Why Turkey probably won't join the EU
It's about the S-word
Turkey first applied to join the European Economic Community in 1987, a year before I was born. In 1999, when I was in middle school in Ankara, we became a candidate country. In 2005, when I was in high school, the EU officially opened accession negotiations.
It’s now 2025, I’m almost 37 years old, and I can barely get a visa to travel to an EU country.
Political reality shifted very dramatically between 2005 and 2025.
When I was a kid, Turkey was a supplicant waiting to enter at the hallowed gates of Europe. Today, the jungle has caught up with the Europeans, and they’re in bad shape. Yes, they’re still wealthy, but they’re also divided. There’s jungle is growing back around them, and they don’t know what to do. Turkey now is now the tracker emerging from the bushes, offering his help in finding a way through the wilderness — for a price.
Life in Europe is still much cozier than in Turkey, but Turkey is a geopolitically astute country. It has a growing industrial economy, a relatively young population, a very ambitious defense sector, and growing regional clout. Most importantly, it has the kind of political resolve that Europe sorely lacks.
That’s why, after almost two decades of candidate status, some people are saying that Turkey’s accession might be possible.
Erdoğan himself has been making the pitch as forcefully as he can:
Only Turkey can save the European Union from the deadlock it has fallen into, from economy to defense, from politics to international reputation.
Turkey's full membership to the Union can save it.
It is Turkey, Turkey's full membership that will give life to Europe, whose economy and demographic structure are rapidly aging.
I’ve seen the palace’s surrogates trying to whip up support for the idea.
I don’t think it’s going to happen though. I don’t think serious people in Ankara or Brussels think it’s going to happen either.
The EU won’t want Turkey to join because politics in the West is obviously moving rightwards. The new consensus doesn’t want immigration from countries like Turkey, so they’re certainly not going to want to give us EU passports. I’m not aware of any major EU political parties willing to seriously entertain the notion.
Come to think of it, it would be a spectacular way of blowing up the EU. I’d like to see it just for fun, but I don’t think it’s likely to happen.
Even if the EU was willing to think about Turkey’s accession again, I don’t think Turkey would be interested to jump through the hoops. On Turkey’s side, I think the problem was always sovereignty.
If you join the EU, you’re supposed to cut out a big chunk of your sovereignty and pool it in Brussels. That’s the deal. If you’re a small country, or a relatively underdeveloped country, or you’re not France or Germany, that piece of sovereignty is expected to be bigger.
Turkey doesn’t pool sovereignty. It never has.
Why then, did it apply for EU membership? In the 2000s, the AK Party pursued EU accession mostly because it made it more difficult for the military to depose them. Once they brought the generals to heel, they thought that EU membership would be a nice way to upgrade the country.
If nothing else, the Europeans had promised Turkey that it could accede, and Erdoğan liked to remind them that they had offered him something big, and he would hold them accountable for it.
You can only enter the EU if all members agree to take you in. There wasn’t any way that (Southern) Cyprus would agree as long as the island was divided, and there was no way that Turkey was going to back off on its claims (see: sovereignty). Nor was Turkey going to back off on the Eastern Mediterranean, or changing its “terror laws” and softening up on the PKK, minorities, etc.
So what now?
Ankara is going to keep reminding the EU that it made a promise, and continually increase the weight of that promise. At some point (probably when the far right is in power in France and/or Germany) the EU is going to have to say that it is no longer willing to contemplate Turkish accession.
I’d imagine that Erdoğan and EU leaders would then have a sit down and negotiate an exit strategy.
The EU and Turkey are going to remain separate political spheres. I can’t see how it would go any differently. I’m not even sure they can cooperate on defense all that much. What could happen though, is that they’re linked through reasonable economic agreements and that their new elites have decent relations with each other.
Interesting piece from a British perspective. We lacked the statecraft and the cruelty required to make this single minded pursuit of sovereignty work, with the fact that our parliamentarians refuse to admit these are real issues proof enough of the problem.
I also hadn't appreciated how the European integration process generates leverage over both other Europeans and domestic opponents.
Still though. The world in which we all have a Normal Turkey that wants European integration for normal reasons like Poland or Spain is a better world. As you say, racism against Muslims and Turks from Europeans is part of why we don't have it, but if as you say Turkish elites were never really serious about it then that's a shame too.