Turkey’s 40-year dream of joining the European Union took a momentous step forward on Monday night when both sides finally agreed to open membership talks after a marathon round of negotiations.
At the end of a dramatic day, in which the EU finally buried its differences, the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abdullah Gul, flew into Luxembourg after accepting a deal on talks that could last up to 15 years. The Turkish delegation arrived in the early hours for a ceremony marking the formal start of the membership talks.
Earlier, Gul said: ”We have reached agreement. Turkey will be the only Muslim country in EU.”
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who chaired the talks, greeted Gul with hugs. Earlier, Straw had hailed the deal as ”truly historic for Europe and for the whole of the international community. We are all winners: Turkey, the European member states and the international community.”
A successful outcome to the negotiations will mean the EU’s population will grow to more than 500-million, a fifth of whom would be Turkish Muslims. Britain, Turkey’s greatest champion in the EU, believes this would undermine Islamist extremists by showing that the EU is not an exclusively Christian club.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who set the membership talks as one of the main aims of Britain’s EU presidency, believes Turkey’s presence would also help relations with millions of Muslims in today’s EU.
But the talks may well fail, not least because Austria and France will hold referendums on whether to admit Turkey if negotiations succeed. The deal came after Austria, which had been trying to downgrade Turkey’s membership talks, backed down. Austria moved when it became clear that Croatia would be given the green light for talks after the international war-crimes tribunal ruled Zagreb was offering full cooperation. In a symbolic meeting of East and West, the EU formally opened membership talks with Croatia in the early hours.
Earlier, Ankara had taken exception to a demand by the EU that it must move towards accepting ”common” EU policies. Turkish ministers insisted this could force them into the impossible position of having to agree to allow Cyprus, which it does not recognise, into Nato.
With British officials struggling to reassure Turkey this would never happen — because the EU is highly unlikely to agree a ”common” position on Nato — the United States Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, intervened.
Rice is understood to have told Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, that the US could not envisage circumstances in which such a loyal Nato ally would be forced to make such a move on Cyprus.
Any false move on Cyprus could lead to the downfall of Erdogan’s government in Parliament or at the hands of the military. He held a day-long meeting with his national security council as British officials informed them on the state of the negotiations in Luxembourg. After the four-hour pause, Erdogan welcomed the deal.
”We passed the most important phase on the way to reaching our 40-year goal and the founding principles of our republic,” he said.
Britain’s hopes of a strong start to Turkey’s talks ran into trouble last week when Austria insisted Turkey should be offered less than full membership at the outset of talks. Ursula Plassnik, the Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs, stood by her guns on Monday morning, prompting a warning from Straw.
”Yes, we are near [to a deal], but we are also on the edge of a precipice,” he said. ”If we go the right way, we reach the sunny uplands. If we go the wrong way, it could be catastrophic for the EU.”
Around mid-morning a deal started to emerge. With every other EU state refusing to downgrade Turkey’s membership talks, Austria was offered a ”ladder to climb down” when several countries said they would toughen up the language on an area of the talks known as the ”absorption capacity” — whether the EU can fit in a new member.
Ministers agreed to this because it is part of the ”Copenhagen criteria”, which govern membership talks, and would therefore not amount to rewriting the rules. — Guardian Unlimited Â