Comment: The mysterious alchemy of enlargement

The main effect of membership talks with Ankara will be to open a door for south-eastern European countries that may well join before Turkey, writes Timothy Garton Ash.

Taking his cue from Austria’s succesful drive on 3 October to link the start of Turkey talks with the opening of talks with neigbouring Croatia, Timothy Garton Ash makes a prediction: By pushing the front line of enlargement far to the south-east, the EU has thus made sure that the rest of south-eastern Europe will come into the EU – and most likely before Turkey. 

Writing in the Guardian, Ash argues: “When those Balkan countries are in, they will immediately start agitating for their neighbours to join them, just as Poland is now agitating for a promise to Ukraine. No matter that those neighbours are former enemies, with bitter memories of recent wars and ethnic cleansing. The mysterious alchemy of enlargement is that it turns former enemies into advocates. Germany was the great promoter of Polish membership, and Greece remains one of the strongest supporters of Turkish membership.”

Ash points to the historical irony that Turkey, as the earlier Ottoman empire, occupied much of the Balkans, and therefore “cut them off from what was then the Christian club of Europe” but is now “the European door-opener for its former colonies”.

Taking a UK political perspective, where many Conservatives see further enlargements as the way to dilute the EU into a large free-trade area, Ash argues that this thinking is wrong:

“This larger Europe will be much more than a free-trade area, or it will be nothing [….] The prospect, rather, is of an entity that is as far beyond a free-trade zone as it is short of a centralised superstate. For want of a better term, I describe this unprecedented continent-wide political community as a commonwealth – but I have in mind something more like the early modern Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth than today’s British commonwealth. The European Union has done something very important this week, without itself really understanding what it has done. It has not decided to make Turkey a member. It has decided that Europe will be a commonwealth and not a superstate.”