Turkey was yesterday given a month to rescue its bid to join the European Union, as Brussels sought to allay public concerns that the EU is expanding too far and too fast. In response, Ankara said it was up to the 25-nation bloc to keep the negotiations alive.
"It is clear that Turkey is not fulfilling its obligations," Philippe Douste-Blazy, France's foreign minister, said yesterday. Unless Ankara changed its behaviour, "it seems to me necessary to review Turkey's EU membership timetable".
The issue is set to come to a head at an EU summit next month. But Olli Rehn, EU enlargement commissioner, held out hope that the looming "train wreck" over Turkey's membership could yet be averted. "While there's a will, there's a way," he said.
The European Commission had been considering whether to recommend the formal suspension of three or more of the 34 remaining negotiating "chapters" of Turkey's membership talks because of Ankara's failure to meet a key EU demand over Cyprus.
Yesterday Mr Rehn announced that the Commission would not make a recommendation at this stage, giving Turkey more time to meet the EU's concerns.
Officials said that Brussels would probably set out the likely penalties for Turkey in early to mid-December, ahead of the EU summit. But Mr Rehn's staff fears that if the EU takes too tough a stance with Ankara, either the talks will prove impossible to revive or Turkey will choose to walk away.
"At this point, much of the responsibility for continuing the [EU] accession process lies with the EU rather than with Turkey," said the Turkish government in an official statement. Ankara added that the issue of Cyprus should not be linked to its own membership bid.
But the Turkish statement appeared to acknowledge that its preparations for EU membership needed to be stepped up. "We will correct the problems stemming from implementation," said Abdullah Gul, Turkish foreign minister.
Yesterday's Commission report highlighted the issue that could bring the negotiations to a halt - the country's refusal to open up its ports to vessels from Cyprus, which is an EU member but which does not have diplomatic ties with Ankara.
The report also criticised Turkey for letting the pace of reform slow and expressed its concern over prosecutions of writers and journalists for criticising "Turkishness" and the Turkish state. The report voiced the Commission's concern that Turkey's judiciary was not yet sufficiently independent, that its military was not fully under civilian control and that some cases of torture were still being reported.
Mr Rehn said he hoped the Turkish parliament would amend the article in the country's penal code that the Commission believes restricts freedom of speech. He added that a Finnish attempt to broker a deal between Turkey, Cyprus and the self-styled Republic of Northern Cyprus was "the last opportunity to make serious progress for some years to come on this issue".
Such a deal would remove the biggest threat to Turkey's candidacy. However, many EU diplomats believe the likelihood of a Finnish breakthrough is slim. A ministerial meeting scheduled for last Sunday to reach a deal was cancelled.
Under the Finnish proposal, the Northern Cypriot port of Famagusta would come under EU management and be opened to trade with the rest of the EU.
At the same time, the UN would take charge of the neighbouring town of Varosha.
Mr Rehn also addressed wider public fears about the pace of EU expansion with new guidelines for future enlargements, but insisted the EU should not slam the door on any country with ambitions to join the club.
His paper on the union's "capacity to integrate new members" said any future enlargement should only come after the union had modernised its creaking institutions, probably by salvaging parts of the moribund EU constitution.
Learning the lessons of the difficult negotiations with Bulgaria and Romania - which will join the EU on January 1 - Mr Rehn said that future talks would have to tackle crime and corruption at an earlier stage.
But both he and José Manuel Barroso, European Commission president, have resisted pressure from politicians in France, Germany and elsewhere to make the EU's "absorption capacity" a new condition for membership and have refused to define the eventual eastern borders of the club.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
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