In These New Times

Zaman Today

21st October, 2009

President Abdullah Gül (L) spoke with his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, on the phone on Monday.
Turkey, which has already announced its intention to hold a joint cabinet meeting with Russia similar to those recently held with Iraq and Syria, hopes to hold such a meeting with its Black Sea neighbor in early December.

“We have proposed a similar step to the joint cabinet meetings with Syria and Iraq with Russia, but there is nothing being implemented at the moment,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said last week before departing for a visit to Iraq, during which he and the nine ministers accompanying him held a joint cabinet meeting with the Iraqi government. Erdoğan and his Iraqi counterpart, Nouri al-Maliki, co-chaired the meeting of the Turkish-Iraqi High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council.

Earlier last week, a ministerial-level meeting of the Turkish-Syrian High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council was held in the Syrian city of Aleppo and the Turkish city of Gaziantep. At the time, Erdoğan said an agreement to initiate a similar mechanism with Russia was signed when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited Ankara in August, when Turkey and Russia signed about 20 agreements on cooperation in a number of areas, including, most notably, energy. “We will put into force a similar mechanism with Russia.”

The timing of the meeting planned to be held with Russia has been found particularly interesting as it comes just before a December summit of the European Council. Observers suggest that the planned meeting with Russia is a message to European Union members who offer a “privileged partnership” to Turkey instead of full EU membership. Turkey will show how a privileged partnership is constituted through the meeting with Russia, the same observers argue. Turkey firmly rejects any option that falls short of full EU membership.

The EU opened accession talks with Ankara — an EU candidate since 1999 — in October 2005, but they have been progressing slowly amid opposition from France and Germany. The unresolved Cyprus dispute and a slowdown of reforms in Turkey are other factors hampering the accession process.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are the most high-profile European politicians opposed to Turkey’s accession. Sarkozy claims Turkey does not belong in Europe, while Merkel promotes privileged partnership, an option Ankara categorically rejects. In Berlin in May, Merkel and Sarkozy made a joint statement declaring that they shared a common position regarding Turkey’s accession to the EU, in that it should be offered a privileged partnership, not full EU membership.

The first step toward holding a joint cabinet meeting with Russia was taken on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responding positively to a proposal by his counterpart, Ahmet Davutoğlu. Moves to organize the joint meeting have been continuing since then. The meeting between Russia and Turkey is planned to be held at a ministerial level. Meetings with Iraq and Syria, on the other hand, are chaired by the prime ministers.