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101 on the Turkish deep state – Devlet

Three days ago I wrote about a series of strange and shocking events – murders, rumours of military coups and political conspiracies – that have made headlines in Turkey in the past three years. I listed these events as they came to my mind and as if they were unrelated. This impression of randomness could be seriously misleading, however.

In fact, reading Turkish newspapers and newly published books these days one enters the world of a multilayered thiller – Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code come to mind – in which every ominous event appears to be linked to the next. It is a world of secret patterns that are only revealed at the very end: a hidden plot that connects the murder of an Italian priest in a church in the Black Sea town of Trabzon in 2006, the attempted murder of a former PKK member in a mainly Kurdish city on the border with Iraq in 2005, the assassination of a high judge in a courtroom in the centre of Ankara in 2006 and the cold-blooded execution of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in the busy centre of modern Istanbul in 2007. Istanbul prosecutors currently seek to prove in an ongoing investigation that there is in fact a link between all these (and many more) crimes: a network of radical nationalist conspirators operating under the name Ergenekon. This in turn is linked to what Turks call derin devlet: the deep state.

What is Ergenekon? And what is derin devlet? Let us proceed cautiously from what is known before arriving at what is only suspected. In matters of conspiracies, it is best to treat carefully lest one gets lost in a fantasy world of multiple echoes and strange shadows.

First, devlet. When I arrived in Turkey a few years ago I was struck how often Turkish analysts would make a distinction between “the government” and “the state” in sentences such as “the state will not allow the government to do this” (for instance, use its sufficient parliamentary majority to elect a new president). I did not appreciate at the time the definition of devlet in the excellent book on Turkey (Crescent and Star, 2001) by former NYT correspondent Stephen Kinzer:

“The dictionary says it means “state”, but it also means something much uglier. Devlet is an omnipotent entity that stands above every citizen and every institution. Loyalty to it is held to be every Turk’s most fundamental obligation, and questioning it is considered treasonous. No one ever defines what devlet means; everyone is supposed to know. Its guardians are a self-perpetuating elite – the generals, police chiefs, prosecutors, judges, political bosses and press barons who decide what devlet demands of the citizenry. This elite has written many laws to help it do what it perceives as its duty, and when necessary it acts outside the law.” (p. 26)

The institutional foundation of devlet was (and is) the Turkish constitution of 1982. It was drafted under the supervision of the Turkish military that had taken power following a coup in 1980. The very first sentence of the preamble of the constitution spells out its underlying philosophy:

“In line with the concept of nationalism and the reforms and principles introduced by the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Atatürk, the immortal leader and the unrivalled hero, this Constitution, which affirms the eternal existence of the Turkish nation and motherland and the indivisible unity of the Turkish state …”

A few paragraphs further down the constitution spells out what this means:

“… no protection shall be accorded to an activity contrary to Turkish national interests, the principle of the indivisibility of the existence of Turkey with its state and territory, Turkish historical and moral values or the nationalism, principles, reforms and modernism of Atatürk …”


Ankara - Ataturk Mausoleum

Ankara – Ataturk Mausoleum

There were many other provisions, in the constitution and in other laws, that buttressed the military’s vision of the national interest in post-coup Turkey: the military-controlled National Security Council, acting as a shadow government, the Higher Education Board controlling universities, laws on political parties (that made it easy to dissolve them) and on associations and foundations (to control these). The outside world was viewed as full of enemies, plotting to bring Turkey down and always looking for and finding domestic traitors to work with. As Stephen Kinzer wrote in 2001:

“Writers, journalists and politicians who critizice the status quo are packed off to prison for what they say and write. Calls for religious freedom are considered subversive attacks on the secular order. Expressions of ethnic or cultural identity are banned for fear that they will trigger separatist movements and ultimately rip the country apart.” (p.12)

This repression was not hidden, however: it was the public face of the state. In fact, the architects of this system and its guardians were unapologetic about the necessity to protect devlet by limiting individual rights and democracy.

What, by contrast, is derin devlet? It is those elements of the state which went even further than the repressive laws already put in place to fight the enemies of devlet with illegal methods.

