reasons for including corruption as an accession issue nor the exact criteria candidate States must fulfil in terms of anti-corruption policy or levels of corruption have [sic] been spelled out by the Commission’.Footnote ⁶⁶

In their place has emerged an ill-defined, yet growing, emphasis on ‘good’ governance. This was driven partly by the Clinton administration's decision ‘to press for serious OECD action on bribery’ and partly by the World Bank's inclusion of corruption in the ‘weak institutional environment’ (which it cited as ‘an explanation for the disappointing results of market reforms’).Footnote ⁶⁷ Consequently, policy has gradually moved away from the comparatively passive corruption awareness-raising schemes (derived from the World Bank's Africa model) of the mid-1990s to more proactive capacity-building measures now called ‘anti-corruption programming’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Unlike its less vigorous predecessor, this does not consist of the dissemination of blueprint policies written in Geneva or Brussels. Instead, anti-corruption programmes take the form of heterogeneous, bespoke measures focussed on developmental and social indicators. As a result, corruption is increasingly ‘correlated with civil liberties, civil service professionalism, rule of law, regulatory direction, unofficial economy, press freedom, and indicators of transition’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The prospect of Turkish Accession has thus become conditional upon its demonstrable willingness to ‘adopt and implement’ the EU's wishes in areas as diverse as the ‘the fight against drugs, organised crime, money laundering and judicial cooperation in criminal and civil matters’.Footnote ⁷⁰

Such an association between corruption and more general social decay succeeds in creating a sense of disapprobation which locates rectifying policies within a broader moral climate, rendering them more to difficult to challenge. The World Bank's recent EU-linked 403 million Euro Programmatic Public Sector Development Policy Loan to Turkey, for example, was accompanied by the warning that ‘corruption deters investment, spurs inequality and threatens macroeconomic stability […] [It] reduces the effectiveness of the public administration […] erodes the rule of law [and] plagues the relationship between the public and private sectors as well as civil society’.Footnote ⁷¹ Influenced by the work of their own economic consultants (such as Susan Rose-Ackerman who earlier wrote that ‘corrupt incentives are the nearly inevitable consequences of all government attempts to control market forces’), the Bank proposes that the only way to guard against such a dystopia is to adopt ‘policies that lower controls on foreign trade, remove entry barriers to private industry and privatise state firms’ on the basis that ‘any reform that increases the competitiveness of an economy will reduce incentives for corrupt behaviour’.Footnote ⁷² Such measures are also said to prevent the emergence of a ‘rentier mentality’ in which the availability of unearned income through patrimonial links with the public sector breaks the labour-remuneration determinant of economic behaviour, reduces the incentive to work harder for greater reward and leads to less productivity and an unattractive investment environment.Footnote ⁷³

To support the applicability of these approaches to the Turkish context, public perception measurements (described by The World Bank Institute as ‘sometimes the best, and the only, information we have’) have been widely used to support discourses on Turkey's peculiarly corrupt character and its supposed support for European tutelage.Footnote ⁷⁴ Here it is clear that only a very selective use of such data is deployed. For instance, despite political elites in Turkey and Europe spending many years attempting to associate the accession process with progressive social reform, a recent Pew Global Attitudes survey found that only 27 per cent of Turks hold favourable views of the EU – corroborating earlier research which showed that just 12 per cent of Turks expect accession to bring a deepening and strengthening of democracy and only 8 per cent stated that they believe it will reduce corruption.Footnote ⁷⁵ In fact, the use of public perception is a particularly weak means of assessing corruption levels; not least because, beyond all the obvious methodological difficulties in relating impressions with reality, general opinion relies heavily on the availability and accuracy of information. As such, countries in which corruption is very high but detection and media dissemination are minimal or disingenuously represented are likely to report low perception levels. The collapse of Enron and Worldcom (estimated to have cost the American economy between $37 and $42 billion), for example, have been ‘presented as “rogue” enterprises emerging on the periphery of established metropolitan capitalist institutions’ despite both firms' far-reaching connections with Washington officials and the alleged complicity of major American institutions such as Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Merrill Lynch.Footnote ⁷⁶ Investigations into corruption within the European Union of comparable extensiveness (an example of which prompted the mass resignation of the Commission in 1999 after more than £17 billion of public funds were found to have been improperly accounted for) have been similarly portrayed amid a widespread paucity of information and an ongoing ‘risk that the declared costs of projects are [still] misstated or ineligible for reimbursement’.Footnote ⁷⁷

