I know many nice Turkish people, and Istanbul is probably one of the coolest cities on the planet, but Turkey, the country, is a jerk. Greeks, Aremenians, Kurds...the only reason Turkey gets along with Israel is because they're both bullies.

I should resist responding, but I can't: Germany, the country, is a jerk, too, taking the whole of the 20th Century into account. And the U.S. has been kind of a jerk lately. But countries don't have inherent characters, and bringing a country into a mutually beneficial alliance usually moderates any tendencies toward "jerk-like" behavior.

Off topic. Has anyone else noticed that when Mark posts lately, a spammer attaches to Mark's older posts? Am I guessing correctly or does the spammer attach to other postings, too? And does it only happen when Mark posts something new?

Added: I'm probably wrong. I checked the spammer's comments tonight and two of the four were not on Mark's postings.

Mark,

I agree with most of what you write in TPMcafe, but here I disagree with you totally-- it's just way too damn impractical to work Turkey into the EU, and I think it would be bad for both Turkey *and* for the EU.

First of all, from a purely hard-nosed, practical perspective (i.e., "if Turkish entry into the EU were a good thing, is it feasible,") Turkish membership in the EU is a non-starter. It's just not happening, and it annoys me to see the potentially productive Turkish people waste so much time on it. The Cyprus issue alone kills any possibility of it. Turkey refuses to recognize the current government of Cyprus at Nicosia and no government in Ankara could ever recognize that government-- it's political suicide. Since Cyprus is an EU member, this poses an obvious problem.

Furthermore, even if all the stars were to line up and Ankara were to recognize the Cypriot government, Cyprus has an absolute veto power over Turkish membership and wouldn't allow Turkey to join the EU. It's not hard to see why-- Turkish incorporation into the EU would presume free movement, eventually, of Turkish people throughout the EU. Cyprus, being a small country, could easily be deluged by Turkish migrants-- Turkey being the 2nd-most populous nation in Europe and its immediate sphere, aside from Germany-- and this would, in the eyes of the Cypriot government and people, basically be allowing Turkey to conquer Cyprus by flooding millions of Turks into the country, achieving in a different way, what Turkey has tried to do militarily. I don't know whether or not this view is fair-- this is certainly up for debate-- but what matters is that the Cypriots hold it, and in fact it's pretty much universally held by them. They're not going to allow Turkey to join. Moreover, since Cyprus has veto power at any of the 35 or so portions of the EU negotiations at both the start and finish of each portion, that means Cyprus has about 70 opportunities to block Turkish entry.

Even if by some miracle Cyprus could be excluded from the equation, Turkey would still have to do all kinds of painful and potentially suicidal (politically) things to prostrate itself-- admit culpability in the Armenian Holocaust (which the French have finally succeeded in including as one of the ocnditions), as well as give the Kurds full rights to self-determination, which would probably break up Turkey itself. Even this wouldn't be enough-- Turkey would have to bring its deficit way, way down, to an extent inconceivable in the near future. Turkey is ironically in a debt situation somewhat paralleled by the US-- they'd have to massively raise their taxes to even modestly bring down their deficit and national debt, to an extent that would cause a disastrous recession.

Turkey also has 70 million people already and a young and rapidly growing population. Whether you like it or not, the fact that this population is mostly Muslim does cause major problems. Remember that the EU has many small countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal and Denmark, as well as some larger ones (like France and Britain) that already have enormous and rapidly-growing Muslim populations of their own. If Turkey gets EU membership with rights to free movement of their peoples, all of these countries-- especially the small ones-- would soon have a Muslim majority. Thus, a persistent European cultural feature for almost 2,000 years-- the mostly Christian character of the nations therein-- would be wiped out within a few years of Turkish membership, with unbelievable economic and cultural strains on the receiving countries. Now, I'm in general a pro-immigrant sort of person, up to a point. High immigration is fine so long as people can be absorbed and worked into a society, and so long as the newcomers don't too much threaten the pre-existing society's structures, which in many cases have been in place for thousands of years, but it shouldn't be overwhelming. (Obviously, there are special cases such as the US Southwest and Florida, where Latinos *were* the founding cultural group before the Mexican War, and where treaties and other legal means provide them with special rights to property, language, customs and other basic rights based on their continuous presence there for centuries *before* the US incorporated that region, though such cases are the exception rather than the rule.)

