Comment: I am writing this to Frodo42 . First of all, please dont act like you are giving us something pro bono. We dont need your endowment, your desire towards our EU join at all. Dont be deluded that our public craves to enter EU, opinion polls here are the same as yours. I am sure that if Turkey joins EU someday, it will be just because of the high interests of EU, not an instant sentimental decision of your diplomats you dont like. And in my opinion, if your diplomats would act according to your people???s desires, you would be somewhere else in the GDP scale. The Europe which I think is splitted in 2 or 3 must give an approval or disapproval decision for us anymore. It is not fair to be suspended for years and to be asked much more than other candidate members. We need to draw our line too.
You are talking about the censorship of YouTube, the invasion of Iraq etc. in order to display our current situation. It is ludicrous to cite all these while many of our citizens are being burned alive in the midst of contemporary Europe. It is another paralogism to name a cross-border operation towards terrorists as an invasion, since we are having that operation on the strength of UN treaties. It is the salvation of a public from a longstanding anguish, not occupation of Cyprus. We have many people who seek protection there. Sorry but we dont need to ask anyone to proect our public from a carnage. And there is also no country recognized or an official place called Kurdistan. If you accept that name and the view of a terrorist group with ease then you are said to have tolerance for any terrorist movement anywhere and also you must be ready to admit a new independent region in your country requested by a terrorist group in future.
If the democratic legitimacy of the EU is bound up with our join, then you better do something quickly for your union. You are using so many assertive statements most of which I can assure are totally wrong, and I think it is a pity such a wrong-informed guy can write comments to a magazine like Newsweek. I feel irritated about your prejudice and for your age, I would expect you to be more hip when commenting about a foreign country.
The True Turkish Believer
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Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan just won't take no for an answer. In 2002 he and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power promising to get Turkey into the European Union. Under the banner of the EU's "Copenhagen criteria" for new members, the AKP made an impressive start: it abolished the death penalty, curbed the backroom political power of the military and eased restrictions on Kurdish language and culture. But instead of recognizing just how far Turkey had come, European leaders recoiled, rebuffing Erdogan and his country at virtually every turn. French President Nicolas Sarkozy says he opposes Turkish membership in the EU because it's "an Asian country," suggesting instead that maybe one day it could be part of a proposed Mediterranean Union. German Chancellor Angela Merkel warns that "Turkey's membership is going to constrain the EU." She offers "privileged partnership" instead of full membership.
Erdogan is undeterred. Instead of slowing down the pace of change, the AKP has announced its biggest and boldest reform package yet. Emboldened by a resounding victory in snap elections last summer, the party has embarked on a wholesale overhaul of the hard-wiring of the country's political system. Central to the new order is a redrawing of Turkey's 1981 Constitution designed to give more power to the people—including direct presidential elections—as well as introducing more freedom of speech and religion. In doing so, the AKP hopes to create a society that Europe simply cannot refuse—one that is moving ahead with a long-term strategy that looks calmly past the current crop of anti-Turkish European leaders. "Whatever they say, we will continue on our path," promises Foreign Minister Ali Babacan. "For us the important thing is that the negotiation process with Europe remains on track."
What is driving this? One top European diplomat who has worked closely with Erdogan during Turkey's negotiations with the EU says Turkey's prime minister "has a deep and personal commitment to bringing his country into Europe. He feels that that is his country's destiny." During his years in power Erdogan has developed a powerful narrative for Turkey as a "bridge between cultures," with both his country and himself playing key roles in "bringing religions and culture closer together to avoid a global clash of civilizations." It is a philosophy he expounded eloquently upon at a recent Madrid conference on the "Alliance of Civilizations," which he co-hosted with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and it is based on the assumption that Turkey cannot stand alone in glorious isolation.
There is also a more pragmatic rationale for looking to Europe. Turkey's growing harmonization with western business practices and regulations has brought a deluge of foreign investment—$20 billion last year—which has helped fuel GDP growth of close to 6 percent for the past five years and helped modernize Turkey's once creaky manufacturing and textile industries.
Still, if taken at face value, Erdogan's enthusiasm for Europe comes as a surprise: for most of their careers, Erdogan and his close ally Abdullah Gul, now president, shared with most Turkish Islamists a deep suspicion of Europe and Western values in general. Their political mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, frequently railed against the West for being ruled by "racist imperialism and Zionism." Erdogan himself, while mayor of Istanbul in the mid-1990s, sparked controversy when he compared democracy to a streetcar: "When you come to your stop, you get off."
But then reality intervened. In 1999 he was convicted of sedition after reciting an allegedly subversive Islamic poem at a political rally. He spent four months in jail, and by his own account, his spell in prison helped convince him that political Islam needed modernizing just as much as the Turkish state. The two, he came to understand, were locked in a vicious cycle. On one side, an ultraconservative military was using police-state methods to enforce a rigid secularism, which was at odds with the reality of Turkish society; on the other side were old-guard Islamists like Erbakan, whose blend of nationalism, religion and anti-Westernism was out of step with a modern, globalized world.
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