Despite this, Turkish corruption has not been analysed comparatively. Source material is used selectively to conclude that it is ‘endemic’ and ‘a huge problem’ while ignoring data revealing higher levels of perceived corruption in other candidates for accession (namely Croatia and Macedonia) as well as newly acceded states such as Romania and Bulgaria (Greece and Poland are frequently found to have only very slightly lower levels of perceived corruption).Footnote ⁷⁸ Regardless of the difficulties in establishing Turkey's particular need for remedial attention, the transformative demands of the EU mean that ‘accession would require social engineering, something never raised in debates over East-Central European applicants’.Footnote ⁷⁹ In this sense, assertions regarding the purported generality of Turkish corruption begin to function as a means of ‘implicit disciplining’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Conforming to a more general mindset in which ‘the attitude of Western governments to the problem of corruption and shoddy business ethics has been framed within Eurocentric assumptions that corruption is essentially a […] pathology endemic to “backward” developing countries’, the European focus on corruption becomes a central component in ‘efforts to bring about change in (or “civilize”) Turkey’.Footnote ⁸¹ Since these endeavours both ‘rely on the ability to exert leverage […] [through which] the promise of EU membership can […] encourag[e] potential members to act in ways which stabilize and strengthen the EU “core” and inherently involve ‘adopting the values of the “core”’, discourses on Turkish corruption cannot be divorced from the types of concerns discussed in the previous section – particularly the notion that ‘there is an inherent problem between Islam and the values and norms of the European project’.Footnote ⁸²

Penetration and transformation

Attempts to substantiate Turkey's supposedly exceptional corruption levels have thus tended to rely heavily on cultural determinants. Particularly obstructive to anti-corruption measures is, apparently, the continuing social importance of Islam. Despite the fact that it shares neither a doctrine of vicarious atonement nor an intercessional priesthood, Islam's ‘hierarchic’ character, Daniel Treisman argues, means that ‘challenges to office-holders might be rarer than in cultures shaped by more egalitarian or individualistic religions, such as Protestantism’.Footnote ⁸³ Turkey's recent political turn towards religiosity (as evidenced by the election of the JDP) has, for some writers, led to a growth in the influence of ‘traditionalists […] infused with Islamic values […] [including] centralized-decision making, a personalized leadership style that is both autocratic and paternalistic, emphasis on hierarchy, and a patronage relationship between the leader and subordinate’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Such a caricature corresponds well with the wider assertion that ‘religion tends to produce a mind-set hostile to democracy among ordinary Muslims’.Footnote ⁸⁵ As Elie Kedourie puts it, ‘the notion of popular sovereignty as the foundation of governmental legitimacy, the idea of representation, or elections, of popular parliamentary assembly, of these laws being guarded and upheld by an independent judiciary, the idea of the secularity of the state, of society being composed of a multitude of self-activating groups and associations – all of these are profoundly alien to the Muslim political tradition’.Footnote ⁸⁶

These depictions are part of what Novak calls the value of ‘rediscovering culture’ and coincide with the notion of the Turk as the ‘other’ discussed above.Footnote ⁸⁷ By viewing non-Western society in non-material and apolitical terms, the social context in which the corrupt act occurs is ignored. Bureaucratic performance is stripped of any political or socio-historical context and then vigorously highlighted as a defining characteristic of Europe's engagement with the Turkish economy. This produces an understanding of corruption which is culturally specific and therefore impossible to generalise without making a great number of normative assumptions (after all, as Pranab Bardhan suggests, ‘what is regarded in one culture as corrupt may be considered a part of routine transaction in another’).Footnote ⁸⁸ Turkey's cultural heritage is thus rendered the key influence on social practice and public accountability and deployed as an elastic and efficacious means to homogenise Turkish societal values and present them as incommensurate with a similarly undifferentiated notion of the European ‘self’. The EU's Commissioner for Enlargement, Olli Rehn, for instance, has recently revealed that, since corruption in Turkey ‘is a cultural phenomenon’, to ‘eliminate it will take a long time and […] will never be achieved totally’.Footnote ⁸⁹

