Summer nudity amid a Xmas Turkey crisis

Europe's media remain obsessed with the problems of enlargement laid bare. No I’m not talking about the en déshabillé summertime wandering of a certain commissioner. Rather, it’s the traditional pre-Christmas crisis over Turkish EU accession.

On the eve of the year-end summit, EU foreign ministers decided to suspend accession talks on eight of the 35 chapters.

The Irish Independent uses a no-doubt unintentionally apt description when it says the talks are to be "partly frozen". Any chef knows that’s a recipe for spoilage.

Arab website al-Jazeera looks at the larger political meaning. It says the "EU debate over ‘punishing’ Turkey mirrors deeper-running differences within the bloc over the desirability of admitting a large, relatively poor and predominantly Muslim country."

A commentator in the Turkish Daily News finds solace in the fact that the talks aren’t completely dead, but still decries the decision: "The negotiations with Turkey have not broken down. The process has been made difficult and the road to full membership has been lengthened. That’s it."

In a trenchant analysis under the headline "Europe is losing faith in its most successful policy", the Financial Times writes: "Senior EU officials say this is a dangerous moment. If the bloc sends out negative signals to future members, what consequences could it have for reformers in Turkey, the politically unstable Balkans or former Soviet republics such as Belarus or Ukraine? The world has a stake in the message that comes out of Brussels."

It asks: "So what went wrong with the latest enlargement? The simple answer is: not very much."

The International Herald Tribune features on its front-page a Pulitzer-length article on the inside story of a European business disaster: "How hubris and haste snarled Airbus A380."

It’s a compelling read. Through interviews with executives, politicians, engineers and mechanics, the piece describes how political infighting between France and Germany, antiquated and Byzantine institutional structures created to accommodate national sensitivities and a denial reflex that refused to acknowledge things could be going wrong combined to create disaster. Sounds familiar?

"A much-lauded pan-European industrial process was in complete breakdown," the author writes, "an apt enough metaphor for the wider process of European integration that was collapsing at the same time with the rejection of a much-heralded proposed EU constitution."

Finally, the website for EUX.TV - which sounds like just the place to find nudie footage of a commissioner - reports on that hoary chestnut, the Lisbon Agenda.

"Good news for the European economy!" it declares, with no hint of whether the exclamation mark is supposed to be ironic. "The Lisbon process is paying off with more jobs and higher growth figures. European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and his Enterprise Commissioner Günter Verheugen on Tuesday said the ‘Lisbon’ process is back on track again thanks to the emphasis on growth and jobs."

Sounds like the commissioners have no clothes.

• Craig Winneker is a freelance writer based in Brussels.

Europe's media remain obsessed with the problems of enlargement laid bare. No I’m not talking about the en déshabillé summertime wandering of a certain commissioner. Rather, it’s the traditional pre-Christmas crisis over Turkish EU accession.

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