Even if Turkey could overcome all these hurdles, it would still be denied membership on other bases. Remember that the initiation of potential membership talks, for Turkey to join the EU, were opened in September 2005 based on the EU treaty then being negotiated. However, both France and the Netherlands rejected this treaty in referenda-- in large part due to the Turkish issue-- which means that the initial framework for even conducting talks with Turkey, has now been suspended indefinitely. The new treaty being worked on is much more hostile to further EU expansion, especially in Turkey's direction.

Finally, even with all these other obstacles, Turkish membership would *still* have to gain approval in referenda by individual European nations. France is one of them, and opposition to Turkish membership in France is running at 70% of the population. (Don't fantasize for a minute that this will ever change due to immigration into France-- the Arabs there are hardly sanguine about a massive Turkish influx, since this would threaten many of their own low-skill jobs, and two of the biggest continuing immigrant inflows into France are from Greece and Armenia, whose people are if anything even more against Turkish accession than the native French themselves.) The Netherlands is another, and considering the problems the Dutch are already having with their Moroccan population, the murder of Theo van Gogh and other issues, the Dutch are adamantly against the additional incorporation of Turkey-- 70-80% of the people there against Turkish membership. You'll find similar numbers in countries like Italy, Greece and Denmark, which would also probably require referenda.

Even this may well be a moot point, since with the debacle now taking place in US-occupied Iraq, and the probable formation in the near future of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq, Turkey will almost certainly be drawn into a conflict there. Many Turks, who are now furiously anti-American, even believe that Turkey may soon be embroiled in a war against the USA itself-- a Turkish novel called "Metal Storm," which envisions a Turkish-US war, has become one of the biggest sellers in Turkey's history, and people are actually taking the premise seriously: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0215/p01s04-woeu.html

In any case, Turkey may well be getting sucked into a nasty military confrontation within the next five years. This would obviously make all the EU negotiations a moot point-- the EU would not allow any country so involved in what would inevitably be an ugly war, involving the Kurds, into the EU.

So to make a long story short, EU membership for Turkey is impossible for all practical purposes. The obstacles are designed to be insurmountable, and there are many of them. Frankly, for that matter, I don't think Turkish membership would be advisable, either. I don't quite agree with everything that Etzioni says, but I think he has a point in general-- I don't see why Turkey wants so much to be just another cog in the EU wheel. Turkey itself could be the locus of another power center, perhaps a powerful Turkic bloc extending into Central Asia, or in any case, Turkey could indeed be a secular, moderate model for the rest of the Islamic world. IOW, rather than being a disdained member of a group of countries that frankly don't want it to be in there, Turkey could be a world leader, a big regional power, in its own right. This would be the better option, for Turkey to be a sort of leader of the Middle East, and it would be of much greater benefit to Turkey both economically and politically.

One more thing: the dirty little secret in Europe is that, as everyone knows, Turkey's EU membership is dead.

The English-speaking part of the Western world might keep debating and entertaining the possibility but, as a more productive activity, I would suggest golf or bird watching.

But, still, in our unending pursuit of intellectual irrelevance I still would like to hear Mark's arguments why Turkey would be good for Europe. So far, he hasn't said a word about it.

Mark Schmitt,

In other words, to deny Turkey membership in the EU, and send it off to some hypothetical MEU (Middle Eastern Union) of the future would not make Turkey the democratic anchor of the Middle East. It would push the country, always poised by the nature of Kemalism on the knife-edge between democracy and totalitarianism, back over the edge into the militaristic state of the dirty war years.

Finally, I can’t accept this tendency to want to partition the world off by religion and region.

