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rfmcdonaldInternet news sites and the blogosphere have already reported that the European Commission, after a highly public and emotional debate, has decided to recommend that Turkey be considered for membership in the European Union, and proposed opening initial talks on membership.
It's more than a bit troublesome how frequently historical emnities between Christian European states and Muslim Turkey, dating back to the Ottoman Empire's invasions and conquests in Europe in the 15th century, were invoked as a reason against Turkish membership.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pompe was quite right to point out that the European Union's origins has its origins in a successful attempt to permanently settle the Franco-German enmity that had helped cause three major wars in as many generations. A history of past conflict--particularly a history that, by all accounts, ended a generation ago--is a poor argument to bring to bear.
One thing that I've noted about the debate on Turkish entry into the European Union is that proponents and opponents tend to use hyperbolic language. At one extreme, Tork, writing at Living in Europe, makes what I think is an overoptimistic case in favour of Turkey joining the European Union (will Turkey's problems really resolve themselves so nicely?). At GNXP, what I think is an overly pessimistic argument has been written (is Turkey really so incapable of modernizing?).
The Economist does a good job of presenting a measured opinion in favour of Turkish membership in the first two paragraphs of a recent cover article ("The impossibility of saying no," 18th-24th September 2004, pages 30 through 32):
The article goes on to consider Turkey's slow implementation of the various proposed domestic reforms in human (women, political) and minority (Christian, Kurdish) rights and touches briefly upon Turkey's relative economic underdevelopment (one-third of its labour force is still occupied in farming, GDP per capita measured at PPP is less than three-quarters that of Poland and unlike Poland's hasn't shown any trends towards convergence over the 1990s). The central focus of the article, though, is upon Turkey's Islamic identity and the way that can be made to fit (or not) in a largely secular and increasingly post-Christian Europe.
As the article title would tend to suggest, the Economist's writer comes out strongly in favour of allowing Turkey to join the European Union. A Turkey that was allowed to join the European Union, even at some ill-defined date off in the future, would be--in the writer's argument--a Turkey confirmed both in its modernity and its Islamic identity. A green light from Brussels would show the world's Muslims, the argument goes, that it was truly possible for a Muslim country to be treated as an equal, that a Muslim country could remain Muslim while embracing modernity. A red light, now, could trigger another clash of civilizations.
The argument's major flaw is that it rests upon ill-defined "potentials."
If Turkey, in other words, ends up being in the 2015-2020 period more similar to the Economist's second country than its first, something like German CDU leader Angela Merkel's offer of special associate status would be a viable compromise.
Whenever I think about the European Union, I tend to compare it to the Canadian federation. Granted that there are immense differences between Canada and Europe, the established Canadian and the emergent European systems were both founded reluctantly by certain core units, led by politicians and assorted opinionmakers who believed that the only way to retain their autonomy in the face of larger and more powerful states was to establish a federal regime of sorts.
A Europe of the Twenty-Nine isn't inevitable--it's still quite possible that Turkey might fail to meet the qualifications for membership for reasons having little or nothing to do with Turkish Islam. Another military coup would certainly ruin Turkey's chances; the failure to implement the new liberalizing laws passed by Erdogan's government would do likewise.
Then again, the current Europe of the Twenty-Five wasn't inevitable. It's possible that its membership might be somewhat larger than it already is: Imagine a situation where Yugoslavia survived the transition from Communism intact and joined the European Union this year along with its northern post-Communist neighbours, or where the 1995 Norwegian referendum went slightly in favour of European Union membership. It's more likely that the European Union's membership could have ended up being considerably smaller than it is, whether because of social collapse in post-Communist central Europe, an unwillingness to expand into the Mediterranean in the 1980s, a British vote against membership in 1973, or perhaps the establishment of a tight western European federation of the Six that would find it difficult to expand to include non-founding states.
Similarly, the establishment of a Canada that, upon Newfoundland's 1949 accession, stretched uninterrupted across the whole of what had once been called British North America, wasn't inevitable. I can think of two scenarios--or rather, clusters of specific scenarios--that are particularly likely.
Imagine, for a moment, that the young Dominion of Canada, established in 1867 as a compact of the provinces of Ontario, Québec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, never expands significantly beyond its core. Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, isolated far away on the northeastern fringe of North America, may well fall into the Dominion's orbit. British Columbia, however, remains a separate entity and eventually becomes a sort of Northern-Hemispheric New Zealand, while the Métis manage to successfully maintain the independence of their Manitoban homeland--stretching here from the Ontarian frontier to the Rocky Mountains--and create a nation-state that becomes a bizarre hybrid of Uruguay and the United Arab Emirates.
