Common Market: The New Associate

Europe’s Common Market is prospering so much that nearly everybody wants in. Spain, Sweden and Austria are knocking at the club’s door. Israel and Iran are negotiating a trade pact with Europe’s Six. In Africa, 18 former French, Belgian and Italian colonies recently signed an export-boosting treaty with the Market. Last week, in the first break away from the solid ranks of the British Commonwealth nations, Nigeria asked the Six to consider some kind of association with it. Many Common Marketeers favor the bid from black Africa’s biggest nation (pop. some 45 million), believing that the new Europe should expand its influence in the world’s less developed areas. Perhaps the most important indication of this feeling is that the Market has just granted associate membership to a poor but ambitious country that bears most of the burdens common to developing nations: Turkey.*

Fast Development. Straddling Europe and Asia, Turkey was 300 years behind the industrial countries until Kemal Ataturk lowered the veil and started pointing its face westward after World War I. Since then, Turkey has narrowed the gap to 30 years, at least in its cities. On the surface, this big, potentially rich but long-neglected land looks as if it is striding rapidly toward industrial revolution. Ten dams are rising in the abundant streams and rivers that feed the Tigris and Euphrates, those watering founts of ancient civilization. Going up on the Black Sea coast at Eregli is a $235 million, government-subsidized iron and steel complex that will be stoked by coal from nearby deposits. A consortium of Royal Dutch/Shell, British Petroleum and Mobil Oil built a $56 million refinery that started cracking at Mersin on the southern coast last year. Recently Goodrich, U.S. Rubber and Italy’s Pirelli set up plants in Turkey, and Chrysler will soon begin to assemble trucks. German businessmen opened a mushroom cannery and French entrepreneurs, discovering that Turkey is acrawl with snails, started canning escargots.

But Turkey will be by far the Market’s poorest sister. Two-thirds of its 30 million people are illiterate, more than 10% of its work force is unemployed, and per capita income averages $200. Foreign trade, which swings around agriculture, is in chronic deficit. This year Turkey will export $370 million—mostly in aromatic tobacco, cotton, hazelnuts, sultana raisins and Smyrna figs—but its imports will amount to $640 million, largely in machinery. With its population growing by 1,000,000 a year, while its capital markets remain skeleton-thin because of a lack of personal savings, Turkey sorely needs more foreign financing for industrialization—and hopes to get it through casting its lot with Europe.

Slow Stages. The Eurocrats chose to take in Turkey ahead of many other suppliants because it is allied with NATO politically and seems on the right track economically. By adhering to the austerity strictures of the International Monetary Fund, the government has halted the inflation that racked Turkey in the 1950s. The Common Market is also much impressed by Turkey’s new 15-year development program and by its persuasive economic planner, Deputy Prime Minister Turhan Feyzioglu, 40, a former professor of public administration. The plan is aimed at boosting Turkey’s annual growth rate from 5.6% in the past decade to 7% by 1968 and calls for an investment of $6.7 billion—much of it from the Western allies—in irrigation, power, oil and steel. As a starter, the Common Market will lend Turkey $175 million.

Turkey will phase into the Market in three slow stages. Over the next five years, it will be granted tariff reductions on $40 million a year worth of farm exports to the Six. Hopefully, this will strengthen the Turkish economy for the next step—a twelve-year period of still broader tariff cuts on both sides. If all goes well, the troubled and aspiring land of Ataturk will then achieve complete customs union by 1980.

* The only other associate member: Greece, which was admitted last November.