Such a capacious and open-ended characterisation serves the dual purpose of demonstrating a need for extraneous guidance and legitimising the growing penetration of European capital. Fundamental to this is the guiding principle of Europe's anti-corruption endeavours in Turkey: that the array of vested interests which surround the country's complex forms of patronage are so impenetrable as to represent a problem too great for Ankara to resolve. Zeyno Baran, for instance, notes that, while many Turkish ‘governments [have] vowed to fight it, none have [sic] adequately addressed the problem’.Footnote ⁹⁰ This, along with ‘a lack of democracy culture’ which continues to necessitate the ‘indoctrination (education and training) of public servants about public service ethics’, demonstrates, for some, that ‘the EU's “soft power”’ is an important requisite in consolidating ‘the “mentality revolution” needed for the full implementation of democratic reforms’.Footnote ⁹¹ To this end, Turkey's civil service, customs service, police force and judiciary have received extensive training funded by 6.4 billion euros in loans from the European Investment Bank (2000–2007) and aid from the European Commission of 177 million euros per annum.Footnote ⁹²

Underpinning the authoritative position of the European mentor is an implication of wrongdoing which places responsibility upon the recipient of the illicit transaction rather than the payer. The EU/OECD's current operational definition of corruption under their joint initiative, the Support for Government and Management Programme, is, for instance, ‘any act or practice which could be characterised as “abuse of public office for (illegitimate) private advantage” either by an official or a private citizen’.Footnote ⁹³ This reverses the original meaning of the verb corrupere (to corrupt), which had been used specifically ‘to describe the evil act of paying a judge to decide unjustly in one's favour’.Footnote ⁹⁴ By stipulating the private nature of the advantage accrued, the payment of bribes born of what the Chair of Transparency International, Huguette Labelle, calls ‘a genuine desire to maximise profits for shareholders’ is thus excluded.Footnote ⁹⁵ While the OECD's own guidelines warn against such transactions, the provision of ‘facilitation payments’ ‘made to induce public officials to perform their functions’ are specifically excluded from reproach despite being acknowledged as ‘generally illegal in the foreign country concerned’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Indeed, the voluntary nature of these principles has meant that, according to the OECD's own research, only 32 per cent of the enterprises surveyed included an explicit prohibition of offering bribes in their anti-corruption literature and over a quarter referred to the need to see such practices in terms of local cultural mores. Simultaneously, however, the organisation chastises the Turkish public sector for excessive politicisation, a lack of recruitment impartiality, falling wages, corrupt personnel management and the misapplication of career advancement and disciplinary procedures.Footnote ⁹⁷

To deal with these failings, it is seen as axiomatic that state-owned interests should be taken out of the hands of politically powerful interest groups and privatised to increase competition, reduce regulation and prevent inflation. Such measures are, in the words of Michel Camdessus (Managing Director of the IMF from 1987 to 2000), needed to ‘resolve the tension between the individuality of each country's institutions in the social, cultural, and political domains and the apparent demands of globalization for harmonization of standards and norms’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Anti-corruption policies are thus ‘deeply embedded within the wider constructions of global neo-liberal governance’ and a key means through which Western states and Bretton Woods institutions ‘have systematically bullied their weaker trading partners into accepting […] painful, deflationary, neoliberal reforms, and the fiscal and moral disciplines of the market’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Having ‘shifted from a largely Keynesian strategy’ to a ‘“neo-liberalization” of European integration’ which emphasises ‘privatization, overall retreat of the state's involvement in the economy and further liberalization of trade’, EU enlargement is no different.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The Commission's annual progress reports have, for instance, regularly stated that, in order ‘to unveil Turkey's slumbering growth potential, the authorities should continue to focus on bringing down inflationary pressures and public deficits and on developing further structural reforms’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