I tend to agree that denying Turkey EU membership would not necessarily lead to its role as a regional liberal democratic foothold. But less because of any "hypothetical MEU of the future" than because this already has been the established dynamic, as Turkey is already a member in good standing of the not-at-all-hypothetical Organization of Islamic Conferences, for example. Further, it isn't as if the partition of the world by religion and region have not been a persistent reality throughout the history of human civilization. More recently still, these partitions have been updated with legal status (the regional working groups in the UN) and formal socio-cultural prejudices (FIFA regulations that compel Israelis to compete with European futbol teams as they are boycotted by Arab and Muslim dominated Asian divisions).

It's all about immigration ( and to a lesser-much lesser- extent terrorism) about which public opinion in the EU and the US seem pretty similar. The EU is already a rich cultural mix which wouldn't be that drastically affected by inclusion of Turkey. In 1967 when total unemployment in e.g. Switzerland was 40 , count em , 40 people (btw I know Switzerland has never joined the EU but I happen to remember that statistic)the idea of including Turkey seemed worth discussing. Now with French unemployment exceeding 10%, whatever the economists may claim about immigration not putting people out of work Jacques-lunch-pail knows better...................... Until the social compact which prevents the EU and the US from eliminating unemployment is altered (probably never) we'll all have to hunker down behind greater and greater walls. Pull up the ladder mate , I'm aboard.

Zionista,

I don't see cosmopolitanism as committed to fashioning a generic identity, shorn of all ethnic, national or sectarian identification. Nor do I see it as a panacaea.

But cosmoploitanism is clearly not a fantasy, since it is a phenomenon that is ubiquitous in human development and global history. Many very successful countries that are now seen as forming a single nation or political unity are composed of sub-populations that were once distinct peoples or polities. Those countries usually contain urban and commercial hubs around which are gathered many groups, interacting freely as part of a single society, with some remaining attachment to ethic or sectarian sub-loyalties, but with those sub-loyalties no longer play the role they once did in underpinning a "sovereign" community. These hubs provide the social dynamics that generate and sustain unifying trends - intermarriage, social and economic intercourse, novel forms of artistic expression transcending existing cultural boundaries, etc.

Though we see in history many ebbs and flows of cosmopolitan unification, on the one hand, and ethnic or nationalistic retrenchment, separation and revival on the other, the overall long-term trend is in the direction of unification, and the geographical regions encompassing sovereign polities have grown larger over the centuries. There is no reason to think that this process cannot and will not continue into the future. It is a natural result as the forces of social and economic rationalization, and the desire of people for a more prosperous life, are liberated by improvements in information flow, transportation, managerial skill, etc.

People have all sorts of loyalities. But the political, social and economic choices we make can intensify these identifications, and either make them more exclusive, or weaken them somewhat. The introduction of violence and insecurity, economic stress, political demagoguery etc. can intensify submerged or weakened group loyalties, and lead them to flare up in new chauvinistic revivals.

I accept that the cosmopolitan process must be guided with wisdom, and that overly rapid unification can be as much a danger and cause of conflict as reactionary nationalistic polarization. But it is my view that in the current era, the latter is a more pressing problem - in part because of the renewed prestige it has found in some intellectual quarters. Since I believe a similar revival of sentimental nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries played a significant role in the fascist horrors that followed, I worry about it. And I just don't accept the idea that the existing global national or religious ghettos are permanent fixtures. They never have been in the past.

"Is it a "religion" thing? Islam traditionally has a strong presence in Europe, especially in the Balkans but throughout Europe."

The problem with this thinking, though, Libertine, is one of scale. Yes, Islam has had *a* presence throughout Europe, but it's never been the dominant presence. In Turkey, you have a rapidly growing population full of young people who are, regrettably, mostly unskilled. In 20 years that population may grow to 100 million people-- by far the largest country in the EU periphery and bigger than any EU country itself.

If Turkey were to join and its people were to get full migration rights throughout the EU, this would effectively inundate other, wealthier EU countries with tens of millions of poor, unskilled Turks when they can't employ their already poor and Muslim contingent as it is. There are new riots cropping up in France-- do you think that they want to compound the problem further? Also as I said above, full Turkish integration would be catastrophic for small EU countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and Luxembourg, which would rapidly acquire Muslim majorities and change their millennia-long cultural identities.

