As Karen Fogg, the EU's ambassador in Turkey, points out, it was inevitable that Turks would lose some of their rosy but nebulous feelings about joining the EU as soon as they learned the precise and often painful preconditions for membership.
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro are all candidate members pending their satisfying the required preconditions for membership.
Croatia will join the European Union next July, and one of the preconditions for its membership was the handing over of all war crime suspects from the 90s.
The European Union has made delivering indicted war criminals to The Hague a precondition for Serbia's membership.
Yet, with his own eye on the Sudeten vote, Mr Schily too has now called for the Benes decrees' repeal, though not as a precondition for the Czechs' EU membership.
Bulgaria had to close four of its old reactors at Kozloduy as a precondition for its 2007 EU membership.
The vote has polarised opinion in the country, where nuclear energy has been a sensitive political topic ever since Bulgaria had to close four of its old reactors at the Kozloduy plant as a precondition for its 2007 EU membership.
It will not happen again, if President Ahmet Necdet Sezer approves a raft of sweeping reforms overwhelmingly approved by the parliament last week, in a bid to meet the European Union's preconditions for taking Turkey's bid for membership seriously.
Respecting the European convention is a precondition for belonging to the Council of Europe, membership of which is compulsory for EU members.
I realize that the United States is not about to apply for membership in the European Union, but if it were, getting rid of capital punishment would be a precondition.