By claiming that corrupt public sectors can ‘redirect and subvert policy reforms’, a ‘convenient explanation as to why the pro-market economic reforms of the past two decades in the South have not borne the fruit that they were supposed to’ can be substantiated.Footnote ¹⁰² Turkey's catastrophic financial crash of 2001 (in which the lira was devalued by 26 per cent and GNP declined by 9 per cent), for example, was blamed on ‘a loss of market confidence in the Turkish economic reform which was stalled by corruption’ and used as legitimatisation for a raft of new deregulatory laws – none of which had anything to do with corruption.Footnote ¹⁰³ In reality, though, a considerable amount of evidence exists to suggest that the Turkish crisis may have been more to do with ‘short-term financial flows and the government debt management policies’ than the ‘illegal gains’ of the banking sector cited by then Economics Minister Kemal Derviş.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Indeed, numerous authors have suggested that the lowered opportunity costs and lucrative potential of deregulated financial markets, staff cutbacks and the privatisation of state enterprises may, themselves, be key causes of a rise in corruption.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This certainly appears to have been the case during Turkey's ambitious marketisation programme of the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The sale of the state's majority holdings in both Petrol Ofisi, the country's largest hydrocarbon supply network, and Türkbank were, for instance, plagued by allegations of financial and procedural irregularities, ultimately leading to the resignation of then Minister of State, Eyüp Aşık, in September 1998.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The EU, ‘as a project based on the logic of capital accumulation and shaped in accordance with its requirements’, has established itself as a key actor in this process of marketisation.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In keeping with ‘the new pedagogy that underpins European initiatives vis-à-vis the Mediterranean region’, it has ‘progressively streamlined its integration project in order to make it meet the globalization agenda […] [thus] implicitly renounce[ing] an ideal of social harmonization, with common health and labour standards’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ ‘Favour[ing] a bluntly neoliberal pattern of development’, the European political elite has pressured the Turkish government to introduce greater market ‘flexibility’, resulting in the enlargement of the temporary employment sector from 5 per cent of the workforce in 1985 to 12 per cent in 2007.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This seriously undermined professional morale and helped to force down real-term public sector wages levels by 70 per cent between 1978 and 1997 (despite a growth in capital inflows from around $93 million to $4,100 million over the same period) and then by a further 13 per cent between 1997 and 2003.Footnote ¹¹¹ Such an acute process of impoverishment, coupled with the doubling of day labour in the construction industry between 1983 and 1997, is widely believed to be a primary cause of the technical and administrative failures that underpinned the disastrous effects of the Marmara earthquake of 1999.

More broadly, severe curtailments in state expenditure have rendered the relationship between the civil service and the private sector increasingly clientelistic. As Firuz Yasamis explains, ‘contracting companies, which are dependent on public works projects, are under great financial pressures due to the diminishing ability of the state to make infrastructural investments. These social and economic dynamics have paved the way for an emerging intermediary class consisting of local and national politicians who work on the basis of commission taking the form of either financial or political rewards’.Footnote ¹¹² The result is that corruption begins to act as tax, burdening investors and inhibiting capital inflows.Footnote ¹¹³ Herein lies the true objective of the anti-corruption discourse – to reduce the transaction costs associated with such patrimonialism and to produce an economic environment more conducive to the acquisitive and profit-taking objectives of international capital.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Therefore, ‘the real intention of the anti-corruption programme has not been to deal with the problem directly, but to work the neoliberal reform agenda through it’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Ostensibly grounded upon the ‘failure of the Turkish bureaucracy to implement the necessary structural adjustment reforms on time’ it is, in reality, ‘just another means’, for Western corporate capital ‘to secure its real goal: greater structural adjustment in those states whose adjustment programmes have been stymied by political pressures’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Reducing such resistance would permit European industry to increase its share of Turkey's import market – Turkey is already the EU's seventh biggest trading partner (up from ninth in 1990).Footnote ¹¹⁷ Concurrently, the proportion of Turkey's imports from the EU has risen to over 50 per cent, amounting to more than 4 per cent of the EU's total exports. Limiting corruption would also encourage European firms to take advantage of the discrepancy between existing risk (equating to investment disincentives for competitors) and future economic improvements, estimated to be at a rate of over 4 per cent growth per annum (higher than Mexico, Indonesia and South Korea) over the next 10 to 15 years.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Indeed, foreign direct investment in Turkey has been traditionally under-exploited with per capita figures lagging behind other countries on the European periphery (in 2000, this was estimated at $15 compared with $256 in Poland).Footnote ¹¹⁹ Particularly lucrative opportunities have been identified in the banking, telecommunications and electrical supply sectors – each managed by a single procurement board established in 2004 with the aim of improving transparency and reducing regulation.Footnote ¹²⁰ The World Bank has, for instance, calculated that foreign capital's share of the former was only around 1 per cent during the second half of the 1990s, compared with 61 per cent in Hungary and 77 per cent in Greece.Footnote ¹²¹

