Governmental institutional changes

2.2 Governmental institutional changes

In the year 2000, an EU Internal Economic and Technical Coordination Council composed of the Foreign Minister, the State Minister in charge of foreign trade and the State Minister in charge of privatization was established to ensure full coordination between relevant Ministries on technical and economic subjects (Turkey Progress Report 2000).

An executive organ, the General Secretariat for EU Affairs was created by the Parliament in July 2000. The Secretariat is assigned the following functions – coordinating internal efforts of harmonization to be carried out by the Turkish public organizations and agencies, providing secretarial services to the boards and committees which shall be established, guiding the implementation of the decisions, conducting required research and studies, issuing through the Prime Ministry, regulations, communications, circulars and other similar regulatory instruments concerning the services that it is responsible to render, programming of financial cooperation (Mission of the General Secretariat for the EU). In the 2007 it was placed under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and continues in its coordinating role.

What is still discussed and considered (mainly from the EU side), is the decision to engage and keep the Minister of Foreign Affairs (Ali Babacan) at the position of Chief of the negotiation. The Minister has barely the time to manage Turkey’s heavily loaded foreign policy agenda. The absence of a full time chief negotiator remains to be one of the major obstacles for a faster accession process. Also it is evident this way that Turkey considers the EU issue as a part of her foreign policy, which is not the right attitude according to the EU, because the domestic transformation is actually on side (Yinanç 2008; Turkey progress report 2008: 8).

In the area of public administration, efforts have been made to improve the quality of public management and staffing²⁸. Action Plan on Enhancing Transparency and Good Governance in the Public Sector, adopted by Government in 2002 have implications for the duties and responsibilities of central and local administrations. Also the role of civilian officials in local administration was strengthened. The essential change that represents a significant step towards the demilitarization of the provincial administration, concerns military officers, who are no longer entitled to act in provincial administrations as deputy for the Governor in the latter’s absence (Turkey progress report 2002).

Another important institutional change in field of execution was setting up a Reform Monitoring Group in September 2003, whose aim is to ensure effective implementation of the reforms and to overview the progress in actual implementations and identifying also the difficulties that occur in practise (Human rights: Policy objectives and developments). The remit of the group includes fact-finding missions intended to identify difficulties experienced in the practical implementation of the reforms. The group is also entrusted with the task of ensuring that allegations of human rights violations are investigated (Aydın and Keyman 2004: 23).

In 2004 a package on the reform of the public administration was adopted.²⁹ Their purpose was to reform the division of competences and duties between the four levels of administration (central, provincial, metropolitan, municipal) and to improve performance. The country’s centralised, hierarchical and secretive administrative system should be at the end modified to decentralized, participatory, transparent, responsive and accountable model (Turkey progress report 2004).

The reforms of 2005, in the field of public administrative mainly concerned strategic planning requirements, emergency planning, debt and borrowing limits, performance based budgeting, annual activity reports and the creation of audit commissions

In the 2006 Law Establishing an Ombudsman was adopted. This was important step because this office should be a key institution in improving the efficiency of public administration and in detecting corruption, it creates an institutional framework for the monitoring of public administration by Turkish citizens. The task of ombudsman will be to handle petitions from natural and legal persons in relation to administrative acts. However, the Ombudsman law has been stuck in the Constitutional Court for over two years (Rehn 2008).

In 2007, a circular was issued by government that specifies implementation of the Regulatory Impact Assessment and its guidelines were adopted to enhance the quality of regulations. “One-stop” offices were established within governorates and district governorates to lessen the administrative burden on citizens requesting certain public services (Turkey progress report 2007: 9).

In March 2008 Parliament adopted a Law on municipalities, but this law is still under review in the Constitutional Court, following the appeal by the CHP. The recently adopted local administration laws need to be implemented and decentralization of powers in favor of local governments to be strengthened. As regards the reform of public administration, a number of issues remain to be addressed, such as reducing administrative burden, ensuring simplification, establishing regulatory impact assessments, developing administrative procedures, enhancing transparency and improving policy-making and coordination systems (Turkey progress report 2008: 8).

