EU foreign ministers reached agreement on Monday afternoon over the terms of the EU accession negotations with Turkey that are due to start at 18.00 Central European time today.
No details have yet been released, but it is understood that Austria has backed down over a clause allowing for the option a privileged partnership that would fall short of EU membership.
Turkey is now studying the text before it gives its response. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has previously said that Turkey will not bother starting talks if anything short of full membership is offered.
EU leaders agreed unanimously last December 17 that Turkey could start accession negotiations on October 3 if it fulfilled certain conditions, including signing the extension of the EU-Turkey customs agreement to all new member states. Membership talks are expected to last at least ten years.
Although the European Commission has judged that Turkey has fulfilled all of the conditions set out last December, public opposition to Turkey’s membership among EU voters, over half of whom oppose membership according to opinion polls, as well as Turkey’s insistence that it does not recognise EU-member Cyprus, has raised a question mark over whether the talks can start today.
Austria was seeking a reference to a specific alternative to EU membership if Turkey is unable to complete negotiations but
Austria is believed to be playing tough on Turkey in order to squeeze concessions on neighbouring Croatia. The EU refused to start accession negotiations with Croatia on the planned start date last March because it judged that the government had not co-operated enough in locating wanted war criminals from the conflicts in the early 1990s.
As the deadline for talks looked like it would be missed over the weekend, nationalists in Turkey’s capital Ankara demonstrated against EU membership.
Cyprus, which bargained hard over the wording of an EU counter-statement to Turkey’s declaration that it does not recognise Cyprus, would be left with a dilemma if talks did not start, as EU membership is seen as the only real incentive for Turkey to keep up its interest in a solution to the decades-old Cyprus problem.
