Exactly 13,530 days ago, on April 14, 1987, Türkiye submitted its application for formal membership in the European Economic Community, the previous name for what is now known as the European Union. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan was supposed to participate in the joyful event of the EU’s celebration of its “largest expansion,” in which Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia had already joined the union. It is called the “largest expansion” because of the people and number of countries that became members. Most of those countries were Soviet satellites when Türkiye had applied for membership; but as part of the “grand strategy” for the world hegemony of the United States, all those “Eastern European” countries were hastily wrapped up both in NATO and the EU lest Russia reclaim them by invading as it had during the Cold War. Neither did NATO nor the EU have time to check the admission criteria for them (other than not having territorial claims by neighboring countries). Yet, the EU has been checking and rechecking and checking again whether Türkiye was eligible for EU membership; but not those Eastern Europeans! The EU and NATO assumed since they were basically Christian folks that they should have all the qualifications to be members of the European common market and to join NATO. After the application for NATO membership, Türkiye had to join the Korean War to support the American forces and to have a democratic multiparty system in place!
Since April 14, 1987, Turkish officials have put together facts and figures and submitted their economic and financial data to Eurocrats to prove their proficiency for full membership. Ankara has enacted new laws and regulations to harmonize its legal, penal and political systems with Europe. We even made new license plates for our cars, even though the United Kingdom did not have them when it became an EU member before “exiting” it a couple of years later. Imagine the public expenditure to renew all those license plates of millions of cars, trucks and agricultural vehicles! But we did! We thought, as people and as politicians, that all the trouble and inconveniences were worth it; we were becoming Europeans, after all. We prayed a lot. We hoped for the best. We kept dreaming for 37-plus years, 2,000-plus weeks, 13,530 days and 325,000-plus hours! To no avail.
The Economist, ingenuously, reported that Türkiye’s EU membership was fiction: “The fiction that Turkey is a candidate to join the EU is unravelling,” it said on its cover. “Many European voters don’t want a big Muslim nation in their club, even if it becomes more democratic,” they wrote as if Türkiye with at least 20 political parties participating in every general election was not “democratic enough.”
We could not see the reality that the EU, or “the idea of unified Europe,” was schizophrenic: They were trying to create an economic and monetary union with a common parliament and ministerial committees and commissions, but the individual countries retained their sovereignty. It had a joint defense policy and military structure, but it was run by a country that was not a member of the EU, not even a European country.
We participated in the EU-Türkiye Customs Union in 1995. Our manufactured goods would now enjoy free movement in the EU. Not agriculture or services, nor people; but that was OK. We were sure that soon we would have full membership. Wouldn’t we?
I wrote one of my graduation papers on the forthcoming impacts of Türkiye’s full membership on the free movement of people in Europe in 1988! One of my uncles was working as a “Gastarbeiterr” in Germany; we used to hear his stories about the inhuman restriction of the Germans on the guest workers. Soon, my uncle and his family would be free to move in Germany (in the whole of Europe!) to find the best job like the German workers.
Yeah! They would. Wouldn’t they?
Since that paper, which turned out to be a real embarrassment for me even though nobody knew about it other than the professor I submitted to, I have been thinking about the reasons for Türkiye’s insistence on that “full membership.” I found the answer in Jean Baudrillard’s book titled “Simulations.” Simulacrum, as a tool of simulation, is something that replaces reality with its representation: “Simulation is no longer that of a referential being but the real thing.” It is the generation by models of a reality without origin or reality: a hyperreal.
I know it needs a little more explaining than this. First of all, the book begins with a quote from Ecclesiastes: “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
Baudrillard uses this quote to explore the concept of simulation and the blurring of reality and representation. The only problem with it is that it is made up! If you know your Bible, no problem, you’d know that there is no such sentence in it. But Baudrillard assumes readers see the quote and don’t go back to check it! They keep reading the book believing that the quote is “real.” Thus, the unreality becomes “reality,” and even “hyperreal,” since for those who don’t have any familiarity with Ecclesiastes this quote is now the only fact in Ecclesiastes. Thus, Baudrillard concludes that the fact that a simulacrum is a simulation that has become more “real” than reality; it ceases to be a symbol or fake but the reality in and of itself: more “real” than “reality.”
In our world in Türkiye, the notion of “European Union reality” led to a cultural state of confusion between signs and symbols invented to stand in for reality, and direct perceptions of a consensus reality. As Baudrillard explains in the book, because of the compression of perceptions of reality in culture and media, what is generally regarded as real and what is understood as fiction are seamlessly blended together in experiences so that there is no longer any clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. Hence, direct perceptions of consensus reality stand in for reality.
But it is so difficult to accept the true reality after all those years and shut the door on the idea of joining the EU. As the famous Turkish poet Ismet Özel said, in his recent musing (titled “Why can't we describe our grief?”): “We have all become outsiders convinced of things we don't believe in.” Have we? The test of which could be the informal meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Belgium.
According to international media reports, Fidan will not attend the informal meeting. Last February, Hadja Lahbib, the Belgian foreign minister, whose country holds the current presidency of the European Council, announced that Türkiye, as a candidate country, was invited to the meeting on April 29-30. However, at last week's summit, EU leaders decided that talks on Türkiye’s joining the EU could only start after the resumption of peace talks in Cyprus. What could be more real than tying the Cyprus issue to an application we submitted exactly 13,530 days ago?
Fidan’s decision about today’s invitation could be the first concrete step taken to accept the “true reality” rather than what is believed to be the reality.
We’ll see.
