President of the European
Council Donald Tusk, who happens to be a history graduate, seems not to have
been paying keen attention during his studies. It clearly looks as if he missed
this important lesson from the French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville:
“History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many
copies.”
The former Polish prime minister announced late last month on his official
Twitter account that the EU-Turkey summit scheduled for November 29 was intended
to “re-energize our relations and stem migration flow.” This decision has been
made in the light of the worst refugee crisis since World War II.
According to last month’s agreement on the action plan to support Turkey in
easing Europe’s refugee burden, European leaders offered Turkey a very generous
package consisting of three billion euros in aid over two years, an easing of
visa restrictions and the fast-tracking of its EU membership process. The offer
has been described by many as a “dirty deal,” due to the fact of it not having a
consensus among EU member states regarding its funding.
While five hundred million euros come from the EU’s budget, the remaining
two-and-a-half billion euros will come from member state contributions, where
the amount requested from each one is based on the same formula used to
determine member state contributions to the EU budget. This means Germany will
have to pay the most (534 million euros), followed by Britain (410 million
euros) and France (386 million euros).
Despite the fact that Berlin is the biggest contributor, German Chancellor
Angela Merkel, whose willingness to take nearly a million refugees this summer
has put her under huge political pressure at home, broke with protocol to visit
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan before the election in his country, and put
pressure on the rest of the EU member states to finalize the agreement.
However, the very idea has been strongly opposed by the CEE countries like
Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland, which have serious concerns
over putting too much emphasis on a non-EU member state’s involvement in EU
affairs. As Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban mentioned during the migration
summit in Malta last month: "We don't want to sit down for talks with Turkey,
making them think that they are our last chance of saving us.”
Indeed, this writer has serious concerns over Turkey’s credibility in entering
this alliance, when our western neighbors appear to be ready to set our European
values aside in a quest to resolve the refugee crisis, following the main prayer
announced by Voltaire: “When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same
religion.” It is quite astonishing how hypocritical we can be in the wake of
terrorism and the urgent need to defend our way of living, in order to turn a
blind eye to Turkey’s human rights failings, and bow to Ankara’s money demands,
in the knowledge that “in Turkey itself the desire to join Europe was mainly for
economic reasons, rather than to improve the quality of democracy and human
rights in the country,” as the Chatham House analyst Fadi Hakura has said.
What's more, in the light of published reports about Turkish arms supplies to
jihadis in Syria by unlawfully imprisoned journalists in this country, and the
most recent aggression towards Moscow being committed to help in defeating
Islamic State after the Paris attacks—where a Russian warplane was shot down—it
looks like the very same scenario from the year 1855 is being repeated.
(Special thanks to Mr.Adriel Kasonta about this article)