by Shay Gal
Europe often describes its crises as distant rings of instability – the eastern flank, the southern neighbourhood, the periphery beyond which the Union projects order. Yet in Cyprus there is no periphery: only EU territory itself, divided by force and managed by habit. One autumn morning this year, the island revealed both faces of Europe. From Limassol, vessels departed under the Amalthea maritime corridor with EU-endorsed screening and Cypriot logistics for Gaza. A few kilometres inland, Turkish security forces advanced earthworks near Pyla and maintained new positions around Varosha, developments recorded by UNFICYP and noted in every European capital, yet met with carefully balanced statements and no operational consequence. Two Europes, one island, and a widening space between principle and practice.
Brussels handles Cyprus with inherited reflexes: frameworks renewed, mandates prolonged, assistance programmed, progress monitored. It is a grammar of management designed to prevent deterioration without ever confronting its source. For two decades this reflex passed as prudence. In 2025 it amounts to something else: a system that absorbs and stabilises an abnormality until the abnormality recedes from political sight.
The Union’s legal architecture is not in question. Cyprus acceded whole in 2004. The acquis is suspended only where the government cannot apply it, not where sovereignty somehow ends. The Green Line remains an internal demarcation. UNFICYP’s mandate is recognised in Union law. But the operational architecture has drifted. UN reports describe new trenches, berms and police incursions in the buffer zone. In Varosha, incremental steps continue despite repeated Security Council calls for reversal. The Union, however, responds with the vocabulary it reserves for neighbourhood disputes, as though the territory concerned were not its own.
When Ankara is treated as a partner, the contrast is stark. The EU-Turkey Statement re-engineered migration flows and became the model for externalised border control. The Pact on Migration and Asylum embeds long-term operational reliance on Turkish cooperation. Visa and trade dialogues reflect the same hierarchy of priorities: stabilise the larger file, contain friction, and compartmentalise Cyprus until it ceases to demand strategic attention. Turkish leverage commands institutional energy; Cypriot sovereignty absorbs institutional fatigue.
This is not intentional indulgence; it is the accumulated effect of design. Instruments created for the benefit of Cypriot citizens – Green Line trade, assistance to the Turkish Cypriot community, technical convergence with the acquis – are insulated so thoroughly from political conditions that they function regardless of developments on the ground. Intended to prepare the north for reintegration once legality returns, they have inadvertently reduced the cost of eroding legality in the meantime.
The paradox becomes sharper when set against the Union’s stance in Ukraine. There, Brussels insists that borders cannot be changed by force and that occupation cannot be normalised. The message is correct. Yet its credibility weakens when a different discipline governs the Union’s own territory. In Kyiv, a trench is a threat to the European order. In Varosha, a trench becomes a scheduling problem. This dissonance is heard not only in Moscow and Ankara but across candidate and partner states asked to believe that Article 2 TEU values are indivisible.
Within the institutions the divide is visible. Parliament’s reports on Turkey are explicit about developments in the occupied areas, and Ankara’s responses are equally explicit. But clarity fades in the Council, where the instinct is to soften the Cypriot file to preserve the broader one. Each symmetrical call for restraint, each decision to prioritise diplomatic calm over enforcement, reinforces the same dynamic: a Union that manages the manifestations of occupation more rigorously than the occupation itself.
Meanwhile Cyprus has become indispensable to the Union’s regional diplomacy. The Gaza maritime corridor depends on Cypriot ports, customs, security and credibility. The island serves as a base for evacuations, humanitarian missions and monitoring operations across the Middle East and North Africa. Its recent maritime boundary agreement with Lebanon completes a rules-based arc of delimitation the Union praises as a model for the region. Its proposal for a new regional security mechanism has been received seriously because Cyprus is viewed as principled, predictable and legally exact. Europe trusts Cyprus to stabilise its neighbourhood; it has not yet treated the occupied part of Cyprus as part of that neighbourhood.
The system that has emerged is neither accident nor conspiracy. It is the product of consecutive decisions to favour management over enforcement, balance over clarity, process over consequence. The result is operational complicity: a stabilised illegality in which procedures designed to mitigate the consequences of occupation inadvertently shelter it from pressure. The more the system manages the fragments, the harder it becomes to address the whole.
Reversing this logic requires no new treaties. It requires coherence. Any discussion of customs-union modernisation or visa facilitation with Turkey should be expressly linked to measurable steps in Cyprus already expected by the Security Council: halting new works in and around Varosha, ending incursions into the buffer zone, ensuring UNFICYP’s freedom of movement, and refraining from unilateral actions that alter the status of the line. These are not punitive; they are standards the Union enforces elsewhere without hesitation.
Cyprus does not seek privilege. It seeks consistency. It has aligned with the acquis, absorbed the costs of division, and offered its territory for collective operations from Sudan to Gaza. If the Union is serious about its values and security, it cannot allow the only occupation on its territory to be treated as administratively manageable. The integrity of its legal space cannot depend on geography or political convenience.
Europe is strongest when it enforces its rules, not when it manages their erosion. Cyprus has shown what responsible membership looks like. It is time for the Union to match it.
Shay Gal is a strategic analyst and adviser specialising in international security, European foreign policy and geopolitical crisis management. He advises senior government and defence leaders on complex strategic challenges while bringing deep expertise in public diplomacy and strategic communications. His work focuses on power dynamics, crisis management and the interaction between law, institutions and strategic decision-making.
Also read: Operational Reunification: Europe’s Red Line Through Cyprus
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