ABSTRACT
The Cypriot application for EU membership is unique because it was submitted by the Greek-Cypriot community on behalf of the whole island in 1990, without prior consultation of the Turkish-Cypriots. Instead of taking account of this perculiarity, most analysts describe the Cyprus conflict as an absolute gains scenario and refer to the ending of the division as the ‘natural’ rationale of the application. But Greek-Cypriot interests or identification may have been neither altruistic, i.e. to overcome the division per se, nor equal the island’s ‘national’ interests (or that of the Turkish-Cypriot community). If we want to reconstruct the motivation of the Cypriot application, we need to distinguish between relative gains based on the individual community’s interest on the one hand and absolute gains for both communities on the other. There is also no scientific consensus whether the application was ‘purely political’ (Yurek 2002: 9) or ‘more economic’ (Redmond and Pace 1996: 432; Nugent 1997: 55).