For our purposes, the Dominion of British Columbia and Republic of Manitoba won't enter into our discussion. In fact, let's go further and say that their absence will barely impact Canada's development, which unfolds much as it did in the history we're familiar with: a post-1867 flood of emigrants is stemmed by protectionist industrialization, the shock of two world wars accelerates the modernization of Canada in all fields, a fragile English Canadian cultural nationalism too often characterized by negative definitions develops even as the French Canadians of Québec slowly evolve into Québécois, and Canada eventually becomes the prosperous and pluralistic post-industrial country that we know today.
So many Canadian policies would make more sense if it wasn't for the inclusion of western Canada. Take bilingualism, for instance: Without the ten million Anglophones of western Canada, the ratio between Anglophones and Francophones in *Canada would remain close to its historic ratio of two-to-one. Without vocal energy-producing interests in *Manitoba, a National Energy Policy would be overwhelmingly popular. Without Western populism to complicate things, Canadian politics would still be dominated at the federal level by the Tories and the Liberals. Without strongly pro-American trading interests in western Canada, a variant of Trudeau's Third Option might have gotten off the ground. *Canada, in short, would be a more coherent polity with a more unified society and more homogeneous economy.
*Canada would also be a smaller and less powerful country, mind. As a First World country of twenty million people-—a population scarcely larger than that of the Netherlands—-it would be difficult for *Canada to sustain claims to global leadership. South Korea or Spain would have better claims to membership of the G-7 than *Canada. The National Energy Policy, too, was only theoretically viable because of the presence of Albertan oil and natural gas; *Canada, lacking privileged access to *Manitoban petrochemical fuels, could well be hammered by fluctuating prices. Of course, the burden of the failure of British North America to unite completely would fall hardest on the initially smaller and less developed territories, on *British Columbia and *Manitoba. It's difficult to imagine that *Manitoba would ever evolve into a prosperous and pluralistic society of seven million people, or that a *British Columbia deprived of close transcontinental ties with a developed market in eastern Canada would experience quite as much growth as British Columbia.
Still. If policymakers and public opinion wanted to prevent Canada's complete unification, that would have been a legitimate policy decision. If in the Prairies a Métis nation-state or other organized society did exist and preferred independence in isolation to colonization, or if British Columbians too preferred their independence, barring some exceptionally compelling reasons there would be little justifiable reason for Canadians to override those preferences. Besides, would the Canadians even want to risk expansion? Better to simply enjoy the benefits of international trade.
While researching my Honours thesis in 2001, I was lucky enough to find--at the tourist trap of Gateway Village, on the Island terminus of the Confederation Bridge, of all places--The Causes of Canadian Confederation. This is an anthology of essays published in 1990 by Acadiensis Press which examined the underlying dynamics behind the formation of the Canadian community.
A particularly interesting essay was Nelson et al.'s "Canadian Confederation as a Case Study in Community Formation," which sought to examine the ways in which the six colonies of what is now eastern Canada were alternatively connected or disconnected. He and his fellow researchers examined a variety of indicators: the volume of intercolonial trade; the number of news items from other colonies appearing in a given colony's press; publically expressed attitudes towards Confederation; and so on. They came to two interesting conclusions:
Based on these patterns, then, there was relatively little rationale for the creation of a political community-—later deepening into an economic and cultural community—-comprising two regions with so little in common. If it hadn't been for John A. MacDonald's inspiration to take advantage of the 1864 Charlottetown Conference on Maritime Union to break the parliamentary deadlock in the United Province of Canada by creating a wider union, the Dominion of Canada might never have formed. Instead, we might have ended up with a *Canada with its eastern frontier on the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Baie des Chaleurs, and some sort of Maritime or Atlantic confederation to *Canada's east.
I have to admit that it's more difficult to imagine the negative outcomes for *Canada than it is for *Atlantica. For a time when I was younger, I tried to imagine alternate histories where the nascent industrialism of the Maritimes could have caught on fire in the 1880s, eventually making the region a sort of North Atlantic Sweden or Denmark, a small rich trading nation. I've since come to believe that given the growing integration of the North Atlantic economy and the small domestic capital and consumer markets of the Maritimes, it would have been very difficult to engineer the region towards prosperity. *Atlantica might settle into a North American version of Ireland before its economic boom, notable as a country with remarkably scenic landscapes, a pleasing folk culture, and large (and growing) immigrant populations wherever higher incomes could be found.
