As James Forsyth mentioned earlier this week, things could get much worse in Turkey. Indeed, they will. Europe’s hope that Turkey will continue to soak up migrants is at best naive; at worst, irresponsible.
Europe desperately needs Turkey to serve as a migrant waiting room on its borders. In exchange, it has offered an acceleration of the EU admission process. In November, Turkey was promised visa-free travel to the Schengen zone by 2016. In December, after five years of standstill, negotiations concerning economic and monetary policies linked to Turkey’s EU membership were reopened.
This entire deal rests on the peculiar idea that, if given the chance, Turkey would be a Europhile with the zeal of a convert. When the incumbent Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu came into office, he declared that January 2015 would be ‘European month’. Soon after, his government inaugurated a five-year European strategy aiming to close all accession chapters in just two years.
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