Dutch TV subtitle: “The European Union and Turkey together will accelerate Turkey’s accession.”

Even the title of this article does not do enough to convey the scale of the stunningly disingenuous ‘negotiation’ that Angela Merkel engaged in on Sunday. It was not a negotiation, it was Merkel just taking Europe’s queen piece and both rook pieces off of the chessboard and tossing them through the window as Turkish mouths widened in grotesque delight.

As is well known, many of the migrants that are flowing into Europe at Angela Merkel’s own invitation—and because of the perverse incentives created by governments like Germany and Sweden—make their transit through Turkey before arriving in Europe. At the same time, Merkel has been facing an internal party revolt as various opportunists are taking the crisis as a chance to challenge her leadership. Some others are revolting against her because the number of migrants that their regions are being asked to accept are more than their infrastructure can ever hope to efficiently handle.

Under these pressures—particularly the pressure arising from the fact that Merkel’s concept of ‘no upper ceiling to migration’ was bound to clash with material constraints eventually—Merkel then found herself thrust into a negotiation with Turkey. The European Union had attempted to bribe Turkey with 3 billion euros, but the Turks decided that it was not enough.

So Merkel went to Turkey and offered them a faster track toward EU accession and visa-free travel, in addition to the bribe that had been previously offered.

Predictably, Erdogan and Davutoglu immediately decided to retract their side of the pseudo-informal ‘agreement’ as soon as Merkel went home. They have clarified that they actually made no promises to stop the migrants within their territory from travelling into Europe, ultimately. In fact, they have no intention of doing anything to stop the migration wave itself either:

DW, ‘Turkey demands additional EU funding to address migration’, 19 Oct 2015:

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that an agreed sum of 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) in return for Turkey’s cooperation in stemming the flow of migrants in Europe would not be regarded as sufficient.

Speaking on Turkish television one day after German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Istanbul on Sunday, Davutoglu said that the money would come from the “IPA” fund - money already earmarked for Turkey as an EU membership candidate . He said that Turkey wanted additional cash.

The 3 billion euro IPA fund proposal is no longer on the table, as we have said we will not accept it,” Davutoglu said. “As for fresh resources, we’re talking about a 3 billion euro amount in the first stage. But we don’t want to fixate on this because the requirements may go up, and the assessment for this would need to be done annually.”

Tit-for-tat diplomacy

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday offered Turkey the prospect of support for faster progress on its bid to join the European Union as well as an accelerated path to visa-free travel for Turks. This followed the summit in Brussels last week where EU leaders had agreed on a migration “action plan” with Turkey, where the figure of 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) had been discussed.

Chancellor Merkel on Sunday had hailed as “very promising” progress on an EU-driven “action plan” after talks in Istanbul with Davutoglu and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Both Turkish President Erdogan and Davutoglu, whose ruling AK Party faces a general election on November 1, appeared keen to avoid any impression of weakness in dealing with European nations. They said earlier the EU had only recently realised Turkey’s value in the crisis.

Davutoglu: Turkey ‘not a concentration camp’

Prime Minister Davutoglu caused further controversy on Monday, saying that his country was “not a concentration camp” and that it would not host migrants permanently to appease the EU.

“I said this to Merkel too. No one should expect Turkey to turn into a concentration camp where all the refugees stay in,” Davutoglu said.

The talks had however resulted in a “positive response” to the government’s request for visa liberalization, he said.

His comments came as the flow of people along the so-called “Balkan Route” into Europe via Turkey continued, with thousands of people streaming Monday into the Balkans, where tighter border controls forced people to sleep in freezing temperatures. More than 630,000 people have landed on Europe’s shores so far this year, most of them making risky sea crossings from Turkey to Greece.

ss/msh (Reuters, AFP)

All of those events were actually absolutely unnecessary from a straight power perspective. Why? Because, while Turkish politicians have a lot of bluster, and while they can deploy the threat of unleashing the migrants, the Turks were nevertheless negotiating from an extremely weak position.

Despite having had historical cultural connections to the regional groups to their west, south, south-east and east, Turkey has spent the past 20 years burning all of its bridges in all directions. In summary—and it is definitely a summary—Turkey’s position looks like this:

• Westward, they’ve been unable to make much of an advancement toward European integration, and still have infamously bad relations with Greece over the issue of Cyprus and a variety of other issues.