That's the fundamental difference that you've failed to grasp here. Europeans spent centuries fighting bloody wars to keep the Turks *out* of Europe and maintain their predominantly Christian identities. Do you honestly think they would just toss this out due to some mushy liberal internationalist talk about "the fraternity of nations"? This is too great a sacrifice to ask of Europe's countries.

As I wrote above, there's no way Turkey is getting admission, period, nor should Turkey join the EU. They can have much greater power, and have a much greater effect, as a satellite state outside the EU itself.

Teddy Bard asserts that:

If Turkey were to join and its people were to get full migration rights throughout the EU, this would effectively inundate other, wealthier EU countries with tens of millions of poor, unskilled Turks when they can't employ their already poor and Muslim contingent as it is.

Turkish accession to the European Union is unlikely to happen until about 2020 and, given the pattern of recent accessions, full migration rights could be delayed until about 2025 or even later. The Turkish economy is experiencing GDP growth of over 8% which is significantly higher than the EU average. Given the lengthy delay until accession and the feverish pace of the Turkish economy I think it unlikely that The Netherlands, Denmark and Luxembourg would suddenly be swamped by Turks seeking to improve their fortune.

Teddy Bard continues:

Europeans spent centuries fighting bloody wars to keep the Turks *out* of Europe and maintain their predominantly Christian identities. Do you honestly think they would just toss this out due to some mushy liberal internationalist talk about "the fraternity of nations"? This is too great a sacrifice to ask of Europe's countries.

This is just plain ignorance. The Europeans spent far more time fighting bloody wars against each other than they ever did keeping the "Turks out of Europe." The singular great achievement of the last five decades of European integration has been the peace brought to Western Europe by precisely the "mushy liberal internationalist talk about the fraternity of nations" you decry. After five decades of the EU and its predecessors it is inconceivable that Britain and Germany would ever go to war because some Count gets shot. The people of Europe have made many sacrifices to further the development of the EU but these sacrifices are as nothing when compared to the sacrifices made by preceding generations. A visit to the killing fields of Flanders should suffice to remind Europeans why this sacrifice is so much better than alternative sacrifices.

Teddy Bard finishes with:

[Turkey] can have much greater power, and have a much greater effect, as a satellite state outside the EU itself.

The reality is that over 50% of Turkish external trade is already with the EU and this total is likely to increase. By joining the EU, Turkey would be able to influence the direction of EU policy that directly affects more than 50% of its exports.

Europeans certainly spent most of their history fighting each other, but from time to time they cast their differences aside and fought the dreaded Turk together.

I would also say that European integration is the result of hard-nosed capitalism, not mushy liberal internationalism. There have been no wars in Europe since WWII because killing your customers is not a sound business strategy (and if we're selling arms, we'll just sell them to Africa or China, thank you). I agree that the EU is probably the best thing that happened to Europe since... well, ever, but I would not quite credit internationalism with that. It was rather business sense and the realization that the next war would almost certainly be the last, since Europeans became so fabulously adept at killing each other. There is nothing quite like a mass murder executed with state-of-the-art technology and famous German organizational skills and efficiency.

You are spot on that the danger of Turks overwhelming certain European countries is exaggerated, and the richer Turkey becomes the less likely that is to happen. But who's to say the fear of something that will never happen can't be very real...

The 2005 progress report on Turkish accession is available on the EU website.

"Though we see in history many ebbs and flows of cosmopolitan unification, on the one hand, and ethnic or nationalistic retrenchment, separation and revival on the other, the overall long-term trend is in the direction of unification, and the geographical regions encompassing sovereign polities have grown larger over the centuries. There is no reason to think that this process cannot and will not continue into the future. It is a natural result as the forces of social and economic rationalization, and the desire of people for a more prosperous life, are liberated by improvements in information flow, transportation, managerial skill, etc."