Again, some things are known about how this worked. There were hundreds of mystery killings in South East Anatolia in particular during the 1990s. A particularly radical group such as (Turkish, no link to the Lebanese organisation) Hizbullah was one of the instruments used. This became clear when hideouts used by Hizbullah, containing bodies of people kidnapped and turtored, were found across Turkey. As Kinzer put it, “the true lesson was even more sinister. Hizbullah had not been a band of outlaws but an arm of the Turkish state. Security agencies in southeastern provinces had made common cause with these terrorists. … Hizbullah thugs were turned loose to kidnap and kill their enemies in the knowledge that the police would not investigate them.” (p. 100)

Then there was the famous car accident in Susurluk in 1996: the people who died in the car crash, sitting in the same Mercedes, included a top-ranking police commander, who had been involved in counter-guerilla operations against the PKK; Abdullah Catli, one of the most famous gangsters in Turkey; and a pro-government Kurdish clan chief and parliamentarian. Evidence emerged that linked Catli to numerous crimes since the 1970s, and that showed that he had in fact been recruited by government security agents as an assassin.

However, even such discoveries did not change the culture of impunity in the security apparatus. Politicians who dared to confront the security apparatus did not get far in the late 90s, and nor did prosecutors. A parliamentary investigation, which led to a thick report in 1997, was prevented to question some key suspects, who could have shed light on events and links between state institutions and the underworld. One of these suspects who were not investigated further was Veli Kucuk, who had been a high level military officer in South East Anatolia allegedly in charge of a special and secret military unit and who had last spoken to Catli before the accident. Kucuk is today once again a central figure in the current Ergenekon investigation and was arrested in January 2008.

In fact, much has changed in Turkey since 2001: torture is no longer tolerated, the formal role of the military has been reduced, the Penal code and laws on associations have been reformed. Many more changes are expected and required, should Turkey’s EU accession process continue successfully. There have also been many changes to the constitution, and following the election victory of the AKP in the summer of 2007 work started on drafting a new constitution – with a new preamble – to turn away from the tradition of devlet embodied in the 1982 document.

And yet other things have not changed. There are still those within the system who believe that there is an immutable concept of nationalism that has to be protected, if need be by illegal instruments, against its enemies. Fast forward to 2006, 2007 and 2008 and it becomes clear that the challenge posed by both the surviving authoritarian state tradition and the threat of deep state structures remains serious. This was never more clear than this week in March

To be continued …

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A Turkish weekend

After 10 days of travel and research in Bulgaria and Brussels the plane from Sofia arrives back in Istanbul early on Saturday morning.

It is a glorious early spring day, warm and sunny. At 9 in the morning, as the taxi goes from the airport in the west of the city along the Byzantine walls towards the Golden Horn this metropolis is at its most attractive. There is little traffic, only some early pedestrians in the parks that stretch long the Marmara Sea. We cross the Galata bridge and continue along one of the most beautiful stretches of coast anywhere in Europe: from Ortakoy, underneath the first Bosporus bridge, to the affluent “village” of Bebek and further to the huge Ottoman fortress of Rumeli Hisari. We pass the fortress, turn left, and I am at home.

Mecidiye Mosque, Ortakoy

Mecidiye Mosque, Ortakoy (Istanbul)

Urban vitality 

There is a game I have been playing for the last years upon every return to Istanbul after a trip abroad: to discover what has changed in the city this time. In fact, I do not remember ever having lived in a place – not post-war Sarajevo in 1996, not post-communist Chernivtsi in Ukraine in 1993, not transition Sofia in 1994 – where the feeling of witnessing constant change in the immediate physical environment has been as acute as in Istanbul today.

Today it is new, red road signs have been put up in all of Rumeli Hisari (and, I notice later, elsewhere in the city) during the past 10 days: quite elegant signs that indicate not only the names of streets that I have walked for years without knowing what they were called, but also the specific quarter (in this case Rumeli Hisari mahallesi) and the municipality (Sariyer). The signs have come accompanied by new red numbers pasted onto every house. Having struggled to find my way around the centre of Sofia, looking for non-existant street signs, only a day before makes me appreciate this change.

