Turkey and the EU. A chaotic start with pitfalls ahead

Keeping the EU's date with Turkey turned out to be a messy business

IT WAS hardly the Union's finest moment, but the European gift for squabbling over details, and finessing deadlines, was shown off to good effect. In the small hours of October 4th, the British, who hold the EU's presidency, claimed to have kept the Union's promise to launch membership talks with Turkey - on precisely the agreed date, October 3rd.

It was all a matter of which time zone you were in, the Brits explained. If you went by Greenwich Mean Time, the appointed day was still in progress; never mind that in Luxembourg, where the talks were in progress, it was two hours later, and in Ankara yet another hour on. And anyway, chimed in Olli Rehn, the European Union's commissioner for enlargement, we could always have “stopped the clock” for a few hours if necessary.

Interrupting the march of time is probably not the most difficult thing that Turkey and the European Union will have to do if the promise of full Turkish membership is to become reality, presumably in a decade or more's time. But the British achievement, in sorting out all the last-minute problems over talks with Turkey, was still significant. It showed that the Union is still capable of taking hard decisions, even after its leaders declared their whole project to be in crisis after a pet initiative - the approval of a European constitution - virtually collapsed during the summer.

But the huge difficulties of getting to the starting-point with Turkey suggest that the country's Euro-troubles have only just begun. So awkward was the haggling that Britain, whose turn it was to chair the talks, kept the terms of the final compromise hidden from most of its European partners until Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had signed on the dotted line. That in turn cleared the way for his foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, to set out from Ankara to Luxembourg. Only at a late-ish stage did Britain present the deal to its partners, congratulating them all on their fine diplomatic achievement. Others, dismayed by this sleight-of-hand, were left muttering darkly about Albion's perfidious tactics.

The Turks must now turn to the tougher problem of actually getting in. This means, first, fulfilling the normal conditions of entry, including adopting over 80,000 pages of EU law. These are divided into 35 so-called “chapters”, each covering a topic such as justice and home affairs. All 25 EU members must agree that Turkey has met every condition in each chapter for that bit of the negotiation to be closed. In other words, anyone can hold up talks at any time. The Greek-Cypriot president, Tassos Papadopoulos, has assured his voters that he has scores of vetoes up his sleeve.

Indeed, the summit in Luxembourg also showed that Turkish entry into the EU will be inconceivable unless Cyprus is solved. That problem resurfaced because the EU's entry terms require newcomers to align their foreign policies with the EU in international bodies. In the final stages of the talks Turkey grew worried about this: it voiced the fear that if it joined the Union, it could not veto any application by the Greek-Cypriot government to join NATO.

In fact, its worries were excessive. All the same, it required phone calls from Condoleezza Rice, America's secretary of state, to the Cypriot president (getting assurances that Cyprus does not want to apply) and to the Turkish prime minister (saying don't panic) to allay the fears. The need to call in the Americans, who a month ago were being told to keep out of the EU's talks with Turkey, is a worrying portent for the Europeans' ability to solve the Cypriot conundrum without transatlantic help.

Lastly, the Turks must prepare European public opinion for their entry. Both France and Austria have promised referendums and, at the moment, public opinion in those countries is overwhelmingly hostile. Earlier this year, the German chancellor, who supports Turkey's wish to join, said its attitudes to human rights were “incompatible with [the EU's] common values”. After the agreement, France's President Jacques Chirac said Turkey needed a “cultural revolution” to get in.

Yet whatever happens later, the decision to open talks has already had one important effect. It has kept the door open to further enlargement of the EU in the Balkans. Just 45 minutes after the start of negotiations with Turkey, the Union began accession talks with Croatia. The British said this was coincidence, but few people believed this.

Croatia's entry process broke down because of EU demands that it hand over a suspected war criminal. A sudden breakthrough came because Croatia had supposedly changed its ways, and Carla Del Ponte, the head prosecutor of the tribunal for war crimes, was able to report that Zagreb's authorities were “co-operating fully” with her. Perhaps. But her report appeared just as Austria's objections to Turkish accession talks were melting away - and Austria has been a strong backer of Croatian membership. To many Europeans, swallowing Croatia looks like the price of Turkish accession.

Whatever the truth of that suspicion, the decision to open talks with both countries should, European officials hope, forestall a new crisis in the Balkans. Many reckon that the hope of eventual membership of the EU is the only thing keeping the region's rickety states minimally stable. And their big fear was that, if both the EU constitution and Turkey were rejected, this aspiration would vanish and the region could slide into conflict once more.

If they are right, the EU avoided three crises this week: in Brussels, Ankara - and the Balkans. But only just.

Feature on the formal start of Turkey's European Union membership negotiations, 3 October 2005. Keeping the EU's date with Turkey turned out to be a messy business.