Dec 17th 2004
From The Economist Global Agenda
At a summit in Brussels, the European Union has agreed to start accession talks with Turkey next October. But the tone of the summit suggests that the road to Turkish membership will be long and full of potholes
AP
Erdogan almost walked
THE European Union will open membership negotiations with Turkey on October 3rd, 2005. That is the essence of the agreement reached at an EU summit that concluded in Brussels on Friday December 17th. But it took two days of tense haggling before this agreement could be reached. At one point, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, was on the point of walking out, as discussions foundered over the question of how far Turkey will go to recognise the government of the Republic of Cyprus, which is now a member of the Union.
The opening of negotiations next year will fulfil a longstanding Turkish goal: the prospect of EU membership was first dangled before the Turks back in 1963. But the accession talks are expected to take at least a decade, for the idea of Turkish membership of the EU (which currently includes 25 countries) remains highly controversial. Turkey is a large, poor, Islamic country, most of whose territory lies in Asia. Its membership would mean that the Union shared a common border with Iraq and Syria. Opinion polls in many EU countries—most notably France and Germany—are strongly hostile to Turkish membership. The centre-right Christian Democrats who are currently in opposition in Germany have said that they might halt talks with Turkey, if they come into power. President Jacques Chirac of France is in favour of Turkish membership. But he has promised that, if and when talks with Turkey are finally concluded, the French people will get to vote on whether to approve Turkish membership. Coming out of this week’s Brussels meeting, the Austrian government made a similar promise.
Once the negotiations begin, they are expected to be extremely lengthy. Turkey will have to enact a corpus of European law which currently runs to over 80,000 pages, and which covers issues as varied as industrial subsidies, environmental protection, foreign policy and health-and-safety at work. The particular sensitivity of admitting Turkey into the EU means that the negotiating process will include some special elements that did not feature in previous rounds of EU enlargement. The declaration issued at the end of the summit pointed to the possibility that negotiations could be suspended if Turkey’s human-rights record worsened. It also included a nod in the direction of those countries—in particular Austria—that have been arguing that Turkey should be offered a “privileged partnership” that falls short of full EU membership. For although the summit declaration emphasised that full membership was the goal of the negotiations, it also made it clear that those negotiations could fail and suggested that if Turkey did not achieve full membership, the EU would still strive to make sure that the country was “fully anchored into European structures through the strongest possible bond”.
Special clauses were also inserted to cater to a particular western European anxiety: the prospect that the EU’s rules on free movement of people and labour will lead to a flood of poor Muslim immigrants heading west. The summit declaration raised the possibility that the eventual deal would include “permanent safeguards” allowing EU countries to close their labour markets, if they were being affected by unsustainably high influxes of Turkish migrants.
But the toughest issue of all turned out to be Cyprus. The northern half of the island remains occupied by Turkish troops and Turkey refuses to accept the legitimacy of the internationally recognised government of the Republic of Cyprus—the southern, Greek-Cypriot bit of the island, which joined the EU last May. The Greek-Cypriots had argued that it would be inappropriate for Turkey to join a club, one of whose members it failed to recognise. The Turks, for their part, insisted that they had made good-faith efforts to achieve a peace settlement (they and their ethnic kin in Cyprus had accepted a UN-sponsored plan to reunify the island but it was spurned by the Greek-Cypriots earlier this year). Mr Erdogan insisted that he could not agree to the opening of membership talks if the price was the formal or de facto recognition of the Republic of Cyprus.
At the summit, this issue ultimately boiled down to whether Turkey would agree to extend its customs agreement with the old EU—the so-called Ankara agreement—to cover the ten newest EU members, including Cyprus. The Turks feared that any such deal would be seen as recognition of Cyprus, and would spark a nationalist backlash at home. Mr Erdogan was on the point of going home—and had even telephoned Brussels airport to get his plane ready—when a last-minute intervention by the EU’s big three (Mr Chirac, Tony Blair of Britain and Gerhard Schröder of Germany) apparently saved the day. Together with the Dutch presidency of the EU, these three came up with a new deal. Turkey will not sign the Ankara agreement—for now. But it has agreed to do so before the opening of negotiations next year, after receiving assurances from the British and others that this does not constitute recognition of Cyprus.
When EU summits wind down, it is customary for the leaders present to make a short and conciliatory closing statement. Instead, Mr Erdogan chose forcefully to reiterate that his government was not recognising Cyprus. This, in turn, prompted a sharp rejoinder from Tassos Papadopoulos, the Cypriot president. Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister, who was present at the closing discussions, commented later that Mr Erdogan’s behaviour was “regrettable” and had injected a “bitter” note into proceedings. It may be a foretaste of things to come.
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