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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Whether Erdogan will follow through with his plans is still an open question. Almost no ruler in modern Turkish history has been better placed to push reform as he is, here and now. Last year, using a canny mix of brinkmanship and diplomacy, he got the United States to back limited Turkish airstrikes and commando raids against PKK bases inside northern Iraq. That won him huge support not just from voters—including ultranationalist voters—but also from Turkey's politically powerful generals. "The government stands side by side with our soldiers," Erdogan told parliamentarians when asking them to authorize the use of force outside Turkey's borders last year. That message went some way toward defusing the military's longstanding enmity toward Erdogan and the AKP.
But the danger is that further reforms will be swamped in the fallout from the headscarf ban. Deniz Baykal, leader of the opposition Republican People's Party or CHP, warned that Turkey faces "a counterrevolution," and vowed to fight to reinstate the headscarf ban through the avowedly secularist Constitutional Court. That will mean months of political messiness and upheaval. On the AKP side, the pressure is on from the grass roots to go further still. Once headscarves are allowed in universities, some AKP members will wonder why it is still banned in hospitals, courts and municipal buildings. "The lifting of such bans in other public services will come to the agenda gradually, inshallah," says Husnu Tuna, an AKP member of Parliament's Constitutional Committee.
That, too, could be considered a liberal move—more akin to much of the West's freedom of religion than Ataturk's ideal of laïcité, or freedom from religion. Now Erdogan faces an enormous balancing act. The test of his commitment to European ideals will come as he chooses in the months ahead which reforms to pursue next—EU reforms, or those advocated by his grass-roots supporters. Poll numbers suggest waning support among Turks for entry to the EU, largely because of European rebuffs and the perception that Europe has failed to keep its promises on Turkish-dominated Northern Cyprus. Yet it seems increasingly unlikely that Erdogan and the AKP would ever hop off that old European streetcar. Since his firebrand days, Erdogan has realized that straight political Islam has a limited appeal to all but a tiny minority of Turkish voters. The same goes for isolationist nationalism. So he is likely to take a more pragmatic path, if for no other reason than that Turkey's continued economic growth is tightly linked to its embrace of Western business standards. Indeed Turkey is going to keep driving that streetcar west—no matter what the EU or Erdogan's opponents have to say about it.
© 2008
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