ABSTRACT
Introduction The accession of Cyprus to the European Union (EU) has made the issue of Cyprus very visible, especially as it is tied to Turkey’s EU membership bid. Turkish accession to the EU would solve the problem, but the Greek Cypriot controlled government of Cyprus has interfered with Turkish negotiations from the moment they were opened and, especially under President Papadopoulos, has used its position as an EU member state as a means of leverage. However, the Cyprus question should not be seen as an original EU problem, or as a unique matter of Turkey’s accession to the EU. The EU’s involvement in the Cyprus issue in the 1990s and more intensively in 2000s before the run up to the 2004 referenda on the UN peace plan (known as the Annan Plan) was widely expected to foster the Europeanization of the island in terms of spreading European rules, norms, and values, and hence, through the normative power of the EU, facilitating the solution of the more-than-half-a-century-old Cyprus problem.
