Audience 3: Although that potential is still to come around. I haven’t seen it yet in 30 years, but it may still happen, it has so much land and so much water. My understanding is that the objection of France and other countries is because of Turkey’s agriculture. Is that still a central issue or the other ones that you mentioned more important?
Interviewee: I think the other ones that I mentioned in terms of culture and politics and things like that are more important. I think that if you talk to the average person in the street, they just are not interested in having, particularly in France, they are not interested in having Turkey come in. And some of it to be frank, some of it is ethnic or racial.
Interviewer: Uh-hmm.
Interviewee: One of the interesting things about the accession process is that once you decide to open a chapter and the agriculture chapter is not opened yet, once you decided to open a chapter, it becomes a matter of technical negotiation. Now, the countries at the end, the other member states may decide that they didn’t like the way the agriculture negotiations went, etc, but everybody knows the rules. There may be some negotiation about how quickly, Turkish wine for example, could have access to the European market. But eventually, it will have the same access as everybody else. So, agricultural is important if we can get the process started. I think we can reduce the tensions over agriculture, and it becomes a technical issue.
Audience 4: Hi! Thanks very much for coming. It’s kind of really interesting. I’m Cynthia [IB]. I’m an attorney in town. So I’m interested in the procedural [IB] of how you actually block 4 chapters. I mean, who did that? Did Sarkozy do that alone or was that…?
Interviewee: It only takes one.
Interviewer: [Laughing]