That's a misreading of history, Dan-- you make the classic mistake of seeing a linear trend in history, when in fact history never moves in a straight line, but zigzags, jerks around and swerves wildly, without an overarching trend of one sort or another.

I don't agree that the "long-term trend is toward unification," since if anything, the *ancient world* (read: classical world) and 17th-early 19th centuries had much more unification than we do today. If anything, the nationalistic movements of the 19th centuries were a massive break from many centuries of unification, indeed in some respects a full break from the ideal of the Roman Empire that had motivated many medieval lords. We used to have not only the Roman Empire but then the Holy Roman Empire (not really a unified state in the modern sense but certainly a political unit comprising many principalities), the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire and of course the Soviet Empire.

What's happened to all of them? Every single one of those supranational unified states, generally with one or two poles of central authority, has fallen apart. Nationalism took hold and people in the Austro-Hungarian, British and French Empires began to assert an identity that was independent of the, well, globalism of the time as expressed in the imperial power, and became independent states. There were of course some countercurrents, with Germany and Italy both unifying in the late 1800's, but the point is that those supranational central imperial states fell apart.

Note, I'm not in any way saying that the EU is like the British or French empires, and in fact, I'm overall quite bullish on the EU and suspect that it will flourish and hold together. But that's in part because the EU has known where to quit-- both in terms of the centralization of authority (it's the ultimate federal state in many ways), and also in terms of expansion. Obviously, the EU will have some finite boundary like any other political unit, and it will encompass some states while leaving others out. Turkey, as I've talked about before, just isn't going to fit in, for reasons that are primarily economic but also cultural and historical. Culture *does* matter here, and that's been the secret of the EU's success thus far-- it's provided the benefits of integration without imposing undue cultural and economic burdens on the various states.

Were Turkey to join, no less than 6 small countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, Cyprus and Denmark) would be so inundated by poor, unskilled and mobile Turks, based on the freedom of movement principle in the EU Constitution, that all of them would take on Muslim majorities-- an especially bitter irony, since they spent many centuries fending off Turkish invasions. France and Britain would also likely take on a Muslim-majority character, since they already have so many Muslims with a high-fertility rate while the native-born population is declining. Turkish integration would also push them over the top. I'm sorry, but that's too much of a cultural burden on these states, and they're not going to accept it.

The problem with the notion of unification, is that it has to stop somewhere. I think we can achieve some level of economic unification on some levels, but cultural unification is impossible-- cultures throughout the world are too different from each other, how in the world would we decide on "the" culture that would be the global one? We could of course remain a multicultural economic union, but then, that's basically what you have in the EU, with some extra special features. In any case, to preserve those cultures, there have to be some restrictions on movements, which in turn limits the reach of any such supranational state.

Colore Oscuro states that,

"The Turkish economy is experiencing GDP growth of over 8% which is significantly higher than the EU average. Given the lengthy delay until accession and the feverish pace of the Turkish economy I think it unlikely that The Netherlands, Denmark and Luxembourg would suddenly be swamped by Turks seeking to improve their fortune."

Colore, you seem to be conveniently forgetting that the largest immigration flows to the US in the 1800's were from countries with similarly high levels of economic growth *and* simultaneous population growth. The great waves of migration both to the relatively open lands of the Great Plains and the Great Basin, and then to the American urban centers during the Ellis Island period, came overwhelmingly from countries that at the time were industrializing (often with 10% or higher rates of economic growth) coupled with large, young and rapidly growing populations and large numbers of unskilled workers. This went on for many, many decades, up in fact to the First World War and the immigration restrictions the government passed in the early 1920's-- without those, Europe would have continued sending millions of immigrants to the US.

That pretty much precisely describes Turkey's current demographic and economic profile, and history has shown repeatedly that these countries export young workers in extremely high numbers. Which means that you have it exactly backwards-- Turkey's high growth rate and high population growth practically guarantee that Turkey would send tens of millions of its young workers into Europe if they had freedom of movement by, say, 2025 or so. That historical pattern has been pretty much constant.