At first glance, the exclusion of four small and poor provinces which (as of writing) have 7% of our Canada's population and perhaps a twentieth of our Canada's GDP wouldn't have much of a negative effect on Canada. On the contrary, it might well have a positive effect, freeing the Canadian federal government of a real need to maintain programs of regional subsidies unpopular in the richer provinces and allowing greater per capita economies of scale. And yet, it's possible to imagine negative consequences as well. For instnace, Newfoundlanders--and by extension, Atlantic Canadians--play a role in the prosperous economies of mainland Canada as economic migrants with Canadian citizenship. Would this economic niche be filled? Geopolitically, too, without a significant Atlantic sea frontage *Canada might have been tugged into the American orbit at a much earlier date. *Canadian nationalists might well mourn their nation's failure to secure *Atlantica.
It's clear that the two alternate-historical scenarios I've outlined above, where Canada fails for whatever reason to reach its current size, would produce negative outcomes, particularly negative economic outcomes. It's also fairly clear, I think, that the negative outcomes would have the largest impact on the areas excluded from *Canada, owing to their relatively small size and lower levels of development. Without British Columbia and the Prairies, or without Atlantic Canada, all British North Americans would be diminished.
It's also clear that I can imagine some situations where this diminishment might not be a bad thing. In the case of the first scenario, for instance, a relatively more homogeneous Canadian federation that didn't have to take the concerns of *British Columbia and *Manitoba might well work, while for the Métis of Manitoba independence would self-evidently be the best way to ensure the primacy of their culture in their homeland. The advantages of a smaller Canada are less evident in the second scenario, though I do wonder whether an *Atlantica might be forced to innovate like Ireland in the absence of financial support from a larger and richer Canada.
If the European Union, in the end, decides not to expand to Turkey because Turkish membership would be too costly, or because it would prefer to remain a more coherent entity, I'd be somewhat saddened but not upset. If Turkey, at its end, decided to remain outside of the European Union because it feared that Europeanization would damage the fabric of Turkish society, or because it felt that it could build sounder and stronger relations with the neighbours to its south and east than with the neighbours to its north and west, I'd feel much the same way. All of those decisions would be well-founded and rooted in sensible arguments. They'd be worthy of respect from all concerned; I'd only hope that the spate of unwanted and frankly annoying American rhetoric regarding Turkish entry into the European Union would end.
If the European Union and/or Turkey decided to break off their relationship because of perceived cultural incompatibilities, though, disregarding the real connections uniting the two sides or the potential new economies of scale resulting from this enlargement, that would be a disaster.
Turkey bears watching for the next while. It's still a very poor country by European standards if not by world standards, in my opinion the prospect of large-scale Turkish migration to the EU-25 is more destabilizing than it is energizing, and the security of Turkish democracy and secularism remains open. For the time being, though, I'd have to say that the Commission's recent decision is a positive one. It may not matter much, but I'm happy.
It's more than a bit troublesome how frequently historical emnities between Christian European states and Muslim Turkey, dating back to the Ottoman Empire's invasions and conquests in Europe in the 15th century, were invoked as a reason against Turkish membership.
pompe was quite right to point out that the European Union's origins has its origins in a successful attempt to permanently settle the Franco-German enmity that had helped cause three major wars in as many generations. A history of past conflict--particularly a history that, by all accounts, ended a generation ago--is a poor argument to bring to bear.One thing that I've noted about the debate on Turkish entry into the European Union is that proponents and opponents tend to use hyperbolic language. At one extreme, Tork, writing at Living in Europe, makes what I think is an overoptimistic case in favour of Turkey joining the European Union (will Turkey's problems really resolve themselves so nicely?). At GNXP, what I think is an overly pessimistic argument has been written (is Turkey really so incapable of modernizing?).