And it is not the only one that has transformed my mahalle: the reconstruction of the facade of a prominent old house in the main street leading up the hill from the Bosporus has also been completed. The enlargement of the pedestrian promenade along the water has also advanced. And these are just the changes I notice immediately upon arriving. It is this reality of small but continuous changes that conveys the sense of being in the most dynamic city in one of the most dynamic countries in Europe: a vitality and restlessness that does not cease to fascinate (one could make a long list of the large number of changes just in Rumeli Hisari in the past year).

Political crisis

Unfortunately, excitement and surprises in Turkey are today not restricted to urban improvement. There is a second aspect of life here that is no less constant: witnessing the twists and turns in an unending and often merciless power struggle that lies beneath the astonishing social and economic developments visible on the surface. It is almost a certainty that after a few days of absence reading a daily paper or visiting a Turkish website brings one face to face with the latest existential social crisis, atrocity, political turmoil or bitter confrontation, facts that often shock and surprise even the most seasoned observers of local politics.

To illustrate what I mean let me list only a few of the recent crises that have appeared like lighthing on a clear sky in recent years: the apprehension of two military men, caught planting a bomb in a bookshop in the town of Semdinli in late 2005. The murder of an Italian Catholic priest in his church in Trabzon. Protests preventing the holding of a conference discussing Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire in Istanbul. The assassination of a judge at the State Council in Ankara. The murder of Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in the centre of Istanbul. The killing of a group of missionaries in Malatya. A speech by (former) president Sezer warning that Turkey has never been in greater danger from turning fundamentalist. A dire warning by the Chief of Staff to the same effect. The removal of a prosecutor (in Van) who indicated that higher levels in the military might have been involved in the bombing in Semdinli. A violent demonstration in Diyarbakir, ending with young people killed in the streets by security forces. A terrorist attack by the PKK. Another terrorist attack. Media frenzy over an impending invasion of Northern Iraq. Airstrikes. An actual invasion of Northern Iraq. A frontpage story in March 2007, published in an Istanbul weekly (Nokta) how leading military officers were planning coups in 2004. The closing of that same weekly, never to reopen, a few days later, following pressure from the prosecutors. The opening of a trail against its editor. The threat of military intervention delivered through an email (the e-memorandum crisis) in April 2007. Mass demonstrations against the government. The sentencing of an academic who dared to question some aspect of the life of Ataturk. Trials of writers and journalists. The trial of Orhan Pamuk. The dissolution of a town council in South East Anatolia for using “languages other than Turkish” when providing services to citizens. The indictment of a Kurdish local politician. More indictments. A move to prohibit the DTP (Kurdish party) represented in the Grand National Assembly. The discover of a plot to kill the prime minister and his advisors in Ankara. The discovery of a large number of handgrandes in a house on the Asian side of Istanbul in summer 2007.

And finally, to top everything, the arrest of dozens of individuals who form an underground terrorist right-wing network in January 2008 and who appear to be linked to a large number of the incidents just listed … As I write this list I realise that I can easily do so from memory, without any real effort. I certainly have forgotten a range of smaller “existential crises”.

Every time one leaves Istanbul for a few days one thus returns to find the city that appears a bit richer, a bit more beautiful and yet also a city where the wildest political fiction is regularly surpassed by the reality of Turkey’s dark power struggles. Turkey is a bad country for those who do not want to believe in conspiracy theories. So this is a typical Bosporus weekend: walking along the water, drinking tea, looking at the rays of sun dancing on the small waves, enjoying a sense of peace and harmony, beauty and promise. And then turning to the papers and experiencing the opposite reaction: bewilderment.

Just consider the amazing turn politics took this weekend. On Friday evening (14 March) the Chief Public Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, applied to the Constitutional Court to close the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), suggesting that it poses a threat to the secular order of the country. He calls for a ban on 71 of its leading members, including President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, from politics for five years! Can this be true?

Turkish reactions

Most reactions in Turkey condemned the closure request. The daily Radikal titled on 15 March 2008: “It’s enough, anything else”, Taraf daily wrote: Put the Prosecutor on trail. On 17 March 2008 Sahin Alpay commented in Today’s Zaman: “The status quo fights back.” The Industrialist’s Association TUSIAD also criticised the motion: “In respect of Turkish democracy this trial is unacceptable.”

Instead of offering you my own analysis, let me quote a few of the local papers to share the full flavour of the local debate.

