Decision week for Turkey as EU summit looms

BRUSSELS (AFP) - European Union leaders will next week debate the most strategically important issue facing the bloc when they decide whether to open accession negotiations with Turkey.

The stakes are high for the Muslim-majority country itself but also for several EU states such as France and Germany, where opposition parties are making political capital out of public hostility to Turkey's EU bid.

Turkey is adamant that, fully five years after it was formally accepted as a candidate for EU membership, it has done enough to open the accession talks with no further strings attached.

When they convene for their winter summit next Thursday, the 25 EU heads of government are expected to give a green light to starting the talks. But question marks remain over what conditions they will impose.

French President Jacques Chirac among others has pushed for the EU to leave open the possibility of offering Turkey some kind of "privileged partnership" should full membership talks founder.

Others such as Austria and Cyprus are even more hostile. In the case of the Mediterranean island, which is divided between Greek and Turkish zones, the Greek-Cypriot government is demanding Turkish recognition as its price.

And draft summit conclusions obtained by AFP say the EU must be sure it has the "capacity to absorb" Turkey before it can decide to admit the country.

Turkish officials fear that would open the door to an unprecedented flood of national referendums, such as has already been promised in France by Chirac.

Turkey points out that in the EU's own criteria, the demands made on a candidate country specify only that it must be well on the way to EU standards for accession talks to start.

And it notes that in October, the European Commission recommended that the talks begin on the basis of a raft of reforms rammed through by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government.

"We have begun the match," Erdogan said in an interview with European newspapers published Wednesday. "You cannot change the rules of the game half way through," he said.

The EU has already experienced a sea change this year by admitting 10 new countries, drawn mostly from the impoverished former Soviet bloc.

But while the May expansion was seen as the definitive end to Europe's Cold War divisions, the prospect of Turkish entry to the EU is a whole lot more controversial.

To detractors such as former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the accession of a Muslim-majority country of 72 million people with one foot in Asia would mean "the end of the European Union".

But to its supporters such as Britain and the German government, Turkey's accession would show the Islamic world that Europe is not a Christian club and, in an age of mounting extremism, is not bent on a "clash of civilisations".

And from the sidelines, the United States has been vocally supporting Turkey's EU bid, keen to see a pivotal strategic and military partner bind itself to the West.

Visiting Brussels Wednesday, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that Turkey had done a "very good job" of meeting European concerns over its suitability for EU membership.

In any case, even after the EU leaders' expected conditional approval on Thursday, it will be many years before Turkey gets to prowl the corridors of power in Brussels -- if ever.

The draft summit statement warns that the negotiations will take at least a decade and are not "guaranteed" to result in EU membership.

Turkish ministers have responded with a flurry of diplomatic activity to press their case in Europe.

Erdogan himself was due in Brussels later Thursday to meet Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, who will chair what could be a stormy summit next week.

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