| Volume 5, Number 4, October 2008 |
Looking West While Sailing East
by Peter Starr 彼得·斯塔尔 |
Turkey And Europe
Undivided But Not United
by Erkan Erdogdu 埃尔坎·埃尔多杜 |
IF ONE is struggling to explain the inner-European controversy about Turkey to someone looking from very far away, for example as far away as China, one might say that the problem has always been the impossibility of establishing where Europe’s eastern borders are. The forests in the north, the plains, the rivers, and seas in the south, reach out endlessly into Asia, with nothing so neat as a Great Wall to divide us.
From the viewpoint of the European Union (EU), this article will present the defining events and issues surrounding the question of whether Turkey should become a member. Perhaps more unusually, the article will then look at the EU from the viewpoint of the Turks themselves. I will argue that the issue presents itself very differently to those living in Turkey, a country which, as the well-known saying goes, is “a ship sailing east on the deck of which some are running west ...”. (1) ...
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THE statement above explains very well the logic behind the Turkish search for EU membership. For the founders of modern Turkey, the transition from the theocratic-oriented Ottoman Empire to a modern, secular Turkish Republic was to be achieved through "Westernization", which was understood to be a process of emulating and eventually becoming a part of Western civilization. For Ataturk, this meant becoming a part of Europe.
Relations between the Turks and the Europeans go back to the arrival of the Ottomans in Asia Minor in the eleventh century. Throughout the period from the eleventh century up to the present, four turning points may be identified in the course of those relations: the Paris Conference of 1856, the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in the early 1920s, the Treaty of Rome and application of Turkey for EC (European Community) membership in the late 1950s, and finally the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s. Let me focus on these one by one...
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| Issue 5.4 |
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A Voice to
Be Remembered
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