French president Jacques Chirac bluntly told United States president George Bush to mind his own business on Monday when the United States president urged European leaders to give Turkey a firm date for starting EU membership talks later this year.
Ignoring the determined effort to celebrate improved transatlantic relations after the Iraq crisis, the French president publicly rebuked Bush at Nato’s Istanbul summit for calling for special treatment for the Turks.
Bush, he complained, ”not only went too far but went on to territory which is not his own”.
He added: ”It’s as if I was advising the US on how they should manage their relations with Mexico.”
As he was speaking, Tony Blair and Bush were asked about their current relationship with France and Germany, the key Nato critics of their Iraq war policy.
Blair said: ”There’s no point … in saying all the previous disagreements have disappeared; they have not.”
But he insisted that UN resolution 1546 on Iraq and Monday’s agreement on training Iraqi troops had given him what he wanted.
Blair has been notably more emollient in the running feud with Paris than Chirac, whose domestic popularity is boosted by it: the exact opposite of Blair’s situation at home.
Monday’s target was an easy one for Paris. Washington, which long ago embraced secular Turkey as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism in the cold war, has also promoted its case for integration in the EU.
Since September 11 that has become an even more urgent objective.
The US, supported by Britain, has been pushing hard on behalf of Turkey, its Nato ally, and highlighting the value of Europe embracing the world’s most successful Muslim democracy at a time when many predict a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west.
France has been the most openly resistant.
After denying Turkey even candidate status for EU membership for many years until it was finally conceded in 1999, EU leaders are due to decide at their next summit in December when it can begin formal negotiations, which will take at least 10 years.
First Turkey has to meet the union’s strict criteria on human rights, the judiciary and democracy, and the recent authorisation of Kurdish-language radio broadcasts and judicial reforms put it on course for a decision to begin talks early next year.
Polls repeatedly show France to be the country most opposed to the enlargement of the EU, and specifically to Turkish membership.
With a population of 70-million and a high birthrate it could be the union’s biggest member state when it joins, replacing Germany whose demographic projections point the other way.
Meanwhile, the Portuguese prime minister, Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, is keeping everyone on tenterhooks by insisting that he will not decide whether to accept the presidency of the European Commission until hours before EU leaders meet in Brussels his afternoon to make the appointment.
”I cannot … announce this decision without making certain that the necessary conditions are met, both from the point of view of the European Union and the domestic point of view,” he said.
His comment was broadcast live in Portugal, where there is a dispute about what should happen if he decides to go to Brussels rather than continue leading his own country.
As he flew home from the Nato summit in Istanbul to consult President Jorge Sampaio last night, the Portuguese media reported that he believed he must make sure his departure would not provoke a domestic crisis.
The opposition parties, and even some members of his government, have openly disagreed about how a new prime minister should be chosen.
His centre-right Social Democratic Party (PSD) is trailing in the opinion polls and suffered in the European elections last month, and the Socialist opposition has called for a general election.
The call was backed by 2 000 protesters who gathered outside the presidential palace in Lisbon on Sunday.
President Sampaio is free to either accept a new nominee from the PSD or call elections, which are not formally due until 2006. He is widely expected to turn to the PSD again, even though it has become increasingly unpopular since it was elected two years ago. – Guardian Unlimited Â