Stuffing Turkey

The European Union tells Turkey to cool its heels until Dec. '04 before talks about joining the EU can commence; the Turks had been pushing to move that timetable up (they blame the French for the screw job).

Apart from centuries-old animosity toward Turkey, it's hard not to read this as a thumb in George W. Bush's eye--he lobbied on Turkey's behalf and the country will play a key role in any military attack on Iraq. Has any country so desperate to join the "West" been so consistently backhanded?

Comments

[Paul]

Why on earth would Turkey want to join the EU in the first place? It really sounds like the EU's economy is heading into a tailspin (if it's not there already), and it would only drag Turkey down with it.

[tim]

"Why on earth would Turkey want to join the EU in the first place? It really sounds like the EU's economy is heading into a tailspin (if it's not there already), and it would only drag Turkey down with it."

Because the EU economy in a full tailspin still wallops Turkey's economy in full, swanlike flight. Compare and contrast with one EU member:

Turkey:
Per capita income=$2830
Per capita gnp=$3,670

Belgium:
Per capita income=$26,710
Per capita gnp=$25,506

The comparison might be a little better against Spain or Portugal, but Turkey is a third-world country and the EU has good reasons for not wanting to share all its financial and monetary institutions with it. Thumb in the eye or not, this is not Bush's decision to make.

[Tommy]

Bush should just go ahead and invite Turkey to become the 51st state.

[Paul A.]

And please, let us not forgot Ankara's inaction on letting scholars study the Armenian genocide at the Ottoman Imperial archives

Or for that matter, denial of said genocide.

Or the continuing occupation of North Cyprus for 30 years now.

But the EU didn't deny membership for those reasons of course, i think we all have seen how they love Islamic terrorists by their red carpet treatment of the Palestinian Authority. They are just afraid of more cheap labor their imploding industries will have to compete with, not human rights.

And to Tim, EU membership would be a disaster for Ankara, since EU rules and regulations were drawn up within a "rich-nation" context and are meant more for spreading spoils around than allowing economic growth. Look at how poor East Germany has fared since reunification, unemployment's at 25 percent, that's high even for the EU. Developing nations can not develop under those sorts of rules, those are luxuries for rich nations. And I doubt the prospect of tariff elimination will balance out that effect at all.

[Paul A.]

To Tommy: Man, that's just what we need, 25+ million Americans sympathetic to Islamism, with no border controls or roadblocks to protect us just a little.

The mistake most Americans make with Turkey is that they go to Constantinople (Istanbul) or Ankara and maybe somewhere else in east Thrace or northwest Anatolia (and the wealthy neighborhoods at that). This, the more European part, is more or less sympathetic to the U.S. to the degree say Greece is (figure out what that means on your own). And they never go into the central plateau or the east, the more Arabic/ Persian/ Azeri part, where many Khomenei if not bin Laden sympathizers live.

[Karl]

What is backhanded is not what the EU did but what the US did, constantly implying to Turkey, that none of the following matter: its occupation of another state, its unilateral threats by flying armed military aircraft over EU Flight Information regions, its murderous treatment of minotities, and its jailing and torture of its own journalists and non-violent civil rights advocates.

Turkey actions on Iraq are meaningless. they did not support the initial war and as been documented they broke the original arms embargo. Only when the war was a forgone conclusion did they join the coalition. Since then they have been one of the biggest embargo breakers with the illegal trade over the border estimated in the billions.

As far as the long term, do the math, Turkey is the single largest recipeint of aid in real doolars in the History of the US. the aid it has received since the Truman doctrine in constant dollars is bigger than the aggregate for Israel.

Sure one can argue that Turkey has been in Nato but this is like saying that Germany was doing the US a fovor by allowing the Berlin airlift or the stationing of troops in Germany to protect against the USSR. Containing the Soviet Union, and now Iraq is a massive net benifit to Turkey, not a Turkish favor to the U.S.