EU Is Urged to Move Up Talks on Turkey’s Membership Bid

The leader of Turkey’s ruling party called on the European Union on Friday to set early talks on the country’s admission to the EU, instead of the 2005 date proposed by European leaders.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- chairman of the Justice and Development Party, which won national elections Nov. 3 -- said Turkey has been “waiting for more than 40 years at Europe’s door.... History will not forgive you. You will have failed the test, and Europe will lose.”

The Bush administration has been courting Turkey, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s sole Muslim member, which is expected to play a key role if there is a U.S.-led war against Iraq. On Friday, the State Department backed Turkey’s bid for an earlier date to start talks than the July 2005 plan advanced by France and Germany the day before.

This week, Turkey tentatively agreed to limited support for action against Iraq, including opening bases and ports to U.S. forces. Erdogan is expected to travel to Washington next week to discuss with President Bush details of Turkey’s contribution and whether the U.S. will supply the country with more financial aid.

Under a plan hammered out by French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, EU leaders would meet at the end of 2004 to evaluate Turkey’s progress on democratic and economic reforms and then start membership talks the following year if the country was deemed to have performed satisfactorily.

France and Germany have expressed reservations about admitting Turkey to the EU, where it would become the first Muslim member nation. The EU’s failure to include Turkey on a list of applicants it has agreed to take in as full members has prompted accusations here that the union is a Christian club. Last month, former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing declared that Turkey’s accession to the EU would “spell the end of Europe.”

Proponents of Turkey’s admission, including Britain, Spain, Italy and Portugal, argue that in opening its doors to Turkey, Europe would prove to the broader Muslim world that the West does not consider Islam and democracy incompatible.

Turkey’s efforts to join the EU date from the early 1960s, but the country formally applied for membership only in 1987. It was anointed as an official candidate by EU leaders 12 years later. An EU summit in Copenhagen next week will take up the question of a date for talks.

Within hours of his party’s landslide at the polls in November, Erdogan said the new government’s priority would be to secure Turkey’s membership in the EU. This week, the government approved a set of proposed constitutional reforms, including ending the death penalty and easing bans on teaching and broadcasting in the Kurdish language. Should the new law be enacted, it would also enable Erdogan to become prime minister.

A former mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan was barred from running for parliament because of a prior conviction on charges of seeking to incite religious hatred when he recited an Islamic poem at a rally. Under Turkish law, only elected lawmakers can become prime minister. Abdullah Gul, the deputy chairman of the Justice and Development Party, assumed the post instead.

Even so, it is Erdogan who over the last month has been touring European capitals, where he has been arguing that Turkey is closer to meeting the criteria for membership in the EU than the other candidate countries. He also has declared support for a recently floated U.N. peace plan to reunite the divided island of Cyprus, where Turkish forces invaded in 1974 and subsequently set up a breakaway state in the north. EU leaders had earlier hinted that Turkey’s cooperation in resolving that issue would boost its chances of getting a firm date for starting membership talks.

“Whether or not the EU takes us in, we are meeting the Copenhagen criteria to elevate the living standards of our people. That is our real aim,” a defiant Erdogan said Thursday. “We won’t stop because they don’t admit us.”