[BRIEF NOTE] The root of my Turkish concern

[rfmcdonald]

The issue crystallized for me in the comments of Douglas Muir's latest post at A Fistful of Euros on Turkish accession. Leave aside the questionable stability of the Turkish political system and Turkish society that makes me think that opening accession negotiations with Turkey now is like opening up negotiations with Poland in 1989 (and yes, I think that giving Greece membership in the then_EC in 1980 was a mistake, that 1986 would have been a better date for a single Mediterranean expansion). If the only reasons that people can give to make the opening of negotiations with Turkey more justified than the opening of negotiations with Croatia, despite Turkey's comparable or even worse reputation, relate to the fact that Turkey's a large and populous country and it must be treated with, then a good chunk of the morality behind the EU (a zone of democracies, a zone of justice) is tossed out the window. What we're left with is conventional great-power politics, made all the more cynical by the deployment of rhetoric talking about solidarity with emergent democracies.

If Turkey, why not Croatia now? Why not also Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia?