BRUSSELS: A year after Turkey’s historic opening of negotiations to join the European Union, it is hard to escape a mood of gloom and mutual estrangement.
A growing number of Europeans are not sure they want the vast, poor, overwhelmingly Muslim country to join, according to opinion polls, and an increasing number of Turks feel the EU is treating them unfairly and are looking eastwards to Iran.
European Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn warned earlier this year of the risk of a “train crash” in Turkey’s membership talks unless Ankara speeded up reforms and opened its ports to shipping from EU member Cyprus. It has done neither.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan will try to put an optimistic face on the Oct 3 anniversary, visiting Britain, his strongest supporter in the 25-nation bloc, before hosting German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has toned down her aversion to Turkey’s EU aspirations since she took office last year.
Rehn will visit Ankara on Tuesday with a carrot-and-stick message underlining the huge potential of the accession process for both Europe and Turkey, but also pressing the Turks to deliver on freedom of expression and religion, and on Cyprus.
The Turkish parliament is debating a reform package now but it falls short of EU demands on free speech and the rights of religious minorities.
Despite discreet efforts by the EU’s Finnish presidency to craft a deal to avert a clash over the divided Mediterranean island, there is no mistaking the sense of looming crisis.
“It’s the most promising effort I’ve seen so far to unblock the Cyprus issue, but I wouldn’t bet my salary on it,” said a senior EU official.
Rehn will report on Nov. 8 on Turkey’s progress, including in fulfilling a treaty obligation to open its ports to Cyprus, and EU leaders will decide in December what to do about it.
In the rail terminology favoured by Rehn, enlargement expert Kirsty Hughes painted four scenarios for the coming months in a pamphlet for the think-tank Friends of Europe:
- full steam ahead: a compromise is found on northern Cyprus that gives Turkey enough room to open its ports;
- minor derailment: only a few sections of the negotiations are frozen but some talks continue;
- into a siding: a substantial slowdown of the talks, possibly requiring an EU review to restart them;
- major train crash: a full suspension of negotiations.
The most optimistic scenario seems the least likely, since Turkey’s nationalist political and military establishment is against any new concession on Cyprus after Ankara accepted a 2004 UN peace plan rejected by the Greek Cypriots.
It would also require Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos, who had led opposition to the UN plan, to compromise and allow direct trade between the EU and Turkish Cypriot northern Cyprus, which he sees as legitimising a separate political entity.
Yet diplomats say Papadopoulos has no interest in a complete breakdown of the EU-Turkey talks, because he would lose his leverage over a powerful neighbour which has 35,000 troops in the north of his country.
There is a strong suspicion in Brussels that several EU countries with “enlargement fatigue”, especially France, would be happy to see a deep freeze in Turkey’s accession process. Conservative French presidential frontrunner Nicolas Sarkozy reaffirmed his opposition to Turkish entry on a Brussels visit last month and said if Ankara did not meet its obligations on Cyprus, the EU should suspend the talks.
By contrast, Merkel, while sharing Sarkozy’s scepticism about the goal of full membership, is keen to avoid a crisis with Ankara that would dominate Germany’s EU presidency in the first half of 2007.
Other damage-limitation options under consideration include sending the Cyprus ports dispute to the slow-moving European Court of Justice, which would buy time until after next year’s Turkish election but requires the assent of both parties.
Ankara may not agree because it would almost certainly lose the case, while Cyprus may not want to see the issue kicked into touch for at least two years, diplomats say.
Another possibility, based on last year’s EU declaration, is that Brussels would freeze only those “chapters” or policy areas directly relevant to the Cyprus dispute, such as transport, the internal market and perhaps maritime safety. That would avoid a total breakdown, but even such a partial derailment could run out of control in the emotionally-charged atmosphere of Turkish and French elections next year and Cypriot polls in 2008, Hughes warns.
“If irritation and loss of energy on both sides feeds into a simmering low-level crisis — with ... the stand-of over Cyprus not resolved — some of the implications of the worst-case scenario could start to develop,” she said.—Reuters