2.3 Grand National Assembly 1999-2008

The most important and surprising development came with the unexpected passage of an impressive EU adjustment package in summer 2002. This package was passed after the Parliament had taken the decision to go for an early election. Even the most optimistic Europhiles were not expecting such a move. With a large number of resignations from the coalition partner DSP in summer 2002 and the resulting New Turkey Party under the leadership of former Minister of Foreign Affairs Ismail Cem, the EU and related issues seem to have been pushed to the forefront of political debate in the country. At one point there were expectations that Cem would use the EU issues as a stepping-stone into riding the issue agenda of the country. However, other political party leaders have by that time only tangentially dealt with this issue in front of the electorate. Besides Cem, the ANAP leader Mesut Yılmaz stood in favour of this issue in his campaign. The MHP leadership openly questioned the worth of EU membership. At that time, Ecevit (DSP) did not seem to care about the EU issue or was simply unable to push behind any issue he believed in. Although publicly in favour of the EU membership, Democratic Party leader Tansu Ciller seemed reluctant to push this topic perhaps considering backlash of the conservative constituencies in their competition with the AKP and MHP. AKP´s core constituency was known to be skeptic about EU issues and thus the leadership was not willing to take the lead on this issue. In short, if the EU issues were going to shape the electoral agenda in the next general elections, the political elites’ willingness to raise the salience of the EU issues would be a major factor behind this development. We could also claim that ANAP, more than anybody else, saw an electoral pay-off that no one dared to touch and took its chances by taking the initiative to pass critical pieces of legislation from the National Assembly before the election campaign actually started (Çarkoğlu, Kalaycıoğlu 2007: 49-50).

The EU-oriented legislation passed just before the election and included abolition of the death penalty in peacetime, rights to broadcast and educate in languages other than Turkish, (in principle allowing the use of Kurdish dialects in such activities), despatching penalties for criticizing state institutions, including the military; eased restrictions on demonstrations and associations. The EU adjustment package was seen by some as democratizing new regulations bringing the country closer to EU membership, while an opposing group portrayed these as one-sided concessions undermining Turkey’s unity and independence. The parties in TBMM were clearly divided. MHP alone rejected all the legislation, while AKP opposed only the abolishing of the death penalty, knowing this vote would not impede the package’s passing. ANAP was the new laws’ main advocate, hoping it would lead to electoral support and the EU’s agreement to advance Turkey’s membership application (Çarkoğlu, Kalaycıoğlu 2007: 51).

As we can see, there were defections from all parties (government and opposition) but there was no consistent resistance to the package as a party line. In remarks made on 4th August 2002, the MHP leader Bahçeli stated that the MHP would appeal to the constitutional Court in a bid to force Parliament to reverse its dcision regarding the death penalty and minority rights. The Constitutional court eventually rejected this petition in December 2002 (Avcı 2004: 203).

In the following period in the years 2002-2007 the AK Party held broad majority in the National Assembly, so the conditions for approval of reforms were propitious for the ruling party, thus it basically correspond to what was written in the chapter concerning the government.

In the last examined period, the Parliament continued in submitting draft bills, some of which intended to introduce EU-related reforms. The CHP referred to the Constitutional court several of the laws of such content (including, for example the law on Foundations and the amendments to the Law on the public service broadcaster). However, overall, the functioning of Parliament in this period was very much affected by domestic events of a grave impact. In March the chief Public Prosecutor applied to the Constitutional court for the governing AK Party to be dissolved and for 71 former and present party officials, including the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister, to be banned from being member of a political party for five years. The charges brought against the party alleged that it was a focal point for anti-secular activities. On 30 July, the constitutional Court fell short of the required majority to close down the party, but considered that the latter had carried out activities against the secular principles of the Republic (Turkey progress report 2008: 6). The other elements influencing the work of the National Assembly, was the application for closure of the Democratic Society Party and start of investigation of an allegedly criminal network, known as Ergenekon. On this basis, we can claim that it was affected by the domestic development to such extent that it did not follow the pace of the reforms approval it performed in the previous years.