Thursday, August 17, 2006
Is the West losing Turkey?
The full article is here.
Jax
It a lack of leadership in the west, both in Europe and in the Unitied States. THe problem in the US can be summed up as "George Bush" but can be expanded to describe the authoritarian takeover of the republican party combined with endenic corrpution in Washington. Europe's problem is weakness in the centre. There is no stong pan-european voice, because there are no pan-european elected politicians. THis lack of voice allows the racist and nationalist voices to go largely unopposed and cripples turkey's chance to become a full-member of the European Union.As the columnist Yusuf Kanli put it in the Turkish Daily News: “Things are changing in Turkey. People are becoming more conservative. Conservatives are becoming more nationalist. And nationalists are becoming racist.” He asks, like many of Erdogan’s critics, why “Turks [should] die in Lebanon for the security of Israel but not . . . in northern Iraq for the security of Turkey”? Lebanon is a diversion, some argue, from Turkey’s own battle against Kurdish separatist rebels in the southeast.
Many others say it will distract the Government from the arduous and expensive task of qualifying for EU membership — and of persuading an increasingly sceptical public that this is still in Turkey’s best interests.
