Ironywatch: Turks condemn condemnation of Armenian Genocide by condeming Armenians

Not true. But even if it was, so what? Attempting to demonise and guilt people for shit that they weren't personally responsible for tends to polarise them.

 

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Hello Bells!


Fraggle: Turkey will never be accepted into the EU, not for a thousand years, so long as it is a majority-Muslim nation.

Bells: I disagree.


I think Fraggle may be referring to this:


'Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, has cast doubt on Turkey's prospects of European Union membership, as heads of government wrangled over moves to revive the moribund European constitution in 2008.

Mr Barroso said that getting Turkey into the EU would be "very difficult " and added many in Europe see the 70 million-strong, mainly Muslim nation as "culturally different".'

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...ership-are-in-doubt-warns-barroso-404218.html


And this:

Many ordinary Turks proclaim themselves to be European and their country’s Western outlook is woven into the very fabric of the secular republic created by Ataturk in 1923.

Accordingly, Turkey’s government harbours a cherished ambition to join the European Union. Formal accession talks designed to achieve this aim began in 2005, with Britain the most prominent supporter of Turkey’s bid for membership.

Yet bringing Turkey into the fold raises profound questions about the very nature of European identity and the boundaries of its civilisation. It also stirs deeply ingrained folk memories of that advance along the Danube.

Many leaders, particularly President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, make no secret of their unease. Since winning power in 2007, Mr Sarkozy has hardened France’s position on Turkey’s accession into an outright “no”.

Earlier this year, he urged European leaders to stop “lying” about Turkey’s chances of achieving full membership and declared that he would not “tell French schoolchildren that the borders of Europe extend to Syria and Iraq”. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, quietly agrees with him, leaving Gordon Brown as the only leader of Europe’s “big three” to favour Turkey’s application.

Lying behind these concerns is one unspoken fact about Turkey’s possible accession: if it succeeds, the EU’s second most populous member state would be 97 per cent Muslim. At present, Turkey has 72 million people, but this will rise to almost 100 million by 2050. Letting Turkey join would create the near certainty that, eventually, the biggest EU member state would be overwhelmingly Muslim. Leaders who oppose Turkey’s ambition tend to tiptoe around this fact, while dropping hints that it is not far from their minds. Most candid was Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president who was chosen to oversee the drafting of the EU’s stillborn constitution.

Allowing Turkey to join “would be the end of the European Union”, he declared in 2002, because the country has a “different culture, a different approach, a different way of life”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...ll-Turkeys-EU-membership-dream-come-true.html

Fraggle's assessment is correct.

 

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I agree, I'm surprised its taken so long for anyone to realise this.

 

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Bells, I agree completely: organized or not, Genocide is genocide. Rwanda's Genocide didn't have gas chambers, but it was genocide.

As for Turkey: human rights and equality first, membership second. Sorry.

 

I'm writing a paper on Turkish EU accession and have read hundreds of articles about it. Fraggle is giving you one side and just one side.

 

Yes but he's giving a side widely held by many in the EU.

 

they took the responsibility on to themselves when they denied and defended it.

 

Not really. He's giving you the populist stuff that gets in the news. The real concerns are much more nuanced and can probably be addressed, if Europe is actually interested.

 

You should probably switch to a field of study that will have some relevance to something. Unless you're studying why the Turks won't get admitted to the EU, and the machinations related to that.

As the populism demonstrates, Europe is not interested.

 

When I want your advice on something, I will ask for it.

They didn't want a constitution either, and the EU went around them. Accession negotiations have already started and no country admitted to that process has ever been refused.

 

Good for you.

The stakes were higher on that one - giving up on that would have spelled the end of the European project. Failing to admit Turkey, on the other hand, will be a status quo maneuver.

And the machinations to avoid popular sentiment on the constitution mean that similar overridings are politically less likely, now.

There's a first time for everything.

 

It's been fun listening to you, but the fact remains echoing a populist position in an attempt to predict the future is just that.

My paper actually concludes that Turkey can't be admitted because it does not even satisfy Copenhagen, the baseline for acceptance. But that's now. I'm not foolish enough to try to say what happens 10 or 15 years from now, but I certainly think the EU is stronger with Turkey and Ukraine than it is without them.

 

... so: likely accurate, you mean?

