Vol. 73/No. 48      December 14, 2009

According to the October 31 Economist, exports from Turkey to the Middle East and North Africa have exploded sevenfold in the past seven years, to $31 billion in 2008. The business magazine records an impressive list. “From cars to tableware, dried figs to television serials, Turkish products, unknown a decade ago, are now ubiquitous in markets from Algiers to Tehran,” it said. The Turkish construction company Tav has just completed an airport terminal in Cairo and is building others in Libya, Qatar, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates.

The Turkish government has secured free-trade agreements with Egypt, Israel, Morocco, and Tunisia, and is looking to ink similar deals with the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes Saudi Arabia. Early in October Turkish trade ministers signed 48 cooperation deals with Iraq and 40 with Syria. They ranged from tourism to counterterrorism to joint military exercises.

Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was welcomed enthusiastically in Tehran in October. Erdogan congratulated Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the winner of the controversial presidential election in June. Erdogan’s government has also supported Iran’s right to nuclear power and has offered to mediate between Tehran and Washington.

The U.S. government charges that Iran’s development of the capacity to enrich uranium for nuclear power is aimed at making a nuclear bomb. Washington is leading the effort to deny Iran’s right to continue uranium enrichment. The Turkish government has offered to store Iran’s enriched uranium while Russia produces more of the fuel for Tehran.

Turkey has also developed close ties with the Syrian government. In 2005 Damascus set aside its claim to the disputed Hatay province, which had been given to Turkey in 1939 by France, Syria’s former colonial ruler.
 
50-year delay
Turkey’s efforts at economic integration into Europe began half a century ago when Turkey applied in 1959 for membership in the European Economic Community, the EU’s forerunner. It has been rebuffed ever since with increasingly racist language. In 2004 then French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin asked, “Do we really want the river of Islam to enter the riverbed of secularism?” French president Nicolas Sarkozy has said that admitting Turkey would “dilute” the EU.

What the French capitalist leaders mean is that they do not want some 69 million Muslims to have free movement in Europe. Citizens of EU countries are allowed to work in other EU countries with fewer restrictions. If admitted, Turkey would have the largest population in the EU after Germany. Turkey’s military is larger than any current EU member. Only the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy have military budgets bigger than Turkey’s.
 
Between east and west
Turkey’s capitalist rulers will continue their efforts—with Washington and London’s backing—to enter the EU. Speaking at the inaugural meeting in October of the Istanbul Forum, sponsored by Turkey’s Centre for Strategic Communication, and supported by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, Prime Minister Erdogan explained that Turkey had no intention of acting as a “helpless supplicant” for EU membership and is instead “assuming a role commensurate with its status as a fast-rising power at the strategic crossroads of east and west,” reported the Financial Times.

In July Ankara penned an $11.7 billion deal with the EU to build the 2,000-mile Nabucco pipeline to ship natural gas to Europe from Azerbaijan, and possibly Turkmenistan, Iran, Iraq, and Egypt. Washington has opposed the shipment of Iranian gas through the pipeline.

The pipeline will compete with a nearly $14 billion Russian South Stream pipeline that will go under the Caspian Sea, bypassing Ukraine, and may come on line in 2015. In winter 2008 much of the Balkans and southern Europe faced freezing cities and homes due to a gas shipment dispute between Moscow and Kiev. European governments hope that the Nabucco pipeline, also projected to come on line in 2015, will reduce dependence on Russian gas.  
 
 
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