By Shay Gal
A compressed diplomatic calendar
Early July is not a promise. It is a test. The United Nations Secretary General’s envoy has set a timetable for renewed talks after nine dormant years and warned against rehearsing disappointment. The calendar is compressed. The Republic carries the Council Presidency and domestic elections. The new leader in the north consolidates authority within a structure shaped elsewhere. The setting is not fragile. It is deliberate.
UN mandate renewed, positions unchanged
Two weeks earlier, the Security Council renewed UNFICYP. Not unanimously. Ankara replied in familiar terms: consent was absent; two states are realistic; the Yigitler Pile road is humanitarian; objections are political. Athens, serving on the Council for 2025 to 2026, reaffirmed the federation parameters. The line holds. The scripts diverge. The structure persists.
Transactional engagement in Ankara
On 6 February in Ankara, Commissioner Marta Kos and Minister Hakan Fidan spoke in transactional terms: modernisation of the customs union, facilitated multiple entry Schengen visas, gradual reengagement by the European Investment Bank, continuation of high level dialogues. Cyprus appeared as context. Not as a condition.
The Commission’s 2025 report is more direct than the communiqués. It records that the Council attaches particular importance to progress in Cyprus talks for further enhancing cooperation with Turkey. This is structural. The division of a member state has become an instrument of the Union’s external policy. Not a red line. A lever.
The accession freeze and structural reality
This is the alibi. Brussels wants Turkey close enough to transact and distant enough to exclude. Ankara wants Europe close enough to finance, trade and legitimise and distant enough to avoid membership discipline. Cyprus stabilises the arrangement. It justifies the standstill and sustains the flow.
The accession file confirms the design. Negotiations have been at a standstill since June 2018. Eight chapters were blocked in 2006 over Turkey’s restrictions regarding Cyprus and its obligations under the Additional Protocol to the Ankara Agreement. The door remains nominally open. The hinges do not move.
Cyprus is not what keeps Turkey out. Even if the island were settled tomorrow, Turkey would not join the Union. Accession has been frozen since 2018 for reasons that precede and outlast the Cyprus file. The 2025 report makes clear that the freeze reflects unresolved concerns over democratic standards, judicial independence and fundamental rights. Those issues are structural. They are internal to Turkey. They are determinative. Membership is not on offer.
The central fiction is to present Cyprus as the obstacle. Cyprus is the most convenient pretext because it avoids stating what policy already reflects: enlargement to Turkey is neither foreseen nor prepared.
Managed division and geopolitical arithmetic
Ankara understands this equilibrium. It maintains the accession file because it buys leverage, not because it expects a seat. It negotiates what is deliverable: market access, visa facilitation, investment flows, continued centrality in Europe’s management of irregular arrivals. Brussels provides enough to secure cooperation while preserving the theatre of accession. Cyprus funds the theatre.
The arrangement is called pragmatism. The cost is a managed division. The benefit is an open channel to Ankara. The arithmetic collapses under scrutiny. The Union is already keeping Turkey out. Cyprus is not the price of admission. It is the price of convenience.
The price is concrete. The Secretary General’s latest reporting period recorded 146 ceasefire line violations by the end of November, most attributed to Turkish forces. It noted expanding installations and surveillance along the line. Varosha remains unreversed. United Nations access remains constrained. The status quo is reinforced incrementally. This is not rhetoric. It is irreversibility under construction.
Conditionality and Council Presidency leverage
The temptation is visible in the Council’s own summaries. A customs union dating to 1996. Trade approaching two hundred billion euros annually. A six billion euro migration facility. A visa process that remains incomplete. These are substantial interests. They do not require a divided member state. They require coherence.
The alibi fails not on realism but on consistency. The Union proclaims indivisible territorial integrity in one theatre and treats manifestations of force on its own territory as routine. It conditions upgrades elsewhere and exempts its own fracture from consequence. This is not balance. It is drift.
The correction is procedural and immediate.
First, separate the files. Cyprus must not remain the bargaining variable in a relationship stalled for reasons that lie elsewhere. Second, end the subsidy for non compliance. Every upgrade in trade, visas, financing and access must be tied to verifiable conduct on the island: full UNFICYP access; no further steps in Varosha; no incremental alteration of the buffer zone under administrative pretexts; implementation of obligations under the Additional Protocol. When Europe pays for irreversibility, it will receive irreversibility.
Third, state plainly what policy already reflects. If accession is not foreseen, acknowledge it. A defined partnership is stronger than suspended candidacy. It removes the alibi and restores coherence.
Cyprus’ Council Presidency alters the mechanics. Sequence becomes leverage. Drafting becomes direction. The Presidency chairs the rooms where trade mandates are shaped, conclusions calibrated and upgrades timed. In mid January, the line itself was placed at the centre of European attention alongside the Commission President and visiting Commissioners. Not symbolism. Instruction.
The coming months are compressed. Compression confers authority. The Presidency can embed conditionality across files treated as autonomous. It can align Council conclusions with the Commission’s own reporting. It can insist that the only occupation on Union territory is not an administrative inconvenience but a structural fault.
Europe’s silent understanding with Ankara rested on one assumption: that Cyprus would accept management in exchange for stability elsewhere. That assumption has expired.
A divided Cyprus is not the cost of working with Turkey. It is the price Europe pays to avoid admitting that accession is over. End the alibi. End the subsidy. Align the files.
Then proceed on honest terms.
Shay Gal is a strategic analyst in international security and crisis management, advising governments and senior decision makers on geopolitical risk, institutional strategy, and high level decision making.
Also read: Shay Gal interview: Cyprus-Israel deterrence and the fear of Turkey
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