EUROPEAN UNION FORMALLY OPENS TALKS ON TURKEY’S JOINING
By Craig S. Smith

New York Times
Oct 4 2005

LUXEMBOURG, Tuesday, Oct. 4 – After days of wrenching negotiations,
Turkey and the European Union held a brief ceremony here early Tuesday
that formally opened talks on Turkey’s bid to join the union.

The ceremony, which began just past midnight after an agreement was
reached late Monday, set in motion a process that would probably take
a decade or more but could end with the European Union’s extending its
borders eastward into Asia to embrace a predominantly Muslim country.

“This is a truly historic day for Europe and for the whole of the
international community,” said Jack Straw, Britain’s foreign secretary,
who was chairman of the negotiations. He said Turkey’s entry “will
bring a strong, secular state that happens to have a Muslim majority
into the E.U. – proof that we can live, work and prosper together.”

Turkey has worked for more than four decades to join, restructuring
its legal system and economy to meet European standards even as Europe
added demands and refused to start formal negotiations.

The agreement on Monday to open the talks was a hard-won victory for
the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who
has staked his political credibility on getting them under way. He
hailed the beginning of talks, saying, “Turkey has taken a giant step
forward on its historic march.”

But the bitter struggle over the terms of the talks reflects Europe’s
deep ambivalence toward Turkey’s membership.

The talks come at a difficult time for the European Union, which is
mired in an identity crisis and whose consensus-based decision-making
process is already bogged down by the addition last year of 10 members.

Many Europeans – more than half according to some polls – oppose
Turkey’s membership, arguing that while the country has a toehold in
Europe, it is not European at its core. Critics say the union would
have difficulty absorbing such a large, poor country and complain
that Turkey’s membership would open the doors for a potentially huge
wave of Muslim immigrants.

By the time it could be expected to join, Turkey’s current population
of 70 million people would probably have grown to outnumber that of
Germany, now the largest European state. Under current rules, that
would give it the most seats in the European Parliament, skewing an
already complex European agenda.

The agreement to start the talks was held up until late Monday as
European members haggled over an Austrian demand that the talks include
an alternative to full membership, giving the union a diplomatically
palatable option to inviting Turkey to join.

Austria eventually dropped its demands, but an agreement was then
blocked by Turkey’s objections to language that it feared could
force it to support an eventual bid by the Greek-dominated Republic
of Cyprus to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Turkey
withdrew its objections after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
called Mr. Erdogan in Ankara to assure him that the negotiations with
Europe would not affect Turkey’s voting power in NATO.

Supporters of Turkey’s membership say the expansion would open
up a vast potential economic market to Europe. Other advocates,
including the United States, say bringing Turkey into the European
club would help spread democracy into the Middle East and increase
regional security.

That idea was echoed by Turkey’s foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, before
he boarded a plane in Ankara on Monday night to fly to Luxembourg.

“Once Turkey enters in the European Union, all these circles will also
see themselves, one way or another, represented within the E.U.,”
Mr. Gul said. He left Turkey late Monday night in order to attend
the ceremony here early Tuesday.

The squabble over talks with Turkey briefly held up consideration
of Croatia’s European membership talks, which had been frozen since
March over the country’s poor cooperation in arresting a fugitive
war crimes suspect. Austria had pushed for talks with Croatia to begin.

Late Monday, the chief prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes
tribunal, Carla Del Ponte, told European foreign ministers that Croatia
was cooperating fully – a sharp reversal of her assessment just a few
days earlier during a visit to the Croatian capital, Zagreb. Membership
talks with Croatia are now expected to start within days.

The last-minute diplomacy kept Mr. Gul waiting in Ankara and frayed
nerves on both sides.

“Either it will show political maturity and become a global power,
or it will end up a Christian club,” Mr. Erdogan said of the European
Union on Sunday.

It is just that question that is haunting Europe. The European project,
begun as a means to ensure peace among historic enemies, has faltered
since the end of the cold war, which helped define it. In the 15
years since German reunification, the union has grown but weakened
as it has absorbed much of formerly Communist Central Europe.

Deep differences within the union, particularly between its incoming
and longstanding members, broke into the open over the American-led
invasion of Iraq, which many of the new union members supported but
the older members did not. “Building a consensus is difficult if you
don’t have common values,” said Constanze Stelzenmuller, of the German
Marshall Fund in Berlin. “There has been a loss of focus, a loss of
the sense of commonality, a loss of common interests in Europe.”

Many people worry that adding a country with such a vastly different
cultural and economic heritage like Turkey’s to the mix would only
soften that focus further.

Meanwhile, economic malaise in much of Europe has made people wary
of the heralded “ever closer union” that for many simply means lost
jobs. Those fears helped defeat referendums on a proposed European
constitution in France and the Netherlands earlier this year, stalling
the union’s already slowing momentum and leading many opinion-makers
to question openly what it was that Europe wanted to become. Turkey’s
effort to become a member, which has continued in some form for more
than 40 years, naturally became central to that debate.

Turkey became an associate member of what was then the European
Economic Community in 1963 and formally applied for full membership
in April 1987. It was officially recognized as a candidate only in
December 1999, and it was not until last December that the union
agreed to set a date for membership negotiations to begin.

As part of its campaign to meet European standards, Turkey has
abolished the death penalty, improved its human rights record and
allowed broader use of the Kurdish language among its large Kurdish
minority. But it is criticized for refusing to explore the killing of
Armenians in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire and for refusing
to recognize Cyprus, which became a European Union member last year.

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul for this article.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress