Will migrants of Turkish origin and their descendants, also known as ‘Euro-Turks’, act as a vanguard or an impediment in Turkey’s desire to join the EU? To challenge the stereotypes of Euro-Turks both in their homeland and in their countries of settlement, extensive research has been carried out in Germany and France by the Centre for Migration Research in Istanbul.

This paper sets out Turkey’s current and potential role in the supply of gas to Europe, starting with the EU’s need for gas, the geography of global gas disposition and Turkey’s importance as a natural funnel through which the EU can access gas from many of the world’s leading gas suppliers. It also places Turkey’s role in the context of EU reliance on Russia as its largest single supplier of gas.

This paper starts with the assumption that the EU will decide to open accession negotiations with Turkey at the end of 2004 and in this context it explores the potential for the integration of EU and Turkish foreign, security and defence policies in the pre-accession period. The evolving nature of both the EU and Turkey as foreign policy actors is considered, with attention drawn to the effective graduations in the nature of the EU’s external borders as it extends its membership and association arrangements deeper into the south-eastern periphery.

This paper assesses issues of border controls, visa regimes, asylum and irregular immigration policies in context of Turkey’s candidacy for accession to the EU. Under present EU policy, Turkey would need to apply all present legislation governing the movement of persons across the external frontiers of the Schengen area by the time of accession, although the frontier between Turkey and the Schengen area would not be eliminated for some years, as is also the case for the new member states which acceded in May 2004.

Owing to the EU-Turkish customs union, there is already a considerable degree of convergence between Turkey and the EU in the area of trade. In fact, Turkey is the only candidate country that has a customs union with the EU. At least with respect to the trade in goods, Turkey is almost part of the Single Market. The challenge of enhancing the present state of trade integration could be approached in two ways. First, the customs union could be deepened by refining the arrangements and addressing its shortcomings.

Recurrent severe macroeconomic crises have not allowed the Turkish economy to realise its growth potential over the last two decades. The stabilisation programme launched after the latest crisis in the spring of 2001 has so far been successful in the sense that inflation has fallen from over 70% to less than 10% and public debt is declining slowly as a % of GDP. The key task now is to transform this hard won stability into a normal state of affairs, i.e. to stabilise stabilisation.