1. An article in Today’s Zaman:

“Left shocked by the lawsuit filed by the chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals against the powerful ruling party late Friday, pundits in Ankara have already begun to ponder how this judicial coup attempt will end. According to the Turkish Constitution, there is no timeframe for the Constitutional Court to decide on a party closure file. But, in 1997, it took only eight months for the court to close the Welfare Party, the predecessor of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). This shows that there is not much time for the political engineers in the capital to direct developments to their advantage.

But what is more important then the timeframe is the member composition of the Constitutional Court, which has closed 40 different political parties since its foundation in 1961. Fikret Bila, daily Milliyet’s columnist, underlined this reality in his column yesterday but also drew attention to the fact that the parties were banned because of either acting against the unitary regime of the Republic or being a focal point of anti-secular activities. The ban of two political parties has been asked for: The AKP and the Democratic Society Party (DTP), Bila said, pointing out that the predecessors of these two parties were also closed down by the top court on the same charges.

Another point is that the general composition of the top court has not changed in the last 10 years. Political observers argued that the majority of judges in the Constitutional Court were appointed by former President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a staunch secularist who was elected as president when he was the head of the top court in 2000. Out of 11 judges, at least seven of them would vote for the closure of the AKP, these observers claimed. Apart from these predictions, the court’s ruling last year to annul the presidential elections in Parliament with the votes of nine judges shows that life will no longer be easy for the AKP. But the court will signal its possible ruling on the closure of the AKP through another decision on the annulment of the recently approved constitutional amendments package that lifts the headscarf ban in universities, a move that sparked harsh accusation against the government from the judiciary and the military. Observers in the capital argued that if the court annuls the constitutional amendment on the basis of secularism principle of the Republic that will also send a strong warning to the ruling party.

In the event of the AKP’s closure, the ruling party will not only lose its chairman and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan but also 41 seats in Parliament. The current government will collapse in the absence of its prime minister. But the AKP’s remaining 299 deputies could still form a new party, elect a chairman and of course the new prime minister of the country. Many observers argued that the party would face an in-house race for the party’s leadership but the new prime minister will be someone selected by Erdoğan himself. There are already names being mentioned in the capital for the leadership of the party such as Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Çiçek, Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Şahin, Foreign Minister Ali Babacan, Interior Minister Beşir Atalay, Parliament Speaker Köksal Toptan. Abdüllatif Şener who refused to participate in the July 22 general elections from the AKP ranks, is also seen a potential leader of the new party but Şener cannot be prime minister as he is not a lawmaker. Another possibility is that the country could face snap general elections as a result of the AKP’s closure depending on how long the file remains in court. The country will hold local elections next year in March, where general elections could also be held if the AKP’s possible successor decides to do so. The votes of 276 deputies suffice for calling a general election. Let them close us, we would get 50 percent of votes, Şahin told reporters in Antalya over the weekend. But there are more optimists among the AKP members. This time we’ll receive 70 percent of votes, said Bülent Arınç, an AKP heavyweight.”

2. An article by Fehmi Koru:

“We aren’t accustomed to having solely an “indictment,” written by the chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals, without a process — a process of a military intervention, prepared and executed by masters of psychological warfare. In 1960, after the army takeover, the military rulers brought all the politicians who had served the country in the proceeding 10 years before a specially designed tribunal, whose handpicked members tried them for misdemeanors. President Celal Bayar was accused of embezzling a gift horse. No kidding. The panel of judges later found that the horse had been delivered to a zoo together with a hound, also the gift of an Afghan king. The chairman of the panel waved a piece of ladies’ underwear in the face of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, accusing him of secret liaisons, but it was later discovered that the underwear had been planted by a friendly hand. Prime Minister Menderes was also accused by the same tribunal of fathering a child out of wedlock. In 1980, after the army intervened, the new military rulers opened up court cases against politicians and their parties. Soon afterwards they closed all the parties and banned the politicians from politics. Almost all the politicians were brought before special tribunals, and their miserable spectacle they presented during these trials gave away the reality that they had been subjected to harsh torture and mistreatment.