Again, however, a key difference between the US of the 19th century and Europe of the 21st, is that the US was a big landmass with a decent-sized population already, while the EU is basically fragmented into a number of states, many quite small, that could not absorb even a few hundred thousands Turkish workers effectively, and still retain their native culture.

"This is just plain ignorance. The Europeans spent far more time fighting bloody wars against each other than they ever did keeping the "Turks out of Europe."

Come on, Colore, that one's just plain pathetic. Ignorance? How about straw man reasoning? Prior to the Conquest of Constantinople, the Ottoman Turks also spent far more time fighting each other and other Muslims than fighting the "Christian infidels" in Europe. Probably 90% of the Turks' battles were with other Muslims. Yet the conquest of previously Christian Constantinople had a far, far greater historical impact than all the Turks' other 14th and 15th-century battles put together, and that new Turkish culture and religion became predominant in Anatolia. Same with the Balkan region-- those cultures and religions were permanently changed when the Turks conquered those lands, far more than almost any other conflict on the European landmass between European adversaries.

This is why we study only a small fraction of the world's wars in world history class, it's simply because only a few have really had a big impact, while most really haven't. Your reasoning is utterly ridiculous-- of course Europeans spent far more time fighting battles with each other than against the Turks. Yet the results of those wars with the Turks were far more pivotal battles, with far more important historical results, than the vast majority of European internecine battles. This is why the Europeans-- still not ideally, but to an extent-- were able to unify against the Turkish threat, since there were enough of them to see that their cultures would likely be permanently changed with a Turkish success, as had happened in Constantinople and in much of the Balkans.

"The reality is that over 50% of Turkish external trade is already with the EU and this total is likely to increase. By joining the EU, Turkey would be able to influence the direction of EU policy that directly affects more than 50% of its exports."

Why should the fraction of a country's exports with a country (or political unit like the EU) have anything to do with whether or not it actually joins said country? China has recently become the biggest trading partner with both Japan and South Korea. So should Japan and South Korea both give up their status as independent nations to join their biggest trading and export partners? Should China, in turn, be compelled to absorb every other country with which it does brisk business? What about Mexico, whose biggest trading partner by far is the United States? By your reasoning, Mexico should be joining the United States by now, since Mexico exports so much to the USA. Your arguments here are totally inconsistent.

The arguments, if I can so dignify them, against Turkish accession to the European Union put forward by Terry Bard seem founded more on fear than analysis.

The main argument presented is that when full migration is allowed following accession many Turks would migrate into the rest of Europe and take over small states like Luxemburg. However, Terry Bard ignores the fact that this has not already happened even though many large European nations have long had far worse economies than Luxemburg.

Consider the 2005 numbers from the CIA Factbook. Luxemburg had a per-capita GDP of $55,600, a labor force of 316,500 and an unemployment rate of 4.9%. Germany had a per-capita GDP of $29,800, a labor force of 43.3 million and an unemployment rate of 11.6%. There are consequently more than 5 million unemployed Germans who could move to Luxemburg today and live in a country whose per-capita GDP is almost twice the one they have left and whose unemployment rate is far lower. They would even have the benefit of speaking one of the official national languages. It is pretty clear that most Germans have not migrated to Luxemburg and swamped its culture even given strong economic motivation to do so.

Migration inside the EU is not as easy as migration within or even to the United States. The EU freedom of movement laws apply only to employed people. Unemployed people do not actually have legal freedom to move anywhere in the EU. This means they are not eligible for social services. Also, housing may be available only to legal residents. In addition, migration makes sense only if there is a reasonable possibility of finding work which is not a given in an EU that is notorious for its lack of entry-level jobs.

The upshot is that while I believe some Turks would migrate for economic, social and cultural reasons the migration levels would be nowhere near enough to cause economic, social or cultural upheaval in any other EU nation including Luxemburg.

