Turkey has described its 19-year-old customs union with the European Union as outdated and has renewed its call to be given an opportunity to shape the EU’s emerging transatlantic trade deal with the United States.

Nihat Zeybekci, Turkey’s minister of the economy, said after meeting the European commissioner for trade, Karel De Gucht, last Wednesday (25 June) that the customs union “is far from responding to the needs of today”. The EU-US transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP) could lead to “unfair competition” for Turkish companies, he added.

Turkey has voiced anxiety about the TTIP since before the EU and US launched talks last July, with the former foreign minister, Egemen Bagˇıs¸, telling European Voice in April 2013: “Every time a trade deal is signed, the balance of mutual interest between Turkey and the EU achieved by the customs union creates a new deficit.” Countries with trade deals with the EU automatically gain access to the Turkish, Swiss, Norwegian, Icelandic and Liechtenstein markets under the EU’s trade arrangements with those countries.

Zeybekci also used a visit to the US in June to press the case for Turkey to be granted observer status in the TTIP process. Turkey has, in addition, been exploring the possibility of starting talks on a bilateral trade deal with the US.

Sinan Ülgen of the Istanbul-based Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies says that TTIP is changing Turkish policy both towards trade with the EU and towards the accession process. “For quite a long time, the Turkish government’s position was that deepening the customs union was only going to happen through accession” to the EU, he said.

Ankara has now disconnected debate about the customs union from the accession process, because there is a recognition that “there is a paradox of asking for a free-trade agreement with US and not touching the customs union, as Turkey would therefore be in the perverse position of having a more advanced agreement with the US” than with the EU.

In a recent paper for the think-tank Carnegie Europe, Ülgen urged the EU and the US to start designing a clause of accession to the TTIP. The current EU-US stance is that they may invite other countries to join TTIP once the deal is struck. Ülgen argued that an early commitment to extend the TTIP could reduce future political problems. He told an audience in Brussels on 27 June that a bilateral trade agreement between Turkey and the US would merely “limit the competitive erosion” of Turkish companies.

He said that another option – a ‘bridging’ agreement between bilateral trade deals – would leave Turkey with no role in norm-setting processes envisaged in the TTIP. It would, he suggested, be best to make a political declaration at the outset on accession and to depoliticise the process as much as possible, by placing decisions on membership largely in the hands of a technical committee.

Damien Levie, the EU’s deputy chief negotiator in the TTIP talks, said that “the negotiations are so complex that getting agreement with existing partners should be the focus”. Luisa Santos of the business association Business Europe also warned that giving Turkey a role in the TTIP process would complicate a European Parliament vote to ratify the transatlantic deal.

EU and US negotiators will hold a sixth round of TTIP talks on 14-18 July.

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