Light years from the European Union

By Martin Winter

FRANKFURT (DPA): The European Union (EU)'s two most ambitious projects -- an independent security and defense policy and eastward enlargement -- are threatened with fiasco. The historic, two-pronged assault to nicely round off the political union while surmounting the continental divide could well elevate the EU to the ranks of a world power.

But the Union has lost partial control of the inalienable sovereignty in negotiation it requires to achieve this act. It has been negligent not only in underestimating the influence of non-EU member Turkey in both parts of the project, but, by granting candidate status, has also entrenched Ankara's determination to use it to its own national advantage.

In security areas, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member Turkey, against the wishes of the EU, is threatening to block the proposed EU force from automatic access to the alliance's assets in an attempt to force its full participation in the EU's military planning. It was a politically implausible notion which the Union countered with a compromise. The offer was rudely rejected by the Turkish army command.

Nor is Turkey holding its punches where enlargement is concerned. It insists that Cyprus should not join the EU before a solution to the Turkish-Greek dispute over the island is reached -- and the key to any solution lies in Ankara. If the EU backs down on this score, the door is likely to be shut in the faces of all other eastern European countries, because Greece will not give the go-ahead to any new candidates joining if Cyprus -- ahead in the negotiations to join -- is not among the first batch to accede.

The EU's strategy of keeping Ankara sweet through a succession of new promises has gone seriously wrong. Indeed, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, committed a grave foreign-policy error in 1999 when they used their leverage to get the EU to grant Turkey candidate status.

Turkey appears to have taken this -- and the obsequious journey to Ankara undertaken by EU foreign-policy chief Javier Solana and head of enlargement Guenter Verheugen to persuade Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit to accept the new status -- as sign of its growing power and not as any pledge of commitment to the EU. That is unique on its own: A country that wants to join the European club as quick as it can that does everything it can to harm it.

Turkey can rightly claim that since the 1960s, when it was required to seal NATO's south-eastern flank in the cold war, it has received a succession of promises of EU entry without any of them being kept. But it is also true that Ankara has done nothing substantial since then to better its chances of accession -- to say nothing of justified doubts over whether Turkey belongs to Europe at all or whether it would be in the EU's geostrategic interests to extend its borders to Syria and Iraq. In fact, Ankara does not seem to be taking the current preparations for EU entry especially seriously.

Human and minority rights, the death penalty and the power of the military all remain unresolved problems. And a country which has only just reintroduced virginity tests for student nurses appears to be moving light-years away from the EU.

The EU's Turkey policies should be driven by a sense of reality and not idle desires. Two insights should make this clear. First, Turkey will not be ready to join for a very long time -- and that means decades, not years -- for a variety of political, economic, social and cultural reasons. Second, a candidate cannot remain such forever. Five or ten years is fine, but after that it becomes absurd. Hence it follows that the concept of Turkey as an EU candidate is already finished.

The EU and Turkey have two routes open: both of them painful, but not necessarily precipitating a break. The Union could wait until the big crunch over enlargement and security policy and then wipe Turkey's name from the list of candidates. Alternatively, it could make Turkey an offer of partnership that supersedes the current not- insubstantial contractual obligations but one that would not be as binding as membership.

The last option may not go any way to solving the problem of NATO access or Cyprus. In both cases, the EU must stand its ground and possibly go its way without NATO while accepting a temporary ice age in European-Turkish relations if it is not to lose both domestic European and external trust in its ability to negotiate. But a special partnership in the medium term could relieve the pressure under which the EU and Turkey both stand.

Certainly, such a fundamental turnaround in policy will hurt Turkish national pride in the short run. But that will pass, and in the end, Ankara may even be grateful as it becomes clear to more and more Turkish politicians that the conditions of EU accession demand not only reforms, but a veritable coup. The country, though, seems neither willing nor capable of achieving one in the foreseeable future.