Mere indictment by a chief prosecutor for the closure of a political party is a new phenomenon in Turkish politics. No direct military intervention, no taking politicians prisoner, no sending political leaders to exile, not even any forcing of a government from power… Only an indictment written by the chief prosecutor… The chief prosecutor has obviously spent a lot of time on preparing the text of the indictment. The 162-page text is made up of accusations against Justice and Development Party (AK Party) politicians, including President Abdullah Gül, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and former Parliament Speaker Bülent Arınç. The chief prosecutor collected all the utterances of AK Party politicians — the utterances he felt were against the secular foundation of the state — going back to the time they were members of the now-banned Welfare Party (RP).”

3. A comment by Sahin Alpay:

“chief prosecutor has asked the Constitutional Court to ban the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) for allegedly having become a center of activities threatening the secular regime. This move is surely a severe attack against democracy, the rule of law and stability in Turkey. It is a shame for the country. The accusations leveled against the AK Party are wholly unjustified and have no legal basis, only an ideological one. It seems that the self-appointed bureaucratic guardians of the state want to punish the AK Party for not only daring to elect Abdullah Gül, whose wife wears the headscarf, as president, but also for trying to lift the headscarf ban at university, which has long been the symbol of authoritarian secularism. One can only hope that the Constitutional Court rejects this provocation against democracy and that Parliament finally moves to adopt the necessary constitutional and legal amendments to bring regulations concerning political parties in line with liberal democratic norms.

The chief prosecutor had previously asked the Constitutional Court to ban the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) and now he is moving against the AK Party government, which received 47 percent of the national vote in last summer’s general election. These moves by the chief prosecutor indicate that the bureaucratic establishment in Turkey wants to uphold state policies adopted in the 1920s and 1930s under an authoritarian single-party regime. Those policies, drawn in line with the notion of modernity that prevailed in the founding period of the republic, essentially assigned the state the duty of secularizing society. This amounted to isolating society from the influence of Islam, which was regarded as the main source of the country’s backwardness. Identity policies adopted at the time were aimed at the forced assimilation of minority cultures into the majority culture.”

4. A comment by Bulent Kenes (columnist with Bugun and Today’s Zaman):

“Expecting this much from those who resorted to a midnight e-memorandum, those who provoked a certain segment of society to take to the streets while heaping all sorts of insults on the other segment, those who invented the problem of the “367 requirement” — at the cost of contravening the law — just to keep Sezer as president and those who tried to prevent the general elections by attempting to engage the country in a war in 2007 cannot be considered unreasonable. However, we are only human, and we are innately predisposed to looking at future possibilities optimistically, and we thought that this segment, however enraged it may be, would not dare to draw the country into a political turmoil and chaos it could not handle, thinking that they were on the same ship as us. But today what we understand from their efforts to have the ruling party shut down is that we have been a bit too optimistic.”

5. A comment by Yavuz Baydar (columnist with Sabah and Today’s Zaman):

“If the case is accepted, we shall have unprecedented case in world politics: The parties chosen by more than half of the voters will have faced an annulment of their political will, by the judiciary — the AK Party and Democratic Society Party (DTP), the latter earlier charged with separatist terror. Indictments question the legitimacy of some 360 seats of a total of 550 in Parliament. In other words, Turkey’s democracy is being led into a huge crisis with an unknown outcome.

In such a case the AK Party could, and should, take the lead: First, it should convene Parliament immediately and seek a consensus of urgent and comprehensive constitutional reform with revision also of the Political Parties Law. Second, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Foreign Minister Ali Babacan should immediately visit Brussels and meet with major EU leaders in order to declare a national plan for democratic reform and a clear-cut road map for the rest of the year. It should immediately amend Turkish Penal Code (TCK) Article 301 to show its commitment to the democratic project in accordance with the EU. It is up to Erdoğan to convince the wide democratic opinion of Turkey that the AK Party will return to policies of change on a broader basis.

The AK Party’s only chance to save democracy is to again widen its circle of domestic alliance, re-embracing alienated non-AK Party segments for further reform and pressure Turkey’s friends in the EU to raise the level of support for a stable future. From today serious things are at stake, and hidden efforts will have a backlash.”

