"Both sides have opted to continue to play the accession game," Faruk Logoglu, a former diplomat who assumed top posts at the Turkish Foreign Ministry, told Xinhua.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met last week with European Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker in Brussels, following months of war of words and diatribe between the two sides in the wake of a failed coup in Turkey last July.
Erdogan told Turkish media after the meeting that Turkey had been given a 12-month road map to work on for better ties and that both sides agreed to accelerate Turkey's accession to the 28-nation bloc.

The two sides would lose economically and politically in case of an unending crisis in bilateral relations.

"Turkey cannot ignore the EU if it wants to have a strong economy," Ilhan Uzgel, a senior analyst of international relations, told Xinhua.

For Turkey, the EU is both its biggest export market and biggest investor as far as foreign direct investments are concerned.