The EU has been the most successful international organization of the last 50 years. There is clearly an unspoken fear of its continuing ascent among right-wing Americans. The WSJ editorialists, for example, deride the EU at every opportunity while simultaneously pushing for Turkish accession – which I suspect is due to their hope that such an event would destroy the EU.

The EU has a choice with regard to the accession of Turkey. It can look at its own successful history of enlargement and allow Turkey to join when it is ready. Or it can regress to a time in history when people like Terry Bard talked of Johnny Turk and Governments sent gunships to Agadir. It can look forward to success or backward to failure.

Germany does not fit Teddy Bard's profile of a country with rapid economic and population growth, so the fact that Germans aren't emigrating en masse is neither here nor there.

That said, the idea that Turks would overwhelm smaller countries is preposterous. If a significant number of Turks moved into a country like (say) Denmark overnight, housing costs would shoot through the roof and most of them could simply not find a place to live. They would also not find a job and would not get welfare. Well, why would you move to a place where you have nowhere to live and no way to make money? Answer: You wouldn't.

Still, I do not accept for one second that Turkey in the EU equals forward and Turkey outside EU equals backward. There are many good reasons not to admit Turkey into the EU, primarily related to geography. I don't think the EU wants to be the next big empire and I don't believe this is the time to have the EU extend all the way to the Middle East.

The EU already has an outpost on the Middle East's doorstep. Look on a map and find Cyprus. For that matter look at the other end of the Mediteranean and see what's just across the Strait of Gibralter from Spain.

Re: it's much easier to move from one EU country to another than to move within the United States.

This makes no sense. Having moved from Michigan to Ohio and then from Ohio to Florida I can attest that there are no legal barriers to such a move at all. None. Surely there are at least nominal barriers to such a move between EU countries? Even if not, that makes such a move no more difficult than in the US, but certainly not easier. As for practical barriers there are of course the expenses of moving itself, and I’m prepared to believe it would cost less to move from Belgium to the Netherlands than my Ohio-Florida move cost—but not that a Portugal-to-Poland move would not be quite costly.
Finally, there are cultural barriers in existence in the EU that do not exist in the US. For all our hand-wringing about red states and blue states, wherever you go in the US you will be able to speak English to the population (yes, even here in Miami!), and you will not find the local customs odd or impenetratable.

Re Turkey being culturally in Europe or not. Can someone name the famous Turkish writers, composers, painters, philosophers, explorers, inventors etc., contemporary or not? If Turkey was part of European culture, it should be pretty easy to do, especially given Turkey's size... only I can't think of anyone fitting the description.

You are of course correct. It is easy to move within the EU legally speaking (the movement is not entirely free between all pairs of countries, or at least not yet), but the EU is obviously nowhere near as culturally homogenous as the US. So if you want to move, it's pretty easy, but you'd better know your target country's language and be prepared to at least slightly adapt to their culture.

There have persistent scares that freedom of movement in the EU would cause significant migration from poor regions in the Southern Europe to wealthier Northern Europe. I used Germany as an example purely to demonstrate that people would often rather be unemployed at home than employed somewhere else even when there were almost no cultural or social barriers to their migration.

I am puzzled that the confluence of population and economic growth would somehow make Turks more likely to emigrate to Luxemburg than unemployed residents of the former German Democratic Republic actually are. If anything, the fact that Turkish GDP is growing nearly four times faster than the population should make Turks more willing to stay at home and benefit from their rapidly growing economy. Anyway it is quite likely that continuing economic growth in Turkey would lead to social changes such as a lower birthrate.

There are many good reasons not to admit Turkey to the EU but focusing on a fear of being swamped distracts from reasoned discussion of the issue. There are also many good reasons to admit Turkey. All in all the accession of Turkey is a very complicated issue which is why it has taken more than 55 years to get to the current position with accession perhaps happening in another 15 years. The 2005 EU progress report on Turkish accession comprises 146 pages.