6. A comment by Mustafa Akyol (Turkish Daily News):

“The 21st century tactic is to stage coups via not the military but the judiciary. As I noted in my piece dated Jan. 24 and titled “The Empire Strikes Back (Via Juristocracy),” now the bureaucratic empire in Ankara attacks the representatives of the people with legal decisions, not armed battalions. If you talk to them, they will proudly tell you that they are saving Turkey from Islamic fundamentalism. You have to be a secular fundamentalist – or hopelessly uninformed – to believe that. The AKP has proved to be a party committed to the democratization and liberalization of Turkey, a process which, naturally, includes the broadening of religious freedom But that democratization and liberalization is the very thing that the empire fears from. If you look at the “evidence” that the chief prosecutor presented to the Constitutional Court to blame the AKP, you will see how fake all this “Islamic fundamentalism” rhetoric is. The anti-secular “crimes” of AKP include:

  • Making a constitutional amendment in order to allow university students to wear the headscarf. (Maddeningly enough, this bill was accepted in Parliament with the votes of not just the AKP’s deputies but also those of the Nationalist Movement Party [MHP], and the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society party.)
  • Supplying free bus services for the student of the religious “imam-hatip” schools, which are nothing but state-sponsored modern high schools that teach some Islamic classes in addition to the standard secular education.
  • Naming a park in Ankara after the deceased leader of a Sufi order.
  • Not allowing the public display of a bikini advertisement.
  • Employing headscarved doctors in public hospitals.
  • Allowing one of the local administrators to issue a paper which has the criminal sentence, “May God have mercy on the souls of our colleagues who have passed away.” (The simple fact that he dared to mention God [“Allah” in Arabic and Turkish] in an official setting was considered as a crime.)

Yes, this is absolutely crazy. It is like defining the Republican Party in the United States as an “anti-secular threat” and asking for its closure based on facts such as that it has pro-life (anti-abortion) tendencies and that President Bush publicly said that his favorite philosopher is Jesus Christ. The heart of the matter is that Turkey’s self-styled secularism is a fiercely anti-religious ideology akin to that of Marxist-Leninist tyrannies. And the AKP has been trying to turn Turkey into a democracy. That’s the party’s real “crime.””

7. Finally, a comment by a former Turkish ambassador to Germany and deputy leader of the major opposition CHP, Onur Öymen :

“The AKP’s members cannot expunge their guilt by blaming the judiciary for their actions. Everyone needs to respect the judicial process from now on. Parties need to respect the law.”

The opposition CHP noted that decisions by the courts “have to be respected”. Deniz Baykal, the CHP chairperson said: “the indictment is a legal one. It was not prepared with political aims and hostility; and it does not reflect emotional reactions. It was prepared objectively and within the borders of laws and responsibility.”

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Talk at the Red House in Sofia: Does the EU have a strategy for South Eastern Europe?

I held a public lecture at The Red House in Sofia on EU soft power in the Balkans. Ever since the dramatic events in Kosovo in 1999, the European Union saw the EU membership prospect for the Balkan countries as a tool for stabilising the region. The “EU membership promise” has been perceived as an instrument of excercising soft power over a region that includes Turkey as well. With recent developments across the Balkans, is the EU soft power fading away?

The Red House

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Talk in Brussels – Adding momentum to the next EU enlargement

My colleague Alexandra and attended a session of the EPC Balkans Task Force in Brussels, a group of experts assembled by the European Policy Centre. There, I spoke about the Bulgarian experience and recommended:

  1. to encourage all WB countries to apply for EU membership and become candidates;
  2. to begin screening in late 2008/early 2009;
  3. to start negotiations with those that are ready. This will counteract the slow erosion of EU soft power in the region and produce the necessary momentum for the necessary reforms towards.

The next day, Alexandra and I attended a conference called “Five years after Thessaloniki” with Carl Bildt, Dimitri Rupel, Olli Rehn, Michael Leigh (Director-General Enlargement), Stefan Lehne (Director for the Western Balkans in the Council) and many others, and where I gave another presentation on the state of the Balkans. The background to this event was the Western Balkans Communication issued by the Commission the week before.

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Talk in Sarajevo – presentation at the Bosnian parliament – “A European Bosnia? Myths and realities”

Since 1999, ESI has published a large number of reports on Bosnia-Herzegovina, many of which have created wider public debates about the state of the country.

