Two readings: If some readers had the patience to read or at least skirt over the main thrust of my comments yesterday and last week that I wrote on Turkey, I can understand their despair: what will be the conclusions on the mass of factors and facts I gave them to mull over? It's difficult to answer that! But it's not here wherein the confusion lies (or not only here) but in my head. It's the situation that's confusing, to the extent that major players whose support for European integration is unquestionable, are lining up on radically opposing sides. One could say that the Turkish question calls for two readings. I would already be quite pleased if I had managed to clarify the following:
1) the decision to open negotiations will not automatically lead to accession. Turkey itself could consider this, when the time comes, that the status of Member State is not adapted to its situation or ambitions due mainly to the scale of the "sovereignty sharing" involved and the constraints resulting from "European values";
2) the situation will be different if the EU does not approve its Constitution. If this occurs the EU as a whole will become ungovernable ("insipid, amorphous and bickering", according to Jean-Louis Bourlangues) where a number of countries, even those outside Europe could have a place, and deep integration would be relaunched between the Member States which want it. Their political will would therefore have to get over the legal hurdles, even those that currently appear insurmountable.
No role. We have to free ourselves from a misconception: past relations between Europe and the Ottoman Empire should not play any role for or against Turkish accession. The Bolkestein thesis according to which EU accession would make Ottoman invasion under the ramparts of Vienna, pointless, does not mean anything in itself, as it is in fact acknowledged that the Union's current partners have not over the centuries failed to enter into war with each other ceaselessly and ferociously, and that the reason for their joining a Community was specifically our of a desire to break with the past and end the conflicts that had for so long and so cruelly blackened our continent. The will to achieve reconciliation and peace is valid for all. Why not consider, if this were not the case, that the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar made Italy's accession inopportune? In another respect, the observation that Turkey was closely involved in Europe's history does not determine the European character of the country and is not an argument in favour of accession. The fact that France was once allied with Turkey against another European country does not mean anything today. France has acted similarly on two occasions with the USA and Canada and this is no reason for agreeing to New Orleans or Quebec joining the EU, despite the current or past linguistic identity. These specific historical discussions appear to me to be rather pointless given the real problems I mentioned yesterday, and even a prime minister like Guy Verhofstadt was a little ingenuous when he compared Istanbul to Prague because within Saint Sophia he was able to "breathe Europe". It is obvious that the problem is not Istanbul, which when it was called Constantinople, was the capital of the Christian world before Rome, and then on choosing to use the name of Byzantine again (the name of the King of Thraces Bizas, who founded the city 600 years earlier), was for a thousand years, the capital of the Roman eastern empire. Who would not open with open arms the city that practised before us, what we today call "European values" by facilitating the cohabitation of Jews and Copts, Muslims and Orthodox Christians? The problem is certainly not Istanbul or the areas around it.
Stages. In the Turkish saga, it is in my opinion necessary to move forward in an orderly fashion. The first stage is the approval of the Constitution by the current EU. When the Constitution is in force we can examine, by negotiating with the Turkish authorities, whether Turkey is prepared to wholeheartedly agree and to what extent apply, all of the provisions. If on the other hand, the Constitution fails, we will negotiate with Turkey on its accession to the Treaty of Nice. In the meantime we can hope and trust that ambitious Member States take appropriate initiatives for relaunching supranational integration, strengthen internal policies, put the common area for freedom, security and justice into practice and develop foreign policy and the policy for security and defence. In this way we will be able to achieve calm and cast aside aggressiveness and zealousness by, to begin with, preventing the debate on voting on the Constitution becoming contaminated by our internal quarrels on Turkish accession.
(F.R.)
EP session