{"id":13446,"date":"2009-06-27T21:50:41","date_gmt":"2009-06-27T19:50:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=13446"},"modified":"2013-10-12T22:53:50","modified_gmt":"2013-10-12T19:53:50","slug":"turkey-to-never-give-up-eu-bid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2009\/06\/27\/turkey-to-never-give-up-eu-bid\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkey to ‘never give up’ EU bid"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Turkey has urged France and Germany to back its bid to join the EU, rejecting calls for a special partnership rather than full membership.<\/strong><\/p>\n

“We will never give up,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters in Brussels.<\/p>\n

Turkey’s EU accession talks are going at a glacial pace and risk suspension if Ankara fails to open its ports and airports to Cyprus this year.<\/p>\n

France and Germany want to give Turkey a “privileged partnership” with the EU.<\/p>\n

But Mr Erdogan insisted “our goal is full membership”.<\/p>\n

He also said it was “populist and wrong” to use Turkey’s bid as an election issue.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Some right-wing parties opposed to Turkey’s bid made gains in the recent European Parliament elections.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Slow progress<\/strong><\/p>\n

The BBC’s Oana Lungescu says both opposition inside the EU and insufficient democratic reforms in Turkey are hampering its bid.<\/p>\n

Next week will see a small step forward, when Turkey is due to start talks on taxation, one of the 35 areas where it is negotiating EU entry terms.<\/p>\n

Turkish diplomats argue that their country is of strategic importance to Europe and that its eventual accession would send a positive signal to the whole Muslim world.<\/p>\n

So far, Turkey has opened talks on 10 out of the 35 “negotiation chapters” in the accession process, which started in October 2005.<\/p>\n

But eight chapters have been frozen because of Ankara’s refusal to open up its ports and airports to traffic from Cyprus, an EU member.<\/p>\n

Turkey says it will not do this until the EU takes steps to end the Turkish Cypriot community’s economic isolation.<\/p>\n

BBC<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Turkey has urged France and Germany to back its bid to join the EU, rejecting calls for a special partnership rather than full membership. “We will never give up,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters in Brussels. Turkey’s EU accession talks are going at a glacial pace and risk suspension if Ankara fails […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":28988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[211,21,835],"tags":[9723,985,9728,9722,1764,1018],"class_list":["post-13446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cyprus-trnc","category-eu-members","category-europe","tag-cyprus","tag-eu","tag-france","tag-germany","tag-membership","tag-recep-tayyip-erdogan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13446\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}