City Life

15 November 2008

Are the Turks ready to be part of Europe? Brussels says no but Kylie says yes

I pondered all this over cigars with Zeki Onder, the urbane vice-president of Sekerbank, once the institution where Anatolian sugar-beet growers parked what little cash they had. Sekerbank is now one of scores of banks thrusting their wares, rather like Kylie, along Levent’s Büyükdere Avenue, Turkey’s Wall Street. Smoke circles hung thoughtfully around us as Onder described the future for Turkey as he saw it, sounding a little like Marx — Groucho, that is, not the Prussian socialist — who famously didn’t want to join any club that would accept him as a member. ‘There’s a lot of money in this country,’ the expensively suited Onder mused, stating the obvious while gazing across the Bosphorus to booming Asia. ‘And it remains to be seen who will best avail of it, West or East.’ Once an enthusiastic Europhile, Onder now reckons a Turkish referendum on EU membership would be a close-run thing.

Groucho urged Americans to ‘Go West’ as Atatürk did the Turks, but every time Ankara has tilted occidentally, Europe has raised the drawbridge while developing sudden symptoms of Islamophobia, the truth that dare not speak its name in Turkey’s sisyphean struggle to become officially European. Turks now ask their politicians why are they bothering with the economically sclerotic eurozone when there is so much more fun — read money — to be found in the easterly direction.

It wasn’t just Onder. Under portraits of the beloved Atatürk — a kind of national grandfather — banker after banker insisted Turkey was more than ready for EU entry. But if Europe couldn’t stomach Turkey as its emerging market within, then too bad, there’s the ‘brothers’ in Dubai for starters, then Russia (my hotel was full of shiny-suited ‘bisnismen’) just the other side of the Black Sea, and East Asia adding the cream. Onder tells me of a conversation he had with a colleague in China. The Beijing banker felt sorry for European bankers ‘because there is nothing left to do there’. ‘Look at us,’ he said, ‘we have a huge future to get excited about.’ Onder laughs. ‘And he was right. I more or less feel the same about Turkey.’