The articles and opinions on the TEPAV website are solely those of the authors and do not represent the official views of TEPAV.
© TEPAV, all rights reserved unless otherwise stated.
Söğütözü Cad. No:43 TOBB-ETÜ Campus, Section 2, 06560 Söğütözü-Ankara
Phone: +90 312 292 5500Fax: +90 312 292 5555
tepav@tepav.org.tr / tepav.org.trTEPAV is a non-profit, non-partisan research institution that contributes to the policy design process through data-driven analysis, adhering to academic ethics and quality without compromise.
"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..."