David Colclasure

The Austrian Perspective on Turkey’s EU Membership Aspirations

The possibility of Turkish membership has been provoking heated discussions of late on the political, cultural, and geographic borders of Europe. And Austria, despite the relatively successful integration of its ca. 135,000 Turkish residents and citizens, is surely not alone in what ranges from skepticism to outright rejection expressed in popular opinion polls vis-à-vis Turkey’s EU accession aspirations—along with their counterparts in Greece, France, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Luxembourg, the number of Austrians rejecting Turkish EU membership approaches 60%, with support slightly below 30%. One element that does distinguish Austria from these countries, however, is the fact that all its major political parties have dismissed the possibility, or expressed deep reservations with regard to the prospect of Turkish EU membership. While their party platforms remain to some degree ambivalent, and despite Wolfgang Schüssel and Viktor Klima’s agreement in principle at the 1999 Helsinki Summit to pursue with caution the possibility of accession negotations, the Austrian Social Democrats and the Greens in Austria remain highly skeptical of the possibility, and thus effectively ally themselves with the far-right FPÖ in the latter’s utter rejection of Turkish membership. Perhaps unexpectedly, Jörg Haider remains the most prominent politician in favor of Turkish EU membership, citing the need to integrate Turkey into the EU as a security issue, to in fact prevent a mass influx of Turkish immigrants and avoid a backlash of fundamentalist Islam in the wake of a rejection of Turkey’s EU accession aspirations, and as a way to secure the steady transport of oil and natural from the Caucasus region via Turkey. Most surprisingly, however, Haider even cites the important status that Asia Minor enjoys as the birthplace of key components of Western culture, such as philosophy, music and mathematics as an argument for Turkish membership.

This paper will analyze the arguments presented by both sides of the debate in Austria concerning the possibility of Turkish membership in the EU. Many arguments in Austria against membership, such as the financial implications, the political repercussions of the considerable influence that Turkey’s representation in EU institutions would lead to, the fears of mass immigration, the threat to Europe’s Christian-based value system, the historical animosity between the Ottoman Empire and the West—in the particular case of Austria the memory of the Turkish sieges of Vienna—, and human rights issues such as the use of torture and the rights of women, are widespread throughout the rest of Western Europe as well. The analysis of the arguments in this debate in the particular form that they manifest themselves in Austria, however, has, more so than in other European countries, even more to do, I argue in this paper, with domestic political issues—an often explicitly populist appeal for voters factor—, than with issues of international diplomacy and an informed regard for Austria’s economic and political interests in the European Union and the world at large. More importantly, I argue, the outcome of the public debate in Austria on whether to accept and even welcome Turkish membership in the EU, or to reject it, has not only to do with Austria’s ability or inability to develop an understanding of itself as a genuinely multicultural society, but also with its role in the European Union itself and full, committed membership in it. Until Austrian citizens are prepared to engage the debate on Turkish EU membership without preconceived results, I argue, they will not yet have fully integrated the concept of European identity into their own identity. It is, I argue, only with an appreciation of the positive value of a cosmopolitan league of European nations, one that they may, at least in principle include the Republic of Turkey, and an attendant transformation in the identity of its constituents, here Austrians, that the project of the European Union can be fully realized by its member states.