"CACOPHONY OF SIGNALS" SPELLS "NOT WELCOME" FOR TURKS

Spiegel Online, Germany
Nov 8 2006

The European Commission slapped Turkey on the wrist Wednesday for
not opening its ports to Cypriot ships. Turkey has about a month to
shape up, or else. The question is: Or else, what?

The same statement that makes beautiful music in Cyprus strikes a
dissonant and portentous chord in Turkey: "Failure to implement
its obligations in full will affect the overall progress in the
negotiations." Today, the European Commission released its progress
report on Turkey’s EU accession, telling the country it has until
mid-December to open its ports to Cypriot ships, lest it throw its
European dream into jeopardy.

This isn’t the first time Turkey has gotten a slap on the wrist, and
accession talks have always continued to slog forward. The question
now is whether this warning will have consequences — the answer will
come at the Dec. 14-15 EU Summit.

The report does not please Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, but it
also doesn’t surprise him. He dismisses the idea that EU talks could
collapse entirely: "A suspension, a breakdown of consultations,
the train halting at the station, these are not possible," he told
reporters. Instead, there may just be "a slowdown" of the process.

That’s something the EU and Turkey can agree on. Olli Rehn, EU
Enlargement Commissioner, referred to the EU’s expansion as "a slow,
slow train coming and not precisely up around the bend." German
newspapers have weighed in on what this means for Turkey’s future.

"The EU has maneuvered the negotiations with Turkey into a dead end,"
writes the Financial Times Deutschland. The business daily compares
the current state of negotiations to a "train crash." In this head-on
collision, "the conflict surrounding the divided Mediterranean island
[Cyprus] is blocking negotiations" on Turkey’s side, while on the
European end "it is downright fashionable, so they say in Ankara,
to denounce Turkey’s inadequacies." In France, the National Assembly
recently made it illegal to deny the "genocide" of Armenians under
Ottoman rule during World War I, and in Germany, the conservative
Bavarian leader Edmund Stoiber on Tuesday demanded a complete halt to
negotiations with Turkey. For Turkish observers and politicians alike,
this "cacophony of signals means but one thing: not welcome."

The turning of the tide in Turkish public opinion of the EU is no
good, the paper writes, for those who "wish to build a Europe in
which Muslims have their place."

With no small amount of cynicism, the Suddeutsche Zeitung writes
that Edmund Stoiber is highly suited to criticizing his Turkish
counterparts, since he resembles them so closely. The similarities
are in their politics: "whatever happens, don’t upset the voter
base; speak many great words, only to give up on them later; haggle,
dicker and gamble until the last second — but then turn around and
question your own agreements." For the center-left daily, Stoiber is
"the Erdogan from Wolfratshausen." But Stoiber is worse than Erdogan,
the paper concludes, because his motives are purely personal: "Stoiber
is concerned only with himself and the honorable end of his political
career." Merkel, by contrast, is "considerably more reasonable" and
diplomatic than her Bavarian friend, even though both conservative
politicians share the same goal of preventing full membership for
Turkey in favor of a privileged partnership. Without this diplomatic
approach, the paper believes that "Turkey would be lost for any form
of partnership with the EU."

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The Handelsblatt, meanwhile, traces much of the current "euro-political
wrangling" to the conflicts within German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s
own coalition of Social Democrats (SPD) and conservatives. Europe
looks towards Berlin for leadership, the business daily writes,
"but in Berlin, the grand coalition is much too preoccupied with
itself." In regard to Turkey, that means that while conservative
"Edmund Stoiber has once again called for an immediate end to EU
negotiations" with the would-be member state, his supposed social
democratic partner in government "Kurt Beck has demanded the opposite
with equal fervor." These constant negative signals have become what
the paper calls a "self-fulfilling prophecy," borrowing the English
term, that has turned Turkey away from Europe and more towards
Russia. The business paper sees this as a failure of the government
to follow the tradition that has allowed "Europe to become a success,
because governments disregarded the daily trends in strategic moments."

— Alex Bakst and Joshua Gallu, 4 p.m. CET

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