BRUSSELS, 20 December 2004 — Turkey may have spent the weekend celebrating after securing a long-awaited green light for EU entry talks — but as a new week dawns it faces a long and bumpy road ahead, with no guarantee it won’t ultimately come to a dead end.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was hailed as a conquering hero on his return from the Brussels gathering, where the European Union chiefs agreed to start talks next October.
Erdogan claimed a “success” after notably persuading the EU to accept a compromise on the vexed issue of Cyprus which both sides admitted falls short of a Turkish recognition of the divided island, as the EU has long sought.
But after the partying dies down, Ankara will inevitably wake up to the sobering reality of what lies ahead.
“The road will be long and difficult for Turkey to fulfilll all the conditions to join Europe,” said French President Jacques Chirac, who has warned that it may be up to 20 years before Turkey joins the EU, if at all.
That two-decade estimate — slipped by Chirac into a television interview on the eve of last week’s summit — is double the official time frame set out in the EU leaders’ conclusions, which sets 2014 as the earliest possible date.
But the length of the process may be the least of Ankara’s real problems.
Even before the talks start next Oct. 3, they will be clouded by the Cyprus issue.
For, while Ankara agreed to sign a key protocol extending a customs accord to cover the EU’s 10 new states — including Cyprus — it refused to make any commitments to recognize the government.
Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende acknowledged that Erdogan’s pledge to sign the protocol to the 1963 Ankara Agreement did not amount to recognition, but presented it nonetheless as progress.
“It is not what you can call a formal legal recognition but it is a step that can lead to progress in this field,” he said.
Turkey has not recognized Cyprus since its 1974 invasion — prompted by the threat of Greek annexation — of the northern tier of the Mediterranean island in support of a Turkish statelet which only it recognizes.
Aside from Cyprus, the negotiations facing Turkey are formidably daunting in purely logistical terms: Like any other EU hopeful, it must transfer over 80,000 pages of complex EU law onto its national statute book.
But the EU has made it clear that the accession of the vast Muslim country is like no other.
