Austrian Chancellor 'proud' of tough stance on Turkey
Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel says he’s “proud” of the tough position Austria staked out in crisis talks on the launch of negotiations with Turkey to join the European Union.
Schuessel told Austrian state broadcaster ORF that Austria succeeded in ensuring that all candidate countries – Turkey included – will be required to meet the same exacting conditions for EU entry.
Austria had blocked the start of accession talks before finally withdrawing a demand that mostly Muslim Turkey settle for the possibility of something less than full EU membership. The alpine republic had faced fierce pressure from the EU’s 24 other member states.
Austria takes over the EU’s rotating six-month presidency on January 1, raising questions about how Vienna will administer the bloc after alienating much of Europe with its unsuccessful attempt to scuttle the start of accession talks with Turkey.
Allegations of resurgent racism and xenophobia hounded Austria, particularly after it pressed for the EU to open membership talks with Croatia – a fellow Roman Catholic country and long-time Balkan ally – at the same time it was casting aspersions on Turkey. Yesterday, the EU also agreed to formally launch negotiations with Croatia.
“For Austrians, negotiating with Turkey and not with Croatia is like swearing at church,” the Belgian newspaper De Standaard wryly observed in a commentary today.
But Vice Chancellor Hubert Gorbach of the centrist Alliance for the Future of Austria, which shares power with Schuessel’s centre-right Austrian People’s Party, stood by the country’s tough stance on Turkey.
“Austria was the only country which wanted a clearer definition of the negotiation mandate,” he said.
Schuessel told ORF there was “no connection” between the country’s hard-nosed approach at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg and this past Sunday’s elections in the southern province of Styria, which Schuessel’s party wound up losing.
Only one in 10 Austrians support EU membership for Turkey, and critics had accused the government of using the issue to gain political support going into the elections.
Schuessel dismissed the allegations as “considerable nonsense,” and he said Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik deserved a medal for bravery for staking out a tough position in Luxembourg.
Plassnik told reporters in Luxembourg that Austria, which is home to Europe’s third-largest Turkish expatriate community, “has good bilateral relations with Turkey”.
“There are more than 250,000 Turks living in Austria. We live in harmony together,” she said.
Austrian media today reported that Bulent Arinc, the speaker of Turkey’s parliament, told his Austrian counterpart Andreas Khol in a meeting in Ankara that Turks were “disappointed” over Austria’s attitude.
Alfred Gusenbauer, head of the opposition Social Democrats, described the outcome today as “better than nothing,” but he criticised Schuessel’s government for having toed the EU line on Turkey for the past year, only to break ranks at the last minute.
“It would have been better to have done something earlier. Perhaps then Austria would not have stood alone,” Gusenbauer said.
Many Austrians, struggling to contain record 6 per cent unemployment, worry that EU membership would unleash a flood of cheap Turkish labour into their country. There were similar fears when the EU expanded last year to take in eight Eastern European nations, but the immigration crush never materialised.
