{"id":23704,"date":"2010-10-17T09:26:56","date_gmt":"2010-10-17T07:26:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=23704"},"modified":"2014-01-05T21:08:53","modified_gmt":"2014-01-05T19:08:53","slug":"turkey-and-la-france","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2010\/10\/17\/turkey-and-la-france\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkey and La France"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Last week French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner visited Turkey. While Turkey and France have strong business links, on the political level relations are far from perfect — not least as a result of France\u2019s position on Turkish membership of the EU.\t French President Nicolas Sarkozy has made it very clear that he views Turkey as a non-European state, incompatible with EU values. Sarkozy continues to say that a privileged partnership would be the best option for relations with Ankara. Nevertheless, France needs and wants to have strong ties with Turkey and this visit was clearly meant to boost them.<\/p>\n

Turkey\u2019s EU process is dying and while Turkey has its fair share of the blame to shoulder, there is no doubt that the current French position is also to blame. Furthermore, the French act as if they can totally separate Paris\u2019s position on Turkey\u2019s accession from the rest of political relations. For example, France still looks for strong support from Turkey for French diplomatic initiatives outside Europe, including in the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n

Kouchner did his best not to talk about French opposition to Turkey\u2019s EU bid, sidestepping any questions that were thrown at him on this topic. He simply said that France\u2019s position was well known. Rather paradoxically, given France\u2019s opposition, he preferred to talk about what Turkey should be doing to make progress in the membership negotiations. He underlined that the ball is in Turkey\u2019s court, adding that Ankara needs to introduce more reforms to advance its lagging negotiations.<\/p>\n

During a press conference, Kouchner told Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davuto\u011flu that Turkey could open talks on three new chapters — the remaining 18 are blocked, mostly due to the impasse over Cyprus as Turkey continues to refuse to open its ports and airports to the republic of Cyprus due to the EU\u2019s failure to deliver on commitments made to Turkish Cypriots. Only when there is a change will Turkey do what it is actually legally obliged to do.<\/p>\n

He claimed the chapter on competition could be opened before the end of the year and the one on social policy and employment could be prepared for the Hungarian presidency, which will cover the first six months of 2011. That would leave the last one — public procurement — for the Polish or Danish presidencies. Of course that all implies that Turkey will meet the tough benchmarks or that no other country will block them. It is not totally impossible that Cyprus may decide to block further.<\/p>\n

As a Greek Cypriot friend of mine told me, Greek Cypriot President Dimitris Christofias is coming under increasing pressure to do this. Greek Cypriots are fed up with seeing Turkey\u2019s negotiations proceeding (albeit at a snail\u2019s pace) and Turkey continuing to fail to implement the Ankara Protocol. While clearly this would not be welcomed by many other member states — another dispute with Turkey would be highly undesirable — it should not be totally excluded.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, what happens after these remaining chapters are opened is the million-dollar question. Not only will there be no more chapters, but the EU\u2019s rotation will fall into the hands of the Greek Cypriots in June 2012. In the best-case scenario, the Cyprus problem will have been resolved by then, which would open the way to re-energizing the whole process. However, it is more likely that it will not be and how Turkey will deal with the Cypriot presidency (a country that Turkey does not recognize) will be tricky, to say the least — if not impossible.<\/p>\n

On the Turkish side, Davuto\u011flu continued to push France to liberalize visa regimes for Turks. Turkey continues to feel bitter that many of the countries of the Western Balkans (which are not even negotiating full membership) have already obtained a visa-free regime while Turkey, which has been negotiating for five years, still has a strict visa system to face. Free visa travel would improve people-to-people contacts as well as facilitate business relationships. But here again France is not likely to be overly keen, given the country\u2019s \u201cdifficulties\u201d with its current Muslim community. President Sarkozy\u2019s recent actions towards the Roma suggest that Paris is unlikely to soften up on this any time soon.<\/p>\n

Sarkozy is planning to visit Turkey in early 2011. Therefore, he still has time to work on a charm offensive and work out what this so-called \u201cprivileged partnership\u201d would entail, given that for all intents and purposes Turkey already has a privileged partnership with the EU. What is clear is that Turkey is not going to say let us forget what you are doing to us in Europe, and will help you when you come knocking on our door unless, of course, Ankara has something meaningful to gain by doing so.<\/p>\n

Amanda Paul
\nZaman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner visited Turkey. While Turkey and France have strong business links, on the political level relations are far from perfect — not least as a result of France\u2019s position on Turkish membership of the EU. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has made it very clear that he views Turkey as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":23705,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,48],"tags":[3957],"class_list":["post-23704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-eu-members","category-france","tag-amanda-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23704","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=23704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23704\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}