During the past year, ESI and the Bosnian think tank Populari have taken a fresh look at Bosnian realities – from interethnic relations and dealing with war crimes to energy policy and education – focusing in particular on some regions devastated during the war in the early 1990s: Central Bosnia and Doboj in Republika Srpska. This research was supported by the Erste Foundation and by the Norwegian government. The event was supported by the Swedish Embassy.

Populari’s Alida Vračić and I presented the findings and their implications for future EU policy towards the country in the Bosnian Parliament. Discussants included Osman Topčagić (Director of the BiH Directorate for European Integration) and Alexandra Stiglmayer (ESI senior Analyst).

The event was widely reported on in Bosnian newspapers. There was also a lot of coverage on local TV channels. I gave a long interview about the research to Nezavisna Televizia from Banja Luka and to OBN in Sarajevo.

Gerald Knaus, Alida Vračić, Osman Topčagić, and Alexandra Stiglmayer

Gerald Knaus, Alida Vračić, Osman Topčagić, and Alexandra Stiglmayer
Gerald Knaus and journalists after the presentation

Gerald Knaus and journalists after the presentation
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Peddling ideas around Schuman II (Brussels in January: EPC)

…. continued from Peddling Ideas Around Schuman I (Brussels in January: Coweb)

EPC and the future of screening

Graham Avery Judy Batt Jacques Rupnik

Institutions like EPC are another fixture in the Brussels policy landscape. I have come here quite often in the past, for debates and presentations. Last year I was invited to join EPC’s international advisory board. This time the occasion to come was the ECP “task force” on the Balkans.

EPC is, to those not familiar with Brussels, the equivalent of an intellectual club for Brussels policy-makers: they can come to listen to arguments and debates without really having to leave their offices (the Residence Palace, where EPC is based, is right across the road from all the main EU buildings). But EPC also aims to generate ideas. This is why a small group of Balkan experts had been invited to come together a few times this year and debate. Chaired by Graham Avery, some 10 experts took up the offer.

Again Alex and myself distributed our most recent reports. Again we tried to challenge some conventional wisdoms about the Balkans (particularly about Bosnia this time). And once again we had a specific proposal which we sought to put up for debate: the notion that screening for all the countries of the Western Balkans should begin later this year, even before the start of full accession negotiations. For details on this proposal see my next entry on Rumeli Observer; let me make a more general point about the spreading of policy ideas here.

My first observation: policy proposals are often most effective when their origin is forgotten. One of the attributes of a successful think tank is not to be possessive about “ideas”: the more an idea, analysis or policy proposal becomes part of a new “received wisdom” the more likely it is to be adopted. A policy proposal for real change needs to become part of a new consensus. For this to happen the gatekeepers in public policy debates (journalists and policy analysts) need to find it convincing.

The EPC meeting was a gathering of such gatekeepers. There are others in other places. In fact, like a wandering circus, seminars and conferences on the Balkans take place across Europe every few weeks (or more). I sometimes wonder why “the future of Kosovo” needs to be discussed by a similar crowd of people every other month in another European holiday destination (Paris, Athens, Rome, Vienna ….). However, in the end the intellectual activity that takes place (or does not) at these events matters. This is true for better or worse: when such meetings generate no ideas, or the wrong ones, the consequences will also usually be felt before long …

Compared with other sumptious gathering this EPC task force meeting is a frugal affair. A small group, exchanging ideas over sandwiches, with the vague notion to “contribute to the debate” on the future of EU policy. What exactly we would contribute is left open, it is only agreed that there would be some paper at the end, still to be determined. Participants prepare presentations for each other and then discuss them. I volunteer for a presentation in February on lessons for the Western Balkans from the Eastern Balkans.

Who are the members of this group? There is the chair, a former senior commission official in charge of enlargement, Graham Avery. There is Judy Batt (now based in Paris), Jacques Rupnik (from Paris), Tim Judah (based in London), and others. These are all familiar faces. I had recently met Jacques in Tirana at the Albanian ambassador’s conference (see The gate-crashing principle), Judy in Belgrade a few months ago and Tim in Pristina. I narrowly missed him at an event in Georgia, and would have seen him at another event in DC next February, if I would have accepted the invitation. This indicates the nature of this loose network of Balkan watchers: as a group, people who work on the Balkans in policy institutes across Europe probably meet at least as often as their political counterparts from European foreign ministries. And like them, the thing they do is talk.

