Are Turkey-European Union relations incurable?

The Turkish business community is “worried” about “perceptions” that the distance between Turkey and the European Union has been increasing.

Haluk Dinçer, the chairman of the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSİAD), referred to the concrete concern by using the less direct term “perceptions” in his opening speech at an Istanbul conference titled “Turkey’s Relations with the European Union: Scenarios of the Future” on Nov. 20.

The truth is that the distance between Turkey and the EU has been widening for the last few years, despite President Tayyip Erdoğan’s earlier declaration of 2013 as the “Year of Europe” for Turkey. The fact that the conference was organized by TÜSIAD not in cooperation with a European institution, but rather with the Washington-based Brookings Institution, says a lot about the situation. Not very many people in Europe care about Turkey’s membership target at the moment.

One of the few who does care, Italian Deputy Foreign Minister Lapo Pistelli, said in the conference that when looked at from Europe, today’s Turkey was perceived as part of the “mess” of the Middle East.

The Turkish government’s representative in the conference was Ambassador Engin Soysal, the undersecretary for Turkey’s EU Ministry. Soysal did not touch on that side of the story, but instead concentrated on Europe’s need to see the benefits of cooperating with Turkey.

But another Italian, researcher Nathalie Tocci, who recently wrote a paper for Brookings titled “Turkey and the EU: A Journey Unknown,” listed among the drawbacks the political atmosphere in Turkey where power is increasingly being centralized, and the fact that the rules-based system is being eroded.