With growing EU-led liberalisation, ‘the penetration rates of foreign banks in Turkey are expected to increase substantially’, thereby, it is widely claimed, preventing a recurrence of the kinds of corrupt practices that supposedly led to the 2001 financial crash.Footnote ¹²² The state telephony concern, Türk Telecom, has been similarly pressured into the private sector with the International Monetary Fund withholding a loan of $7.5 billion until sell-off procedures had been initiated.Footnote ¹²³Telsim, Turkey's second largest telephone company was recently purchased by Vodafone following accusations of corruption and a protracted legal battle. In order to accede to the EU, Turkey will be obliged to deregulate further and initiate the ‘liberalization of all telecommunications services and infrastructures [and the] adoption of open network provision measures’.Footnote ¹²⁴ Concurrently, the government is expected to ‘largely withdraw from the electricity generation and distribution businesses’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Its holdings in TEDAS, the public supply monopoly, are envisaged to be privatised shortly – once investigations into an alleged large-scale fraud syndicate (who are also thought to have murdered whistle-blower, Hasan Balıkçı) are complete.

Opportunities such as these have helped to increase foreign direct investment (of which EU countries currently control around 80 per cent) from $1.7 billion in 2003 to $2.8 billion in 2004, before increasing markedly to $9.6 billion in 2005 and finally nearly doubling to almost $18 billion by the end of 2006.Footnote ¹²⁶ Such a rapid enlargement in the penetrative power of Western capital emerged from the Customs Union of 1996, under which Turkey reduced its nominal rate of protection with EU countries from 10.22 per cent to just 1.4 per cent.Footnote ¹²⁷ As a result, imports from the EU increased by 37 per cent, while Turkey's exports to the EU rose by only 4 per cent, thereby worsening the economy's already parlous trade deficit.Footnote ¹²⁸ Castigating those who would resist such adverse incorporation into European markets as obscurant, culturally incompatible with ‘modern’ values and prone to corruption is thus a prudent means of advancing European elites' economic objectives. Turkey's imperial past and Muslim identity are expedient pegs upon which to hang such a discourse. This explains why few studies seek to compare quantifiable measures of Turkish corruption with Western economies. Instead, the literature is dominated by accounts based on public perception, Weberian managerialism and vague, yet pernicious, ‘qualms about a culture which is regarded as alien’.Footnote ¹²⁹ These associate the Turkish business leader, in a characterisation similar to Victoriana images of the European ‘other’, with a ‘hierarchical-autocratic […] somewhat aggressive’ style which has produced an economy marked by ‘centralised decision making, highly personalised, strong leadership, and limited delegation’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Such an organisational culture, rooted in Turkey's religious heritage, is alleged to have nullified social scrutiny, inhibited the development of ethical corporate practices and rendered commercial activity particularly prone to corruption. The solution, it is suggested, is further marketisation. This is supported by an accompanying discourse on a need to pursue Europe's ‘overarching civilizational identity’ which, in building upon older notions of cultural difference, has included concerns over Turkish corruption as a means of furthering the penetrative power of overseas capital.Footnote ¹³¹