OSW Commentary - Turkey and the European Union: in a maze of disputes - Accession on hold

This was related to factors such as the failure to resolve the Cyprus issue, Turkey’s 2013 crack- down on mass-scale public protests triggered by the deteriorating state of democracy in the country, the purge of the political and military elite after the failed 2016 coup, and the 2017 constitutional referendum that consolidated power in the president’s hands. [...] Furthermore, in 2019 the European Parliament called on the Commission and the member states to officially suspend talks with Turkey, largely due to the deteriorating state of the rule of law and freedom of expression in this country.1 Nonetheless, integration with the EU still constitutes the framework within which Turkey’s domestic situation and foreign policy are assessed. [...] These differences can be attri- buted to the following factors: - Turkey’s refusal to join the sanctions regime targeting Russia and its deepening economic and energy ties with this country in the face of the war in Ukraine; - Turkey’s decades-long blockade of the Republic of Cyprus’s cooperation with NATO, and its departure from the formula for the federalisation of the self-proclaimed Turkish Re. [...] On the economic front, the Commission and the High Representative proposed a re- turn to dialogue on the project to modernise the customs union, provided that Turkey takes effective action to counter the circumvention of the EU restrictions on trade with Russia, including by halting the re-export of ‘high-priority’, war-enabling technologies. [...] Consequently the EU (with the support of the UN) has been pushing Turkey to abandon the idea of creating two sovereign states on the island and to stop encroaching on the mar- itime borders of the Republic of Cyprus.7 Turkey’s other long-time opponents include France,8 which has been competing with Turkey for influence in the Mediterranean (for example in Libya and over Cypriot gas deposits) and m.