Hellenic Electronic Center

Some 43 years after beginning its long courtship of Europe and barely a year after opening entry talks with Brussels, Turkey's bid for European Union membership may have just hit a wall.

Olli Rehn, the EU enlargement commissioner who earlier this year warned the talks could end in a "train crash", said this week his measured response to the impasse in the negotiations meant "there will be no train crash". Rather, "there will be a slowing down because of works further down the line; the train will continue to move". Really? Let us hope he is driving.

Mr Rehn's proposal is to suspend negotiations on eight of the 35 chapters of EU law Turkey needs to adopt before it enters the Union. This is, put overly simply, in response to Ankara's refusal to open up its ports to Cyprus, an EU member. It is harsher than Turkey's EU allies - the UK, Spain, Sweden and Italy - wanted, but has delighted politicians in Germany, Austria, Holland and France who think a poor, Muslim country like Turkey has no business inside the EU in the first place.

In either case, there is a distinct possibility that the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, pressed from all sides but up for re-election next year, will simply walk away.

Irrespective of whether it is any longer realistic to believe Turkey will one day join the EU, that would be a geopolitically catastrophic train wreck.

Europe is the ambition that has held together Turkey's otherwise antagonistic and fiercely secular army with Mr Erdogan's neo-Islamist government, with full but now fast-dwindling popular support. It is also the engine of sweeping reform, especially to en-trench democratic and minority rights. It is, above all, proof that the EU can sponsor a marriage between Islam and democracy, a sort of Euro-Islamism analogous to Christian Democracy that can steer a path to modernity and survive the violent dislocations on the way. Mr Erdogan is leading democratic change in a region where Islamists have at best provided alibis to despots determined to prevent democracy.

The EU put all this at risk by its irresponsible attitude to Cyprus. In advance of a 2004 United Nations plan for a confederal system to reunite the island, the EU gave the internationally recognised Greek Cypriot government a guarantee of entry. While Ankara cajoled Turkish Cypriots to vote for the peace deal, the Greek Cypriots self-indulgently voted against - and now obstruct Turkey from within the EU.

While demanding Ankara admit Cyprus ships and goods, Brussels has not delivered on its pledge to end the isolation of Turkish Cyprus. The Cyprus issue can be resolved if member states are prepared to put the strategic interests of the Union above the narrow interests of the Nicosia government. On present form, however, the EU is now widely seen to have retreated behind a wall of dissembling waffle and to be acting in bad faith.