The Economist does a good job of presenting a measured opinion in favour of Turkish membership in the first two paragraphs of a recent cover article ("The impossibility of saying no," 18th-24th September 2004, pages 30 through 32):
This is a tale of two countries that want to join the European Union. The first has been a stalwart member of NATO for 50 years. It has a flourishing democracy, a lively free press and a stable government with a big parliamentary majority. Although most of its people are deeply religious, it is fiercely secular. Its economy is booming: over the past two years, GDP has grown by an annual average of 8.4%, and inflation has fallen by three-quarters, close to single figures. Unlike the current EU, it has a young and growing population. Its biggest city was a cradle of Christian (and European) civilization. It sounds, in short, like a shoe-in for the EU.
The second country is quite different. It lies mostly in Asia, and it borders such troublesome places as Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Its economy has been a basket-case for decades, its current has been repeatedly devalued, many of its banks are ailing, and it is one of the largest debtors to the IMF. IT is far poorer than even the poorest of the ten countries that joined the EU in May. It has a history of military coups. Its dreadful human-rights record and its torture of prisoners are well-documented. Its people are overwhelmingly Muslim, and it could soon be the EU's biggest member by population. In short, the EU should not touch it with a bargepole.
The question of which country the EU should admit is, of course, a trick one. For these are not two countries, but one (30)[.]
The article goes on to consider Turkey's slow implementation of the various proposed domestic reforms in human (women, political) and minority (Christian, Kurdish) rights and touches briefly upon Turkey's relative economic underdevelopment (one-third of its labour force is still occupied in farming, GDP per capita measured at PPP is less than three-quarters that of Poland and unlike Poland's hasn't shown any trends towards convergence over the 1990s). The central focus of the article, though, is upon Turkey's Islamic identity and the way that can be made to fit (or not) in a largely secular and increasingly post-Christian Europe.
As the article title would tend to suggest, the Economist's writer comes out strongly in favour of allowing Turkey to join the European Union. A Turkey that was allowed to join the European Union, even at some ill-defined date off in the future, would be--in the writer's argument--a Turkey confirmed both in its modernity and its Islamic identity. A green light from Brussels would show the world's Muslims, the argument goes, that it was truly possible for a Muslim country to be treated as an equal, that a Muslim country could remain Muslim while embracing modernity. A red light, now, could trigger another clash of civilizations.
The argument's major flaw is that it rests upon ill-defined "potentials."
- Yes, Turkey might provide a positive role model for modernizing Muslim societies the world over, from Senegal to Morocco, from the banlieues of Paris to the ghettoes of Cape Town; or, it might be taken as a singular exception, not to be emulated by the authentically Muslim.
- Yes, Turkey might reverse its economic decline relative to the pre-2004 Europe of the Fifteen and most of the countries which joined this year; or, it might not.
- Yes, Turkey might have a growing population that will come in handy for western and central Europeans, as a useful source of internal European Union migrant labourers; or, it might have a growing population that will be feared by an increasingly anti-immigrant attitude across Europe.
- Yes, it has a strong military capable of significant force projection across the eastern Mediterranean and the Greater Middle East; or, it might also have a collection of generals with near-unlimited power interested in using the shield of the European Union to engage in messy geopolitical games.
- Yes, Turkey has in Erdogan's Justice and Development Party a political party capable of serving as a model for an Islamic Democratic movement akin to Europe's Christian Democracy; or, it might have a political force that destabilizes the secular façade of Turkey and creates a tremendous headache for a European Union of Twenty-Nine.
If Turkey, in other words, ends up being in the 2015-2020 period more similar to the Economist's second country than its first, something like German CDU leader Angela Merkel's offer of special associate status would be a viable compromise.
Whenever I think about the European Union, I tend to compare it to the Canadian federation. Granted that there are immense differences between Canada and Europe, the established Canadian and the emergent European systems were both founded reluctantly by certain core units, led by politicians and assorted opinionmakers who believed that the only way to retain their autonomy in the face of larger and more powerful states was to establish a federal regime of sorts.
A Europe of the Twenty-Nine isn't inevitable--it's still quite possible that Turkey might fail to meet the qualifications for membership for reasons having little or nothing to do with Turkish Islam. Another military coup would certainly ruin Turkey's chances; the failure to implement the new liberalizing laws passed by Erdogan's government would do likewise.
Then again, the current Europe of the Twenty-Five wasn't inevitable. It's possible that its membership might be somewhat larger than it already is: Imagine a situation where Yugoslavia survived the transition from Communism intact and joined the European Union this year along with its northern post-Communist neighbours, or where the 1995 Norwegian referendum went slightly in favour of European Union membership. It's more likely that the European Union's membership could have ended up being considerably smaller than it is, whether because of social collapse in post-Communist central Europe, an unwillingness to expand into the Mediterranean in the 1980s, a British vote against membership in 1973, or perhaps the establishment of a tight western European federation of the Six that would find it difficult to expand to include non-founding states.
