No interruption to negotiations. The Turkish dossier can wait. The EU will not be debating it at a high political level until after the essential orientations in its “fundamental treaty” are defined. This is all very good. It is not exactly the right moment to be adding a very sensitive and controversial dossier to the others currently being discussed. There are at least two reasons for justifying this: a) the EU's attitude to its future enlargements (beyond those which have, in principle, already been obtained) will partly depend on what its new treaty currently being prepared will be; b) Turkey will soon have a new parliament and a new president and the choices to be made by its people will logically have an influence on future developments.
Nicolas Sarkozy's declarations had provoked the new debate and confirmed the fact that, in his opinion, Turkey's place is not within the EU. He explained, however, that there should be no interruption to ongoing negotiations. They will continue over the next few weeks but at their tentative rhythm. Neither has it been ruled out that they will be extended to a few more chapters at the end of June. The president of the French Republic did not rule this out at all and one of his collaborators explained this attitude to Brussels with an example: “One of the chapters that could be opened in negotiation focuses on statistics. Everyone obviously wants to see that Turkish statistics are reliable and comparable to ours”. In practice this means that EU-Turkey relations are very close and that they will, in any case, get stronger. Everything that contributes to them working well is positive.
No-one is talking about “turning our back” on Turkey. This is where the heart of the problem lies. Too often the partisans of Turkish accession present reservations to accession as a rejection of Turkey; this is obviously mistaken. The problem is one of knowing whether full accession is the best formula and in the interest of both parties. The choice is not simply between accession or rejection but rather between accession and a close form of special cooperation beyond what already exists (which is in fact significant). A very recent position taken by the British minister for European affairs appears to me to clearly illustrate this fallacy. Geoff Hoon declared that Western Europe should not turn its back on a large Muslim and secular country. As far as I know, no-one has been talking about turning its back on Turkey. The real fear however, is that London uses Turkey as a way of helping transform the EU into an intergovernmental block (with the current Community rules, Turkey's institutional weight would be excessive in both the Parliament and Council and it would need to be changed), nothing but a single market in effect (Common Agricultural Policy and Cohesion Policy would no longer be able to receive funding as they currently do).
Schulz and Cohn-Bendit still need to re-think. Have these aspects been sufficiently taken into consideration? Some declarations from influential MEPs appear to me to be more brilliant than they are actually well thought out. Martin Schulz, president of the Socialist group, described Nicolas Sarkozy's position rejecting Turkey as “electioneering prattle”. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, co-president of the Greens, group pointed out that Nicolas Sarkozy would not in fact be in power when the final decision is taken. This will take place in 15 years or so when France has another president. The current president has himself announced that he will not go beyond two mandates.
In my opinion they are both wrong: Schulz in not believing that Nicolas Sarkozy was expressing a firm conviction, and Cohn-Bendit in thinking that they have to wait 15 years before deciding. The EU would be wrong to negotiate so long with a great and ancient civilisation only to finally inform it that accession is not possible. Waiting several weeks, and even more to discuss the matter in view of reaching common reflections on alternative solutions is justifiable. I think that it is too early to resign ourselves to the formula of Michel Rocard, according to which the dream of an integrated Europe is dead, and at the same time open the door to Turkey (and many others). Let's wait, at least until we know about the new fundamental treaty, before we give up on our ambitions.
The new reflection will then have to take into account all the different aspects, including those which we do not for the moment dare to openly confront, or which we pretend to ignore and which will be brought up in this column tomorrow.
(FR)