Turkish president in Britain for state visit as hopes of joining EU crumble in the face of opposition from France and Germany
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Abdullah Gül, pictured watching the 'Youth and Sports Day' ceremonies in Ankara, arrived in London on Sunday ahead of a state visit to Britain. Photograph: Ates Tumer/EPA
Amid all the drama of the eurozone crisis, the political world has missed out on a highly significant development in the EU. This is the junking of Turkey's hopes of joining the EU.
Abdullah Gül, the president of Turkey who took part in the ceremony marking the formal opening of his country's EU accession negotiations in 2005, will start a three day state visit to Britain on Tuesday. He is speaking at the CBI conference on Monday.
The president will receive a warm welcome in Britain which has traditionally championed Turkey's lengthy campaign to join the EU. It was no accident that Turkey's formal EU accession talks were launched during the UK presidency of the EU in 2005.
But Britain and Turkey both know that Turkey will not be joining the EU for a generation at least. The humiliating treatment of Gül at the start of those negotiations, which I described in a blog last year, set the tone.
Little has changed in the last six years to change a simple calculation. This is that there are too many members of the EU, led by France and Germany, which harbour too many doubts about allowing Turkey to join.
Volkan Bozhir, Turkey's former ambassador to the EU, confirmed last week that he did not expect his country to be joining the EU any time soon. He blames the unanimity rule which says that every member of the EU has to agree to admitting a new member. This has handed a veto to Cyprus.
In remarks reported on euobserver, Bozhir told a business conference in Istanbul last Friday:
That is what is causing the political deadlock, so the negotiations are not going anywhere.
France and Germany fear that admitting such a large – and relatively poor – country would upset the balance in the EU. Turkey, which has a population of 78.7m, is slightly smaller than Germany which has a population of 81.4m. But Turkey's population is due to grow more quickly than Germany's.
Turkey's EU friends – mainly Britain and Sweden – believe that the EU is making a grave political miscalculation in failing to embrace Turkey. They pose a simple question: does the EU want such a strategically important country as Turkey to face east or west? This is a particularly potent question at the moment after the breakdown in Turkey's relations with Israel.
Turkey's former ambassador to the EU made clear that Ankara has, for the moment at least, given up on the EU. In his speech to the business conference in Istanbul last Friday, Bozhir had a dig at the EU according to euobserver:
The EU dream has come to an end for the world. There is a paradigm shift. The EU is no longer the same Union that provided comfort, prosperity and wealth to its citizens as in the past. It no longer generates visionary ideas such as Schengen [the EU's passport free zone], or the Common Agricultural Policy.
The EU will be admitting new members in the coming years, with Croatia first in the queue. But Turkey faces a long wait, assuming it does not withdraw its application.
At the moment 2011 and 2010 will be remembered for the deep recession and the eurozone debt crisis. In decades to come this period may be remembered as the moment that Europe turned its back on Turkey, a country of great strategic significance which had hoped to anchor its future in the EU. But in the end it was forced to look elsewhere for allies.