Posted on 11/08/2002 4:16:46 PM PST by Destro
Turkish EU Entry Would Be End of Europe-Giscard
November 08, 2002 07:34 AM ET
PARIS (Reuters) - The head of Europe's constitutional Convention was quoted on Friday as saying Turkey was not a European country and its entry into the EU would be "the end of the European Union."
Former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, president of the Convention on the Future of Europe, told the newspaper Le Monde that those who backed Ankara's candidacy were "the adversaries of the European Union."
The European Commission swiftly dissociated itself from the comments, which heightened controversy within the 15-nation bloc over the EU's eventual borders once it concludes accession talks with 10 mainly east European candidates next month.
Alluding obliquely to its Muslim population and high birth rate, Giscard said Turkey had "a different culture, a different approach, a different way of life" and its demographic dynamism would make it the biggest EU member state.
"Its capital is not in Europe, 95 percent of its population live outside Europe, it is not a European country," he said.
Admitting Turkey would go "outside the continent" and prompt demands to admit other Middle Eastern and North African states, starting with Morocco.
Asked what the effect would be, he said: "In my opinion, it would be the end of the European Union."
A European Commission spokesman said the comments were Giscard's private opinion and the EU executive saw no reason to call into question Turkey's candidacy.
COMMISSION SAYS STRATEGY UNCHANGED
Officially recognized as a candidate for membership in 1999, Turkey is pressing for a date to begin accession talks when EU leaders hold a summit in Copenhagen next month to wrap up the next phase of enlargement.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of Turkey's newly elected Justice and Development Party (AKP), is to visit historic rival and fellow NATO member Greece on November 18 to discuss EU matters.
Brussels has so far refused to open negotiations with Ankara because its human rights record does not meet EU criteria.
Commission spokesman Jean-Christophe Filori said EU leaders had set a strategy for Turkey's candidacy in 1999 and "as long as this same strategy isn't called into question by the heads of state and government, it remains in force."
He said the strategy had been successful in prompting democratic and human rights reforms, citing laws passed in August abolishing the death penalty in peacetime and authorizing private broadcasting and education in the Kurdish language.
Enlargement Commissioner Guenter Verheugen said this week that if the AKP wanted to show it was serious about speeding up Turkey's EU bid, it should start by stamping out torture, freeing all political prisoners and bringing torturers to justice.
Giscard's comments reflected in blunt language what many EU politicians whisper privately, but they come at a particularly delicate time when Brussels needs Turkey's cooperation to try to solve several problems related to enlargement.
It is seeking Ankara's support for a U.N.-brokered effort to resolve the division of Cyprus before the country joins the bloc in 2004, and it needs Turkish assent to arrangements giving Europe's embryonic rapid reaction force access to NATO military planning and assets for EU crisis management operations.
Regarding the Celtic inhabitants of Anatolia, they were not eliminated by the Seljuks. In fact, given their technological superiority to the Seljuks, it is easy to understand the Gaelic names of the leadership elite.
Turks didn't totally destroy European tribes in Estonia, Finnland or Hungary. They conquered those people and imparted their language to them.
99% of the reputation of the Mongols and their affiliated tribes as being exceptionally brutal arises as a consequence of their demands for taxes. Someone ought to tell the Democrats about this - that they could be readily mistaken for early Middle-Ages Mongols!
I don't know where you got those figures, but I don't believe it. I got mine here.
And over the other border, wealth, peace, freedom, science, arts...
It is not complicated. They are not judging by the standard of perfected American liberty. They just want out of what is clearly hell and into something that by comparison approximates heaven.
And the rest of Europe will never let them in. If they believed their comparative successes were due to their ideas, they might think those could be taught. But Europe lost that confidence quite a while ago now. Not understanding anymore where their prosperity once came from, they will simply cling to what they have and brush others away.
It didn't all happen in the 14th Century, and everybody wasn't, in fact killed.
There are serious conflicts between East and West over a thousand year period, at the end of which the West had swept over the world and conquered everybody half a dozen times!
The invaders who laid waste to Ishfahan were hundreds of years before the invaders who laid waste to Baghdad (both such places famous for mountains of skulls). I know those mountains are impressive, but to get what you want you need do it only once! Folks see that kind of thing going on and they come around to your point of view, eh?!
BTW, although Gibbon is pretty good on the "who did whats" his conclusions regarding Rome were subject to the English Filter.
Rome finally fell in the same century Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World, and roughly simultaneously with the rise of Protestant thought among Christians. Gibbon had Rome falling quite some time before that.
the infowarrior
The entire leadership elite of the first serious group of Seljuks to permanently penetrate Anatolia properly had Celtic names which are as understandable today as they were a thousand years ago in Gallicia!.
In fact, I would be quite happy to reidentify these guys. What's intriguing is their closest Western European relatives, who lived in Wallonia, responded to the Seljuks with the First Crusade.
What you want to bet these guys on both sides could actually talk to each other despite 1700 years of physical separation and isolation - kind of like Star Trek where Captain Kirk shows up and everybody speaks English!
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