Risk of Islamist backlash if EU shuns Turkey-Rehn

BRUSSELS, June 29 (Reuters) The European Union should keep alive Turkey's prospects of joining the bloc or risk a nationalist or Islamist backlash in its neighbourhood, a newspaper quoted the EU's enlargement commissioner as saying.

Olli Rehn told the European Voice weekly that while acknowledging French President Nicolas Sarkozy's opposition to Turkey's EU entry, the European Commission believed it necessary ''to keep our word and respect our existing commitments''.

''If you look at the the current political situation in the Middle East ... we don't need another nationalist or Islamist problem in the neighbourhood of Europe,'' he told the weekly in an interview.

''The best way of avoiding this is to keep the EU accession progress alive, continue the negotiations and give Turkey a chance (to show) whether it will be able to meet all the democratic and legislative criteria of EU accession.'' Rehn called Turkey an ''anchor of stability in the most unstable region of the world'' and a ''benchmark of democracy for the Muslim world from Morocco to Malaysia''.

The European Union opened membership talks with Turkey in 2005, but they have been slowed by Ankara's refusal to open its port to its rival and EU member Cyprus, fuelling a debate about whether the predominantly Muslim state belongs in Europe.

France this week prevented the EU extending Turkey's accession negotiations into the politically sensitive area of economic and monetary policy, which French diplomats said could prejudge the eventual outcome of the negotiations.

However, Portugal, which takes over the presidency of the European Union on July 1, affirmed yesterday that membership remained the goal of negotiations with Turkey rather than any limited partnership option favoured by France.

A senior EU source said this week that Brussels hoped Sarkozy could be persuaded by his peers that it would be disastrous to break off talks with Turkey and would accept a long-term date for a strategic review of Ankara's candidacy.

The executive European Commission reports every year on the progress of each candidate for membership, and EU governments draw conclusions from those reports usually in December.

The source said one idea would be to propose a fuller strategic review in the second half of 2012 -- before Turkey is likely to conclude the negotiations but after the next French presidential election -- in a bid to depoliticise the issue.

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