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European Union Formally Opens Talks On Turkey's Joining

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  • European Union Formally Opens Talks On Turkey's Joining

    EUROPEAN UNION FORMALLY OPENS TALKS ON TURKEY'S JOINING
    By Craig S. Smith

    New York Times
    Oct 4 2005

    LUXEMBOURG, Tuesday, Oct. 4 - After days of wrenching negotiations,
    Turkey and the European Union held a brief ceremony here early Tuesday
    that formally opened talks on Turkey's bid to join the union.

    The ceremony, which began just past midnight after an agreement was
    reached late Monday, set in motion a process that would probably take
    a decade or more but could end with the European Union's extending its
    borders eastward into Asia to embrace a predominantly Muslim country.

    "This is a truly historic day for Europe and for the whole of the
    international community," said Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary,
    who was chairman of the negotiations. He said Turkey's entry "will
    bring a strong, secular state that happens to have a Muslim majority
    into the E.U. - proof that we can live, work and prosper together."

    Turkey has worked for more than four decades to join, restructuring
    its legal system and economy to meet European standards even as Europe
    added demands and refused to start formal negotiations.

    The agreement on Monday to open the talks was a hard-won victory for
    the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who
    has staked his political credibility on getting them under way. He
    hailed the beginning of talks, saying, "Turkey has taken a giant step
    forward on its historic march."

    But the bitter struggle over the terms of the talks reflects Europe's
    deep ambivalence toward Turkey's membership.

    The talks come at a difficult time for the European Union, which is
    mired in an identity crisis and whose consensus-based decision-making
    process is already bogged down by the addition last year of 10 members.

    Many Europeans - more than half according to some polls - oppose
    Turkey's membership, arguing that while the country has a toehold in
    Europe, it is not European at its core. Critics say the union would
    have difficulty absorbing such a large, poor country and complain
    that Turkey's membership would open the doors for a potentially huge
    wave of Muslim immigrants.

    By the time it could be expected to join, Turkey's current population
    of 70 million people would probably have grown to outnumber that of
    Germany, now the largest European state. Under current rules, that
    would give it the most seats in the European Parliament, skewing an
    already complex European agenda.

    The agreement to start the talks was held up until late Monday as
    European members haggled over an Austrian demand that the talks include
    an alternative to full membership, giving the union a diplomatically
    palatable option to inviting Turkey to join.

    Austria eventually dropped its demands, but an agreement was then
    blocked by Turkey's objections to language that it feared could
    force it to support an eventual bid by the Greek-dominated Republic
    of Cyprus to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Turkey
    withdrew its objections after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
    called Mr. Erdogan in Ankara to assure him that the negotiations with
    Europe would not affect Turkey's voting power in NATO.

    Supporters of Turkey's membership say the expansion would open
    up a vast potential economic market to Europe. Other advocates,
    including the United States, say bringing Turkey into the European
    club would help spread democracy into the Middle East and increase
    regional security.

    That idea was echoed by Turkey's foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, before
    he boarded a plane in Ankara on Monday night to fly to Luxembourg.

    "Once Turkey enters in the European Union, all these circles will also
    see themselves, one way or another, represented within the E.U.,"
    Mr. Gul said. He left Turkey late Monday night in order to attend
    the ceremony here early Tuesday.

    The squabble over talks with Turkey briefly held up consideration
    of Croatia's European membership talks, which had been frozen since
    March over the country's poor cooperation in arresting a fugitive
    war crimes suspect. Austria had pushed for talks with Croatia to begin.

    Late Monday, the chief prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes
    tribunal, Carla Del Ponte, told European foreign ministers that Croatia
    was cooperating fully - a sharp reversal of her assessment just a few
    days earlier during a visit to the Croatian capital, Zagreb. Membership
    talks with Croatia are now expected to start within days.

    The last-minute diplomacy kept Mr. Gul waiting in Ankara and frayed
    nerves on both sides.

    "Either it will show political maturity and become a global power,
    or it will end up a Christian club," Mr. Erdogan said of the European
    Union on Sunday.

    It is just that question that is haunting Europe. The European project,
    begun as a means to ensure peace among historic enemies, has faltered
    since the end of the cold war, which helped define it. In the 15
    years since German reunification, the union has grown but weakened
    as it has absorbed much of formerly Communist Central Europe.

    Deep differences within the union, particularly between its incoming
    and longstanding members, broke into the open over the American-led
    invasion of Iraq, which many of the new union members supported but
    the older members did not. "Building a consensus is difficult if you
    don't have common values," said Constanze Stelzenmuller, of the German
    Marshall Fund in Berlin. "There has been a loss of focus, a loss of
    the sense of commonality, a loss of common interests in Europe."

    Many people worry that adding a country with such a vastly different
    cultural and economic heritage like Turkey's to the mix would only
    soften that focus further.

    Meanwhile, economic malaise in much of Europe has made people wary
    of the heralded "ever closer union" that for many simply means lost
    jobs. Those fears helped defeat referendums on a proposed European
    constitution in France and the Netherlands earlier this year, stalling
    the union's already slowing momentum and leading many opinion-makers
    to question openly what it was that Europe wanted to become. Turkey's
    effort to become a member, which has continued in some form for more
    than 40 years, naturally became central to that debate.

    Turkey became an associate member of what was then the European
    Economic Community in 1963 and formally applied for full membership
    in April 1987. It was officially recognized as a candidate only in
    December 1999, and it was not until last December that the union
    agreed to set a date for membership negotiations to begin.

    As part of its campaign to meet European standards, Turkey has
    abolished the death penalty, improved its human rights record and
    allowed broader use of the Kurdish language among its large Kurdish
    minority. But it is criticized for refusing to explore the killing of
    Armenians in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire and for refusing
    to recognize Cyprus, which became a European Union member last year.

    Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul for this article.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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