Turkey’s Minister for EU Affairs and chief negotiator for accession to the European Union makes a convincing case for his country’s European aspirations. The young, US-educated Egemen Bağış, unlike his more conservative and controversial prime minister, has built a strong reputation

in Europe as a liberal-minded, secular and reformist politician.

More importantly, he speaks and writes with uncommon sincerity and conviction about Turkey’s European credentials – that is, its respect for human rights, pluralist politics, an open economy, and an executive restrained by a strong judiciary and legislature.

Even as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan continues to court Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bağış writes how Turkey has been a source of inspiration for democratisation movements across the region. He claims that Erdogan’s success in mingling liberal democracy with Islamic values has made him the envy of the Arab world’s leaders and one of the region’s most respected statesmen. But what built Erdogan’s reputation in Turkey’s southern and eastern neighbourhood – making an enemy of Israel, alienating the forces for secularism in Turkey, and meddling with his country’s judiciary – has only served to further debase his political currency in Europe.

In its long-standing bid for EU membership Turkey has taken leaps and strides towards meeting the ‘Copenhagen criteria’, and the country’s remarkable political and economic transformation over the last decade has silenced many of its most fierce and prejudiced critics. Denying Turkey’s progress would smack of either bias or a stubborn ignorance of contemporary history. Indeed, if economic performance alone were enough, Turkey would have likely acceded to the European Union with Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. Unfortunately – or, rather, sensibly – the EU demands far more of its candidate countries. And the reality is that Turkey’s record against the Copenhagen criteria remains patchy.

On the very criteria that Ankara claims to have taken the boldest steps – the set of fundamental freedoms that includes freedom of expression, of the press, of religion and of association – the December 2009 European Council found that the Turkish government came up short. The Council also flagged shortcomings in freedom of religion in law and in practice for all religious communities, respect for property rights, minority rights, women’s and children’s rights, gender equality, and civilian oversight of the military.

And it’s not just Europe saying this. Human Rights Watch, in its World Report 2011, concluded that in 2010 Turkey restricted free speech and failed to advance minority rights and to tackle concerns like unjustified prosecutions for alleged speech crimes, the arbitrary use of terrorism laws, a clampdown on the legal pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, and police violence against peaceful demonstrators.

To this list we can add another criterion that remains only partly met: The normalisation of relations with neighbouring countries. Ankara’s much-celebrated ‘zero problems with neighbours’ foreign policy has done wonders for its relations with old antagonists Syria and Greece and, for a time, also with Israel before the country’s unilateral invasion of Gaza led to a spectacular souring of relations. The government’s craven stance on the Armenian genocide has also left relations with Yerevan, as well as with its own Armenian minority and the Armenian Diaspora, decidedly inimical. But for Europe, it is largely Turkey’s less-than-cordial relationship with Cyprus that determines whether this criterion has been met. Few doubt that it hasn’t.

Despite all this, so many European politicians tend to look upon Turkey’s European aspirations favourably. While it is difficult to reject the argument that Europe, with its ebbing demographics and slow-burning economy, could use a large, healthy economy with a young and growing population, I find that an additional motivation is the underlying sense of guilt, as some believe that the EU has been leading Turkey on for long enough and that the time has come to do the right thing and tie the knot. But we forget that everything that Turkey has done was done with the financial and political support of the EU and for the ultimate benefit of Turkey’s own citizens. To claim that we’ve wasted Turkey’s time in encouraging its government to enact politically and economically tough reforms belies the claim that Ankara is committed to such reform for its own sake.

Turkey’s EU affairs minister has “no doubt” that the EU accession process has fuelled Turkey’s socio-economic transformation. And this is exactly what precipitates such anxiety among many European and Maltese citizens when the subject of Turkey’s EU membership comes up – whether during conversation or in the meeting room of the European Council. The day that Turkey accedes to the European Union, the liberalising force of the accession process will no longer be a factor affecting Turkey’s political character. What, then, would sustain the country’s process of socio-economic transformation? Aside from the ‘golden carrot’ of EU membership, I am hard-pressed to see what would cause Turkey’s democratically elected government to go against tendencies that have time and again proven discordant with European values.

David Casa is a Nationalist MEP