Stronger or not, the accession of either of those states would dramatically complicate the EU's foreign relations in a way that it is not prepared for, and shows no signs of being interested in preparing for.

 

No, I mean devoid of substance. You're using a snapshot of current attitudes and trying to apply them to a political reality that is 10 or 15 years down the road. In other words, you're just guessing...

I don't think the question is one of foreign relations so much as it is economic concerns, representation in EU body and outstanding problems such as Cyprus.

 

Given that on the one hand, the attitudes seem to have been stable for some time now and that, on the other, the window of political momentum in favor of accession in Turkey is rapidly closing, I think it's a fairly good estimate.

It's not going to take 10 to 15 years for this question to get resolved. It's already a dead horse, more or less. The only question is how prolonged the process of making this explicit is going to be. For now, the charade of accession negotiations serves both sides well enough. As soon as it doesn't, that'll be the end of the story.

Not sure what you're sweeping under "economic concerns," but those latter issues could easily be resolved/worked around if both sides were determined. But they aren't, and on the European side that is because of widespread, adamant opposition to the prospect of Turks freely migrating to Europe and the fact that a Europe which borders Iraq isn't going to be able to indulge in the sort of afterthough, backseat-driver foreign policy that Europe is accustomed to. The Ukraine case is doubly sensitive in that regard: the EU has no appetite for another thousand miles of border with an enraged, insecure Russia.

 

If you take the contrary, Turkish support for EU accession, you see the numbers plunge during the past five years. So the trend reversed. That could just as easily swing back around, for both the EU and Turkey, though I admit there are no immediate signs of it doing so. My larger point is that speculating on populist moods is notoriously difficult -- so much so that it's almost useless to engage in doing.

To cite just one, there is agriculture. The EU has huge farm subsidies based on income and production. If it suddenly took Turkey under its wing, it would have to pay out an enormous sum, as Turkey has a giant agriculture sector, in which people earn very little and food is very cheap (that would have to change, too).

Turks are already migrating to Europe (ask Merkel). But the issue of rabid immigration, which you are referring to, is a red herring. If Turkey is admitted, it would be placed under the same sort of immigration limits that other new nations in the EU were. This proscribes immigration for a set period of years. The EU leaders know this, so whenever they stoke the fires of the Turks besieging Vienna again, it's purely populist nonsense...

Iraq won't be the problem in 10 years it is today. Syria is already less of a problem than it was 10 years ago. Iran is a problem, but the Europeans have already shown themselves to have no compunction dealing with Iran. There is also another part of your argument that seems to ignore the fact that as a member of NATO, much of the EU is already bound to shield Turkey from any kind of military confrontation with its neighbors. You also seem to overlook how having Turkey would open Europe up to the ME and North African markets the Turks have developed.

There's two ways to look at that. Surrounding Russia by getting another flank proscribes Soviet movement, keeps the bear out of the Black Sea and frees the Ukraine -- and its resources -- from Russian domination. That all sounds pretty good to me.

 

I'm less sanguine on that count - it's been a big problem for several decades now.

Syria was never going to be strong enough to pose a serious problem.

Again, I'm not so sanguine there.

Sort of, but not really. For one, the mutual defense clause in the NATO treaty only applies to attacks in Europe or North America - and only a small portion of Turkey is "in Europe." For another, NATO has long operated on the understanding that the US will do all the heavy lifting - Europe would side with Turkey, but not necessarily do much of anything. A Turkey that's in the EU would radically change that posture - they'd lose a lot of autonomy in their foreign policy, and Turkey appears to be ready to run a more assertive foreign policy, so it's hard to see how that would sit well.

I don't see where they need Turkey for that, in particular. Some pipelines would be great and all, but that doesn't require Turkey to be in the EU...

At the cost of indefinitely sustaining a massive ground army and Black Sea naval deployment to keep the enraged, insecure nuclear power at bay (there are no natural barriers to invasion between Russia and the Ukraine). That's an expensive proposition in both monetary and political terms; essentially a repeat of the Cold War, except this time Russia is the primary energy supplier for Europe. Germany is never going to sign up for that, and so that's the end of the story. At least for another generation or two - Russia is going to look a lot less imposing as their demographic decline proceeds.

 

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n....tatus-quo8217-in-karabakh-conflict-2010-04-01