Similarly, the establishment of a Canada that, upon Newfoundland's 1949 accession, stretched uninterrupted across the whole of what had once been called British North America, wasn't inevitable. I can think of two scenarios--or rather, clusters of specific scenarios--that are particularly likely.
Imagine, for a moment, that the young Dominion of Canada, established in 1867 as a compact of the provinces of Ontario, Québec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, never expands significantly beyond its core. Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, isolated far away on the northeastern fringe of North America, may well fall into the Dominion's orbit. British Columbia, however, remains a separate entity and eventually becomes a sort of Northern-Hemispheric New Zealand, while the Métis manage to successfully maintain the independence of their Manitoban homeland--stretching here from the Ontarian frontier to the Rocky Mountains--and create a nation-state that becomes a bizarre hybrid of Uruguay and the United Arab Emirates.
For our purposes, the Dominion of British Columbia and Republic of Manitoba won't enter into our discussion. In fact, let's go further and say that their absence will barely impact Canada's development, which unfolds much as it did in the history we're familiar with: a post-1867 flood of emigrants is stemmed by protectionist industrialization, the shock of two world wars accelerates the modernization of Canada in all fields, a fragile English Canadian cultural nationalism too often characterized by negative definitions develops even as the French Canadians of Québec slowly evolve into Québécois, and Canada eventually becomes the prosperous and pluralistic post-industrial country that we know today.
So many Canadian policies would make more sense if it wasn't for the inclusion of western Canada. Take bilingualism, for instance: Without the ten million Anglophones of western Canada, the ratio between Anglophones and Francophones in *Canada would remain close to its historic ratio of two-to-one. Without vocal energy-producing interests in *Manitoba, a National Energy Policy would be overwhelmingly popular. Without Western populism to complicate things, Canadian politics would still be dominated at the federal level by the Tories and the Liberals. Without strongly pro-American trading interests in western Canada, a variant of Trudeau's Third Option might have gotten off the ground. *Canada, in short, would be a more coherent polity with a more unified society and more homogeneous economy.
*Canada would also be a smaller and less powerful country, mind. As a First World country of twenty million people-—a population scarcely larger than that of the Netherlands—-it would be difficult for *Canada to sustain claims to global leadership. South Korea or Spain would have better claims to membership of the G-7 than *Canada. The National Energy Policy, too, was only theoretically viable because of the presence of Albertan oil and natural gas; *Canada, lacking privileged access to *Manitoban petrochemical fuels, could well be hammered by fluctuating prices. Of course, the burden of the failure of British North America to unite completely would fall hardest on the initially smaller and less developed territories, on *British Columbia and *Manitoba. It's difficult to imagine that *Manitoba would ever evolve into a prosperous and pluralistic society of seven million people, or that a *British Columbia deprived of close transcontinental ties with a developed market in eastern Canada would experience quite as much growth as British Columbia.
Still. If policymakers and public opinion wanted to prevent Canada's complete unification, that would have been a legitimate policy decision. If in the Prairies a Métis nation-state or other organized society did exist and preferred independence in isolation to colonization, or if British Columbians too preferred their independence, barring some exceptionally compelling reasons there would be little justifiable reason for Canadians to override those preferences. Besides, would the Canadians even want to risk expansion? Better to simply enjoy the benefits of international trade.
While researching my Honours thesis in 2001, I was lucky enough to find--at the tourist trap of Gateway Village, on the Island terminus of the Confederation Bridge, of all places--The Causes of Canadian Confederation. This is an anthology of essays published in 1990 by Acadiensis Press which examined the underlying dynamics behind the formation of the Canadian community.
A particularly interesting essay was Nelson et al.'s "Canadian Confederation as a Case Study in Community Formation," which sought to examine the ways in which the six colonies of what is now eastern Canada were alternatively connected or disconnected. He and his fellow researchers examined a variety of indicators: the volume of intercolonial trade; the number of news items from other colonies appearing in a given colony's press; publically expressed attitudes towards Confederation; and so on. They came to two interesting conclusions:
- Upon analysis, the six colonies grouped into two fairly coherent clusters, an Atlantic cluster including what is now the four provinces of Atlantic Canada, and a "Canadian" cluster centered upon what was once the United Province of Canada.
