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  • Feature: Mad about Turkey

    Feature: Mad about Turkey
    by GARETH HARDING

    UPI - United Press International (USA)
    September 1, 2005 Thursday 11:45 AM EST

    BRUSSELS, Sept. 1 -- Brussels, the self-styled capital of the European
    Union, is a consensual sort of place, where believers in the EU project
    far outnumber doubters, and polite debate is preferred to heated
    argument. But when it comes to the pros and cons of Turkey's membership
    of the Union, the gloves come off and etiquette flies out the window --
    as a demonstration against Ankara's EU bid proved earlier this week.

    On a leafy square wedged between the European Parliament and the
    Council of Ministers in the EU quarter of the city, several dozen young
    activists from the "Voice for Europe" campaign handed out leaflets
    against Turkish membership of the 25-member bloc to bemused motorists,
    tourists and passers-by. They held up banners proclaiming "55 percent
    vs. 35 percent: can't you count" -- a reference to a recent European
    Commission opinion poll showing a majority of Europeans against Turkish
    membership, let off balloons with the slogan "Turkey is not in Europe,"
    and set up a huge clock with the hand standing motionless at 5 minutes
    to noon. The message? Even at this late stage -- accession talks with
    the predominantly Muslim state are due to begin in Brussels in one
    month -- the decision by EU leaders to open membership negotiations
    with Ankara can be reversed.

    It is difficult to get worked up about draft directives and
    parliamentary amendments -- the usual Brussels fodder -- but the
    question of whether Turkey should be admitted into the EU in the
    latter half of the next decade unleashes powerful emotions.

    When Boris Blauth, the German coordinator of the Voice for Europe
    campaign, tells United Press International that Turkish immigrants
    commit "far more crimes" than locals, a Belgian journalist of Turkish
    origin retorts: "Turks don't have a chance to integrate. They are
    put in a ghetto and left to their own devices." To illustrate his
    point, the photo-journalist tells the story of a date he once had in
    Brussels. "After two hours talking in a bar, I told the girl my name
    and she spat in my face and left."

    A hot-headed Armenian demonstrator has little sympathy for the
    reporter's romantic woes or arguments in favor of Turkish entry. "You
    shouldn't be a journalist. You should be a clown," he says, to which
    the reporter replies: "Go forth and multiply" -- but not quite in
    those words.

    It is easy to see why Turkish membership of the EU, which is the
    main topic on the table of a meeting of European foreign ministers
    in Wales Friday, sparks such violent reactions.

    If Turkey joined the EU in 2015, it would become its most populous
    state within a decade due to strong population growth in the
    predominantly Muslim republic and low fertility rates in the Union.
    As population size largely determines voting power in the EU, it would
    leapfrog Germany to become the state with the greatest political clout.

    Turkey is considerably poorer than EU states, with a per capita gross
    domestic product equal to a quarter the EU average.

    "Unemployed manpower will stream into European territories, which
    will result in tensions both on the labor force market and on the
    level of society," says a pamphlet distributed by Voice for Europe.

    Blauth's main concern is that Turkish values, which he describes as
    in the "Asian, Islamic tradition," are different from European secular
    values such as equality between men and women and freedom to practice
    one's religion. "Let them have their culture and let us have ours,"
    says the German.

    Opponents of Turkey's membership of the EU vigorously deny they are
    racist or xenophobic, but there is more than a hint of Islamophobia
    in some of the arguments they put forward.

    "A Muslim state cannot join the European Union," says Mogens Camre,
    a Danish Euro-skeptic member of the European Parliament who took
    time out to meet the campaigners Monday. "You can believe in any
    God you like, but the Islamic religion is not about democracy. The
    Arab world rejects modern society and we don't want their fingers
    on our buttons in Europe. We've only been able to develop the way we
    have because we are a homogenized society. If the Muslims took over,
    Denmark would be a desert."

    These arguments may be crude and pander to the public's basest fears
    about a clash of civilizations between Christian Europe and Muslim
    Turkey, but they are widely held in the EU. In a recent commission
    poll, three-quarters of Germans and 70 percent of French respondents
    came out against Turkish accession, with over half of those interviewed
    opposing Ankara's entry into the 25-member club.

    Since it was founded in May, Voice for Europe has collected over
    26,000 signatures for its petition against Turkish membership and
    has brought its message to Budapest, Copenhagen, Athens, Warsaw,
    Prague and other European capitals.

    "We have had a very good response on the streets," says Blauth. "Even
    Turkish women in hijabs (headscarves) have signed our petition."

    Despite the muscular campaigning against Turkey's membership bid by
    groups like Voice for Europe and the last-minute doubts expressed by
    senior members of the French, Austrian, Greek and Cypriot governments,
    membership talks with Ankara are still likely to kick off as planned
    on Oct. 3 -- over 40 years after Turkey first filed its application
    to join. But the public debate about whether to admit the large,
    powerful and populous nation on Europe's eastern fringes is likely
    to run and run.
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