TURKEY: European Commission president José Manuel Barroso has cast fresh doubt on Turkey's prospects of joining the EU, calling for an "honest debate" on the issue.
He also warned that the European Union faced paralysis if it did not quickly resolve the budget dispute that led to the collapse of last week's summit in Brussels.
Mr Barroso said Turkey had played a role in the decision by French and Dutch voters to reject the EU constitution three weeks ago. "We should discuss seriously the signal that was sent by the electorate regarding Turkey," he said.
Mr Barroso said that the EU would start membership talks with Turkey on October 3rd as planned but stressed that there was no guarantee the negotiations would lead to EU membership.
Earlier, former commission president Romano Prodi said Turkey had no chance of joining the EU in the foreseeable future.
"We need a rethink. The referendums have rung a loud alarm on Turkey . . . I believe that the conditions now were no longer there for Turkey's entry in the short or medium term," he told an Italian newspaper.
Mr Prodi, who was among the strongest advocates of opening membership talks with Ankara when he was in Brussels, suggested that many Italians had a deep-seated fear of Turkey.
"I come from a country where my mother, when she wanted to say something scary, would say: 'The Turks are coming'," he said.
Mr Barroso said that a prolonged deadlock over the EU budget would have a negative impact on the EU, especially on the new member states.
He said that the commission had called for a clause whereby the EU would review its overall spending in 2008, but make only minor adjustments to the Common Agricultural Policy (Cap) before 2013. However he acknowledged that all member states had agreed in 2002 to fix farm spending until 2013.
"It is not reasonable to put everything into question. A deal is a deal and must remain standing. Agreements must be respected.
"The only way to change an agreement made unanimously is to have a unanimous decision. At this moment, that is not yet sure. We can only ask all to make a compromise, a compromise on Cap, also a compromise on the British rebate. We don't have to explicitly link them, but we have to get out of rigid positions," he said.
The commission president avoided blaming any individual country for the failure of last week's summit. However Luxembourg's prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, whose country hold the EU presidency, told the European Parliament yesterday that Britain was responsible.
He said that the presidency had not tried to abolish Britain's budget rebate but to adapt it so that Britain would pay its fair share toward the cost of enlargement.
Mr Juncker said that Britain would have paid its normal share toward regional aid in the 10 new, mainly former communist east European states, although not toward farm subsidies for those countries.
"That was the package that was rejected. It was wrong to reject this package. I am telling you this because no one else will and because you're likely to hear other explanations in the near future," he said, referring to the fact that Mr Blair is due to address the European Parliament today.
Mr Juncker, who received a standing ovation from MEPs, also rejected Mr Blair's claim that the budget was skewed unfairly towards agriculture rather than towards research and innovation.
"The Cap is the only real community policy entirely financed by the EU budget. Research is essentially a national budget, supported by the European budget. You can't compare the two," he said.