| FROM CHIEF | Murat SARAYLI |
| Chairman of the Board of TUGIAD/Confedereration of Young European Businessmen (YES) |
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Turkey in the Barcelona Process… Will Turkey be the Guest or the Host? |
Within this framework, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership is an outstanding restructuring example. The purpose of this formation is defined as “to ensure the establishment of comprehensive political, economical and social relations between European and Mediterranean countries. With this formation, a new process that closely interests Turkey, our region and even the whole world started and this process is likely to create new and different results.
The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, which is also known as the Barcelona Process since the first meeting of this partnership was held in 1955 in Barcelona, Spain, has three basic goals: ensuring a close collaboration in political and security fields; creating a free trade area where economical and financial partnership is strong and; developing the cultural dialogue.
Turkey is one of the founding members of this Partnership and the efforts toward creating a Free Trade Area are deploying very rapidly. This area, when completed, would be one of the biggest trade areas and markets of the world with about 40 countries and a total of 800 millions of consumers and it would play an important role in the global trade. EU has already undersigned bilateral agreements with Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia, Algeria and Syria and the parties already started to gradually build the infrastructure of the future free trade area and to reduce the custom tariffs. It is expected that the remaining Mediterranean countries would undersign bilateral agreements with EU and the free trade area would be completely built until 2015. Consequently, EEC/EU, which started in 1958 with 6 countries doesn’t limit itself with its actual 27 member countries and it, so to speak, covers the whole Mediterranean area by developing an economical perspective.
For Turkey, which is on the road to be a full member of EU, it is very important to closely monitor all these developments and to show a proactive attitude. Turkey is an important power in this region, having the 17th biggest economy of the world. As a matter of fact, Turkey and Israel together produce fifty percent of the total domestic income of the whole region, EU member countries excluded. To make the Barcelona process successful for Turkey, we need to evaluate our advantages and not to miss opportunities. To that effect, we need to prepare the required infrastructure, to get the support of our historical and cultural ties with most of the countries of the region and consequently, we should apply policies corresponding to the position, weight and importance of our country in this region.
In this stage of the Barcelona process, the most important items of top priority to develop the relations between the countries of the region are: to found a Mediterranean Bank to support SMEs and to establish relationships between professional organizations and universities.
At that point, we believed that we, the young businessmen too have important missions and we started to act with the understanding that the leading role of Turkey should be declared in every platform. And we started the works for founding the Mediterranean Young Businessmen Confederation, in order to gather young businessmen of the region under the same roof and unify their forces. TUGIAD leads the preparation works of the above mentioned Confederation, to help Turkish businessmen to move to new horizons and serve to our country.
And as the first concrete step towards founding the Mediterranean Young Businessmen Confederation, TUGIAD and EJB (Association of Egyptian Young Businessmen) during the forum on the Collaboration between Egypt and Turkey, before our President Mr. Abdullah GÜL. These preparatory works will continue with the meeting of Tunisian, Egyptian and Turkish young businessmen to be held in March in Istanbul. We hope that this initiative of ours, as the leading young businessmen and entrepreneurs of the region, is a beginning; that our country takes the role of the “host”, but the role of the “guest” in this process and we wish that all the relevant parties would be active to contribute to a modern and strong Turkey which rises over our historical and cultural heritage.