Does this kind of talk matter? There are many bad conferences, badly prepared speakers, repetitive moments at conferences around Europe. However, listening to Jacques explain the latest thinking in France about the future of enlargement, hearing Tim’s first hand information about his latest encounters with diplomats and politicians in Belgrade, learning from Judy about whatever her latest trip to the region revealed about the mood in Belgrade or Podgorica is always of enormous benefit. So is seeing their reactions to concrete ESI proposals.

What does Lajcak really want to achieve in Bosnia? (Judy has become one of his outside advisors). What is Tim’s latest impression of the political dynamics in Belgrade? (where Tim goes all the time). How genuine is the new French rhetoric about enlargement? (Jacques explains that it is real, having discussed this on a panel recently with the Minister for Europe in Paris, Jean-Pierre Jouyet). How might the idea of an early screening in the Western Balkans be received by the Commission? (I note with relief that Graham Avery finds the idea interesting). Etc …

Malcolm Gladwell has written about the “law of the few” in the spreading of ideas, distinguishing between connectors, mavens and salesmen. Connectors are people who know lots of people. Salesmen are those “with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing.” Mavens (a Yiddish word which, Gladwell tells us, means one who accumulates knowledge) are people “who read more magazines than the rest of us, more newspapers, and they may be the only people who read junk mail”:

“What sets Mavens apart, though, is not so much what they know but how they pass it along. The fact that Mavens want to help, for no other reason than because they like to help, turns out to be an awfully effective way of getting someone’s attention.”

Mavens are “really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know.” This is perhaps the best way to describe this EPC meeting: as a gathering of Balkan mavens.

Connectors in Brussels

L. Keith Gardiner notes in an article written in 1989 (Dealing with Intelligence-Policy Disconnects) that policy analysis “cannot serve if it does not know the doer’s minds; it cannot serve if it does not have their confidence.” He also writes that

“most policy-makers probably would welcome analysis that helps them to develop a sound picture of the world, to list the possible ways to achieve their action goals, and to influence others to accept their visions.”

This calls for “colorful, anecdotal language”:

“analysts strongly prefer to transmit knowledge through writing, because only writing can capture the full complexity of what they want to convey. Policy consumers, however, tend to seek what can be called “news” rather than knowledge; they are more comfortable with a mode of communication that more closely resembles speech.”

This, then, is the third reason to come to Brussels (and do so regularly): one-on-one meetings with EU officials, with friends, like Heather Grabbe, from the cabinet of Olli Rehn, who is in charge of Turkey; old friends like Michael Giffoni, now heading the Balkan department in the Council (we worked together in Bosnia almost a decade ago). The Balkan team in the Slovenian permanent representation in Brussels. Ben Crampton, working on Kosovo in the council, another old hand from the Balkans (whose father, one of the leading historians on South East Europe, I had known in Oxford). Stefan Lehne, the director for the Balkans and East Europe in the EU Council …

Until the next trip …

The fourth task, finally, is the real bread and butter of our work, without which there would be nothing to share, no ideas to present, and no reputation to open any doors: sitting and grappling with the draft of future ESI reports with Alex. Sitting in her apartment in Ixelles we prepare a short intervention for the upcoming debate on the future mandate of the OHR (which will be discussed at the PIC at the end of February). We discuss the Austrian debate on Turkey (a report which has been depressing me for a few months now). We talk through in detail our upcoming report on the German debate on Turkey. And then there is another amitious report on Central Bosnia to finish ….

In the end the whole trip to Brussels lasts a mere three days. As I leave a new long list of dates has been fixed which imply coming to Brussels: a presentation in February to the EPC taks force; a presentation of the Balkan film project with the Slovenes; a presentation on energy policy in the Balkans at EPC; a meeting with Olli Rehn; another one with Javier Solana; a brainstorming with Peter Feith, the future head of the International Mission in Kosovo, and his senior team. Thus the cycle of trips to the European capital never ends …