• To their south, they’ve tried to play neo-Ottomanist games and ended up with total chaos and no strategic gains whatsoever. Their only actual friend there remains—perhaps ironically—Israel, because Turkey historically shares some aspects of its military intelligence with Israel and continues to do so today. Unsurprisingly, this does not help Turkey to further its neo-Ottomanist fantasies in any way in the Middle East.


• To their south-east they are faced with an increasingly Kurdish population which is territorially coincident with the ancient land that they refer to as part of ‘Kurdistan’. By the year 2050, both Turks and Kurds will have gone through a population correction—a decline which must take place—but the asymmetric nature of that decline will be characterised by a change in the ratio of Turks and Kurds. The overall number of Kurds will have increased relative to the number of Turks, so that about 50% of the people in Turkey by then will be residing in homes where Kurdish is the first language. The geographic area where those Kurds are and will be living, is a place which also happens to potentially have a significant amount of oil play under it and comprises almost 40% of the territory of Turkey.


• To their east, Turkey had been more or less ignoring Central Asia and letting it sit in squalor until China decided to start making economic inroads there which are only becoming more integrated, at which stage Turkey made the monumental mistake of funding Uigyur Islamic terrorists in Xinjiang province to destroy Chinese infrastructure. China immediately responded by threatening to fund and arm Kurdish Marxist-Leninist terrorists to erode the territorial integrity of the Turkish state. Since Turkey did not stop funding the Islamists in Xinjiang, China seems to have gone forward with its threat, as the new presence of Chinese weapons among the PKK arsenal would indicate. Evidence of such a presence would be that a year after the warning had been given, 1690 of the machineguns and 40 of the rocket launchers that Turkey had captured from the PKK were of Chinese origin. The Turks have also recently taken to impotently complaining about how sympathetic the western media is to the PKK. Overall, the net gain for Turkey in that area has been somewhere in the range of nil.

Turkey is not some shrewd player. It’s one of the most clownish and absurd players in the world at the moment, and although it has experienced some significant economic growth internally, its foreign policy is a complete shambles and it is nowhere near to being a serious world power.

Should we really believe that Merkel is so stupid that she could not find anything to use to twist the arms of the Turks? The Turks should never have been in a position to be the ones making any demands there.

Any European negotiator who wanted to really play the game the tough way could have given a variety of responses that could twist the arms of the Turks based on the above facts, such as:

• “Do you understand the situation you’re in? How about we just don’t talk to you about EU accession ever again, until you remove the remnants of the Turkish Army from Cyprus?”


• “Do you understand the situation you’re in? How about we cancel all the NATO events that are on the calendar concerning Turkey?”


• “Do you understand the situation you’re in? How about we continue using the National Endowment for Democracy to assist your domestic political opponents so that they can erode your electoral powerbase and replace you with someone who will run Turkey in the way that we want?”


• “Do you understand the situation you’re in? How about we just ignore you and hedge against you demographically on a 30 year time frame, cultivating links with Kurds in the eastern part of your country so that we can encourage them to defy Ankara later and block you from having political control over a large section of your domestic energy resource base?”


• “Do you understand the situation you’re in? How about we just misplace boxes full of weapons and ammunition into the hands of the PKK? I’m sure you remember what that was like for you the last time we did that. In fact, since the PKK does so much independent illegal fundraising inside European countries, we could just stop policing them at all and see how you like that?”


• “Do you understand the situation you’re in? How about we just close the border between Turkey and the European Union, and build a giant fence surmounted by barbed wire and security cameras? The amount that it costs to take care of the migrants for a week is probably the same amount as it costs to build the fence.”

Those kind of responses from a European negotiator, would have been the correct signalling and would have likely produced a much more satisfactory response from Turkey.

Rather than doing anything like that, Merkel instead went in and sat down on a golden throne next to Erdogan, and followed the exact choreography that the architects of Erdogan’s election campaign wanted her to follow. She let Erdogan—a man who literally has been implicated in electoral fraud multiple times and is presiding over a ramshackle failure of a foreign policy—look strong, let him look competent, let him look like he was in charge, and gave him absolutely everything he wanted, absolutely for free.

No one is that absurdly fucking stupid by accident. Merkel had to have been doing that on purpose. That is the only reasonable conclusion that can be reached. It really is.

Furthermore, whose idea was it to send Merkel—a person who actually wanted the migrants to enter Europe in the first place—to have a negotiation with Turkey to try to keep the migrants out of Europe? I would love to know who was responsible for that absolutely stupid idea. Who on earth in their right mind would send Merkel to negotiate for the defence of Europe’s borders while knowing about all the pro-migration actions that she had engaged in prior to that?