The European Union today agreed to move ahead with accession talks with Croatia but are stalling on negotiations with Turkey because of Ankara's refusal to open its ports and airports to Cyprus.
An Austrian EU presidency spokesman said EU ambassadors agreed to open detailed negotiations with both countries on competition policy but only with Zagreb on customs issues.
The spokesman said the European Commission has not finished screening the compatibility of Turkish legislation with EU law on customs because of the Cyprus issue.
It would be wrong to call the decision a decoupling since the two candidates, which began accession talks on the same day last October, were never formally coupled, he added.
Diplomats said the decision, at the last meeting of Austria's six-month presidency, was symbolically important because it was the first time the EU has charged Turkey a political price for its stance over Cyprus.
The EU concluded the first detailed negotiations with both candidates earlier this month on the easiest of the 35 so-called "chapters" into which EU law is divided - science and research.
However, the EU warned Ankara at the same time that the pace of its progress would suffer if it failed to fulfil an obligation to extend its customs union to the 10 new member states which joined in 2004, including Cyprus.
Turkey, which invaded northern Cyprus in 1974 in response to a short-lived coup in Nicosia engineered by Greece's then ruling military junta, does not recognise the Greek Cypriot government and says the Cyprus problem should be solved by a UN peace plan.