Putting Ghosts To Rest.(International Edition; WORLD AFFAIRS)

Byline: Owen Matthews and Sami Kohen

Turkey's prime minister will need political courage to reform his country and bring it closer to Europe.

Bringing Turkey to Europe's door has been Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's epochal achievement. So why, over the four years since Turkey opened formal negotiations to join the European Union, has he seemed to have lost interest in his grand project? With his AK Party's thumping parliamentary majority, Erdogan had a chance to integrate his country into the EU and reform the Constitution in a way that would create a real democracy--for instance, by overhauling the Constitution to protect elected parties and officials from interference from politicized prosecutors. But instead of integrating Turkey into Europe, he has spent more energy over the last couple of years pursuing Turkey's Middle East diplomacy and, most recently, aggressively attacking Israel's invasion of Gaza. And instead of reforming the Constitution, he's chosen to leave largely intact a system born in a 1980 military coup that left the Army with extraordinary powers over elected officials.

Erdogan's opponents say the reason behind the loss of momentum is that he was never serious about the EU process and was using the Brussels-mandated reforms to push through a religious agenda. AK Party leaders counter that reforms stalled because the party has been repeatedly ambushed by a series of judicial challenges to its democratic authority. The first came in 2007 with an attempt to block the appointment of AK stalwart Abdullah Gul as president, which forced fresh elections that Gul won. The next year, the Constitutional Court tried again, attempting to close the AK Party for trying to scrap a ban on religious headscarves in universities.

But those obstacles are past, and Erdogan is running out of excuses. Opposition to Turkish accession to the EU is stiffening in several countries, and at home Erdogan's long run of political success is unlikely to continue indefinitely. This year could mark his last chance to prove to Brussels, and to skeptics inside Turkey, that he's serious about joining Europe and transforming Turkey into a functional democracy. Egemen Bagis, Turkey's minister for European Union affairs, insists that "relations with the EU will be a major priority" in coming months, noting that ...