More Turkish Delight
By EURSOC Two
14 December, 2004
Britain is prepared to offer France some of the concessions it demanded last week to ensure Turkey secures a starting date for EU entrance talks.
According to the Guardian, British prime minister Tony Blair will agree to suspend opening talks until late next year; to include a 'get out' clause warning Turkey its application may be rejected; and will call for a rewrite of EU rules to ensure Turkey - which could be Europe's largest country by the time it joins the EU - cannot dominate EU procedures.
Blair is expected to pass his offer to Germany's chancellor Gerhard Schröder at dinner this week. Schröder will then pass them on to France's president Chirac.
Take us or else...?
While Britain is thought to be Turkey's most vocal supporter in its EU bid, it is not certain how Ankara will respond to Blair's warning it might not succeed in joining the EU after all. While Turkey's government will be relieved that Blair did not agree to Chirac's demand that Turkey be informed it might leave the talks with something less than full membership, signs of impatience are already beginning to show.
picks up picks up on a warning from Turkey's "moderately" Islamist PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Europe faces a terror attacks if the EU knocks back the Muslim nation.
Erdogan said, "Accepting a country that has brought together Islam and democracy will bring about harmony between civilisations. If, on the other hand, it is not welcomed, the world will have to put up with the present situation" (a reference commentators claim refers to the wave of terror attacks that hit Turkey last year.)
He added that Turkey had waited an unprecedented forty years for EU membership: If the other nations chose to keep the EU as a "Christian club...(and) burn their bridges with the rest of the world, history will not forgive them."
Melanie is not impressed by Erdogan's plea: "give Turkey membership of the EU, on the grounds that it is a democratic state just like the rest of Europe, and if you don't we'll blow your brains out. Not perhaps the most well thought-through of diplomatic messages," and she quotes US commentator Victor Davis Hanson, who is more sceptical still.
VDH reckons that Europeans realise privately that allowing Turkey to join the EU will fundamentally alter the nature of the EU and European identity as a whole - and perhaps not in positive ways. However, Europe's utopian political correctness prohibits any debate on Turkish membership on these terms.
Meanwhile, the Turks have their own dilemmas: "Some in Turkey dare the Europeans, almost in contempt, to reject their bid" Hanson writes, "Thus rather than evolving Ataturk's modernist reforms to match the values of Europe, the country is instead driven into the midst of an Islamic reactionary revival in which its rural east far more resembles Iraq or Iran than Brussels. So the world wonders whether Europe is sticking a toe into the Islamic Middle East or the latter its entire leg into Europe."
A poll for newspaper Le Figaro showed 69 percent of the French public opposes Turkish membership of the EU. |
