Evaluation Note / Oya Memişoğlu&Aslı T. Esen: "The Sad Story Of The Failure To Start Economic and Monetary Union Negotiations"

"Although the number of negotiation chapters to be opened for Turkey in yesterday's Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) had previously been announced as "two or three", the decision of the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) to limit the number of chapters to two sufficed to frustrate Turkey. The perception that the decision stemmed from political rather than technical concerns played an important part in the protests voiced.

This perception is not quite unfounded. There was no technical problem to prevent the initiation of negotiations on the chapter of economic and monetary union, which concerns the capacity of the country to conduct its monetary and inflation policies according to EU standards. Indeed, the Screening Report of October 2006 indicated that Turkey should demonstrate further improvement in the area. However, there were no opening benchmarks. Just a few weeks ago, Joaquin Almunia, the Commissioner for economic and monetary union, said that there is not much difficulty in this area and Commission spokeswoman Krisztina Nagy explained that all the preparations to start negotiations were complete. The remaining problems after the reforms carried out by Turkey in this chapter were largely technical in nature and solvable in the process to last until accession..."