EU leaders won't discuss expansion at meeting

European Union leaders should slow down the enlargement of the bloc to give people “time to breathe” after the rejection of the draft constitution by France and the Netherlands, the EU’s external affairs commissioner said today.

Benita Ferrero-Waldner spoke as diplomats said leaders will not discuss expansion to Turkey and other candidate countries or make reference to them in their statement after this week’s summit.

It will be the first time in many years that the issue has been dropped from an EU summit declaration, and is rooted in the dramatic rejection of the EU’s proposed constitution by Dutch and French voters, officials said.

“We need to give our citizens time to breathe,” Ferrer-Waldner said. “We must fulfil what we have said, but my idea is to reduce the speed of (future) enlargement.”

Senior officials stressed previous EU decisions to expand to Romania and Bulgaria remained on track and previous agreements with Turkey and Croatia were still valid.

However, the scrapping of the traditional declarations was bound to send a negative signal to the candidate countries, which have feared a backlash following the two rejections of the constitution.

Diplomats confirmed several paragraphs on expansion to include Turkey and other candidates were being dropped in the latest draft which was to be finalised by EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg ahead of the Thursday-Friday EU leaders’ summit.

They said a single paragraph would be inserted to reflect the “necessity” of future expansion however.

At their December summit, EU leaders set a conditional October 3 date to open entry talks with Turkey, if it carried through on commitments to implement economic and political reforms and if it expanded its customs union to include Cyprus.

The latest draft makes no reference to a date, nor does it include text on Croatia, which won’t be allowed to start negotiations with the EU until it fully co-operates with the UN’s war crimes tribunal.

European politicians have started to raise doubts in public over the December decision on Turkey, raising fears in Ankara that their European ambitions might be shelved by the EU in the wake of the growing opposition at home and the crisis around the constitution.

Polls in France and the Netherlands showed opposition to Turkey’s membership was one of the key reasons voters gave for opposing the EU constitution.

Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot, however, continued to back the EU’s official position that entry talks would go ahead as planned. “They are on track; if the Turks are on track then we are on track,” he said.

Austrian Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Grasser yesterday said Turkish membership “would make excessive demands of Europe”.

He said he saw the constitution’s rejection in France and the Netherlands as “a warning shot” in opposition to Turkey’s membership.

Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos acknowledged two weeks ago, after the French and Dutch referendums that “without a doubt” the two rejections were “going to affect” further expansion plans.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has tried to water down the fears, saying expansion and the constitution “were not connected”.

Many Europeans find it hard to accept taking in Turkey, a mainly Muslim country with 70 million people, poor and culturally different from a predominantly Christian Europe.

The EU has already rejected demands from Ukraine that it be given entry prospects and is hinting that the accession of Romania and Bulgaria, which are set to join in 2007, could be delayed by a year because they are not ready.