The European Union is groping for ways to induce neighboring Turkey to do more to keep Syrian refugees on its territory and stop them flooding into Europe, amid deep mutual suspicion between Brussels and Ankara.
As a bitterly divided EU struggles to cope with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, securing cooperation of non-member Turkey is seen increasingly as central to help manage the problem.
The European Commission wants member states to increase and redirect EU financial assistance to support refugee housing, education and health services in Turkey. In return, Ankara will be expected to improve the conditions of refugees, register more and take more returned refugees back, fight people smugglers and increase efforts to stop Syrians from going to Greece.
"Today there is the tendency to wave everybody through," a senior EU source said. "Turkey has to deliver."
From the Turkish perspective, Europe has only woken up to the scale of the crisis this year while Turkey has been on the frontline for more than four years. Ankara says it has spent $7.6 billion on food, shelter and care and has had only $417 million in aid from the international community.
At an emergency summit on Wednesday, Brussels will propose raising aid to Ankara from the EU budget to 1 billion between now and the end of 2016, two-thirds of it diverted from existing pre-accession funds, the EU source said. It will ask member states to match that money from national resources, generating a total 2 billion euros.
But there are doubts about whether Turkey, which is hosting more than 2 million refugees, mostly outside official camps, is able to stop them seeking a better life in Europe.
Fewer than 300,000 are in government-hosted camps, with the rest living largely on their own savings among the Turkish population, with diminishing help from the cash-strapped UN World Food Program.
"They are now leaving in a very disorderly way especially because the Turkish authorities are turning a blind eye to traffickers on the coast," said Marc Pierini, a former EU ambassador to Ankara now with the Carnegie Europe think-tank.
People trafficking on the Aegean coast has become a billion-euro business and many smugglers have their own Facebook pages with up-to-date information on the state of the borders and weather conditions, he said.
"It is not fair to expect Turkey to face the migratory flows alone," a Turkish foreign ministry official said. "No country is capable of tackling alone the illegal migratory flows."
Low ebb
The crisis comes at a time when ties between the 28-nation bloc and Ankara are at a low over EU concerns about President Tayyip Erdogan's military crackdown on Kurdish separatists, his unclear intentions in Syria and increasingly illiberal domestic policies.
For its part, Turkey is frustrated at being kept out of the EU, complains about a lack of consultation on the refugee crisis and is angered by mounting anti-Muslim and anti-Turkish rhetoric in Europe.
"This (EU support) package has not been prepared yet, this is only their idea, their statement indeed. We have not been involved in any way in this," a Turkish official complained.
If the financial assistance was merely a repackaging of pre-assistance funds "in a way this is going to be like transferring our own money to somewhere else," the official said.
Negotiations for Ankara to join the EU have been on a slow track to nowhere for a decade, while other Balkan candidates have overtaken it. European leaders have failed to hold a single EU summit with Erdogan in that time. And Turks are still waiting for visa liberalization to ease their travel to Europe.
Now central European leaders led by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban are offending them by invoking 16th century battles against the Ottoman empire to justify strong-arm tactics to prevent Muslim refugees crossing their borders.
Of the three things Turkey is thought to want most from the EU — money, status and visas — cash is the easiest to deliver, especially as the EU seems to have overcome its preference for giving it via non-government relief organizations.
European Council President Donald Tusk visited Turkey this month and officials plan to host Erdogan at a mini-summit with the leaders of the three main EU institutions — the European Council, the Commission and the European Parliament — when he visits Brussels on October 5.
But there is no willingness to invite him to a full EU summit given what many see as his increasingly authoritarian behavior and the reluctance of some European leaders to be photographed with the Turkish president as an EU candidate.
"This is a no go," the senior EU source said.
To many in Brussels, Erdogan's calls for "safe zones" to be established with Western air support in northern Syria to house refugees masks a Turkish effort to drive Syrian Kurdish militants out of the border region.
The best solution would be to have a system for processing EU asylum requests in Turkey, Pierini said, but EU officials question whether Ankara would permit such centers on its soil.
EU officials say a visa liberalization process is under way after Turkey signed a readmission agreement with the bloc in 2013 pledging to take back its own nationals from EU countries.
But the accord does not cover third-country nationals, the main source of illegal migration into Europe, and there are other reforms Turkey must make before travel is eased. Politically, the issue is sensitive in Europe at a time when anti-immigration populist parties are in the ascendancy.
EU officials say an estimated 250,000 refugees are believed to be in the coastal region waiting to catch a boat to Greece.
While the EU is willing to take in a share of Syrian refugees, it wants to keep as many as possible "close to their home" — the Brussels euphemism for "in Turkey".