- Not only did these two clusters have relatively little to do with each other, they had more interests (cultural, economic) in common with neighbouring regions of the United States, or even with the British Isles, than with each other.
Based on these patterns, then, there was relatively little rationale for the creation of a political community-—later deepening into an economic and cultural community—-comprising two regions with so little in common. If it hadn't been for John A. MacDonald's inspiration to take advantage of the 1864 Charlottetown Conference on Maritime Union to break the parliamentary deadlock in the United Province of Canada by creating a wider union, the Dominion of Canada might never have formed. Instead, we might have ended up with a *Canada with its eastern frontier on the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Baie des Chaleurs, and some sort of Maritime or Atlantic confederation to *Canada's east.
I have to admit that it's more difficult to imagine the negative outcomes for *Canada than it is for *Atlantica. For a time when I was younger, I tried to imagine alternate histories where the nascent industrialism of the Maritimes could have caught on fire in the 1880s, eventually making the region a sort of North Atlantic Sweden or Denmark, a small rich trading nation. I've since come to believe that given the growing integration of the North Atlantic economy and the small domestic capital and consumer markets of the Maritimes, it would have been very difficult to engineer the region towards prosperity. *Atlantica might settle into a North American version of Ireland before its economic boom, notable as a country with remarkably scenic landscapes, a pleasing folk culture, and large (and growing) immigrant populations wherever higher incomes could be found.
At first glance, the exclusion of four small and poor provinces which (as of writing) have 7% of our Canada's population and perhaps a twentieth of our Canada's GDP wouldn't have much of a negative effect on Canada. On the contrary, it might well have a positive effect, freeing the Canadian federal government of a real need to maintain programs of regional subsidies unpopular in the richer provinces and allowing greater per capita economies of scale. And yet, it's possible to imagine negative consequences as well. For instnace, Newfoundlanders--and by extension, Atlantic Canadians--play a role in the prosperous economies of mainland Canada as economic migrants with Canadian citizenship. Would this economic niche be filled? Geopolitically, too, without a significant Atlantic sea frontage *Canada might have been tugged into the American orbit at a much earlier date. *Canadian nationalists might well mourn their nation's failure to secure *Atlantica.
It's clear that the two alternate-historical scenarios I've outlined above, where Canada fails for whatever reason to reach its current size, would produce negative outcomes, particularly negative economic outcomes. It's also fairly clear, I think, that the negative outcomes would have the largest impact on the areas excluded from *Canada, owing to their relatively small size and lower levels of development. Without British Columbia and the Prairies, or without Atlantic Canada, all British North Americans would be diminished.
It's also clear that I can imagine some situations where this diminishment might not be a bad thing. In the case of the first scenario, for instance, a relatively more homogeneous Canadian federation that didn't have to take the concerns of *British Columbia and *Manitoba might well work, while for the Métis of Manitoba independence would self-evidently be the best way to ensure the primacy of their culture in their homeland. The advantages of a smaller Canada are less evident in the second scenario, though I do wonder whether an *Atlantica might be forced to innovate like Ireland in the absence of financial support from a larger and richer Canada.
If the European Union, in the end, decides not to expand to Turkey because Turkish membership would be too costly, or because it would prefer to remain a more coherent entity, I'd be somewhat saddened but not upset. If Turkey, at its end, decided to remain outside of the European Union because it feared that Europeanization would damage the fabric of Turkish society, or because it felt that it could build sounder and stronger relations with the neighbours to its south and east than with the neighbours to its north and west, I'd feel much the same way. All of those decisions would be well-founded and rooted in sensible arguments. They'd be worthy of respect from all concerned; I'd only hope that the spate of unwanted and frankly annoying American rhetoric regarding Turkish entry into the European Union would end.
If the European Union and/or Turkey decided to break off their relationship because of perceived cultural incompatibilities, though, disregarding the real connections uniting the two sides or the potential new economies of scale resulting from this enlargement, that would be a disaster.
Turkey bears watching for the next while. It's still a very poor country by European standards if not by world standards, in my opinion the prospect of large-scale Turkish migration to the EU-25 is more destabilizing than it is energizing, and the security of Turkish democracy and secularism remains open. For the time being, though, I'd have to say that the Commission's recent decision is a positive one. It may not matter much, but I'm happy.