I agree that the EU does not want to be the next big empire but I believe it has a strong interest in ensuring that its principal trading partners are politically and socially stable. It is clear that the EU is using the prospect of membership as a very strong incentive to ensure that Turkey anchors itself firmly into the West as opposed to drifting off into some Turkic folly. Who these days remembers that Greece, Portugal and Spain all had right-wing military dictatorships in the 1970s before they joined the EU? If Turkey does join the EU in 2020 the people of Europe will have made a small sacrifice that will eventually benefit both themselves and Turkey.

Well, what do you mean by "Eastern Europe"? Poland? Ukraine? Russia?

I am aware that what is now Turkey was an important part of the Greco-Roman world, and a number of luminaries of that era were born and/or lived there, but... would you say Homer was Turkish?

Good point about Orhan Pamuk. Heard the name, didn't know he was Turkish.

It was remiss of me not to mention Yilmaz Guney whose film Yol deservedly won the Palme D'Or at The Cannes Film Festival in 1982.

The width of the Straits of Gibralter would not be much of an impediment. The UN reports that so far this year 7,400 "irregular migrants" have made the hazardous 500 mile crossing from Africa to The Canary Islands in "tiny, open fishing boats."

"Re: it's much easier to move from one EU country to another than to move within the United States.

This makes no sense. Having moved from Michigan to Ohio and then from Ohio to Florida I can attest that there are no legal barriers to such a move at all."

JPF, are you responding to mine or Colore's point here? I agree with you here totally, obviously there are virtually no barriers (legal, at least) to migrating from state to state within the USA, and that's obviously a much easier process than intra-EU migration from EU country to EU country. Colore, however, was further saying that it's if anything easier to migrate from a foreign country to the USA, than to move between EU constituent countries, which is a ludicrous claim-- obviously there's much freer movement between EU members (in the sense of being able to permanently settle, esp. without visa papers) than between two entirely foreign countries, e.g. the US and Bangladesh.

That was one of the main objectives of the EU in fact, to facilitate relatively free movement of people as well as goods throughout the union, assisting commerce, and frankly it has been a big benefit. As you say, there are still some restrictions and intra-EU movement is not as easy as movement within the USA, but it's interesting that migration within the EU is something intermediate between migration between countries and migration between states in the US.

One thing I will agree with Colore on, is that the EU is an especially gifted and promising organization, one of the most important to arise in the past century, with a set of organizing principles and specific policies among its members that make it both unique and quite effective.

"wherever you go in the US you will be able to speak English to the population (yes, even here in Miami!)"

That's probably true, though I have to admit that the last time I was in Miami, I was very relieved that I could speak Spanish in quite a few places, especially in some of the medium-sized and even bigger shops. One definitely appeciates the value of practicing one's conversational Spanish when returning a birthday gift for which the return policy is being formulated right before your very eyes.

"Turkey will have benefited enormously from the accession process even if either the EU or Turkey decides eventually that accession is not the best way forward and it does not happen."

That's very much true, Colore, and I do suspect this may be (hope it will be) the best outcome of the negotiations. On both human rights and economics grounds, Turkey has made dramatic strides because the very principle of EU negotiations imposes a certain discipline. Furthermore, even if as you suggest, Turkey winds up not joining the EU (as, again, I think may ultimately be the best path for Turkey over the long term), it will have hopefully made such progress as to be a model for other nations in the region, though I have grace concerns over the Kurdish question especially considering the extent to which George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice and Dick Cheney have royally screwed things up in Iraq.

If in the year 2025, Turkey becomes not only a relatively wealthy country but also a mature one on human rights issues, with a stable economy that's able to both train and employ its workers and also with a stabilized population and little natural growth (a very important principle), then the whole tenor of the discussion would change dramatically. The EU would then probably be perfectly happy to admit Turkey, and it would then be pretty much Ankara's choice to join or decline (although as I have said elsewhere, in some ways I feel Turkey would gain more from declining). Turkey in such a case would be an asset rather than a burden to any organization it joins. The problem is that right now we can't foresee that, and we're instead facing an economically growing but still overwhelmingly poor Turkey, with tens of millions of unskilled and poorly educated workers, and a very young, growing and mobile population.

It would be imposing too much of a burden on EU states to take in such a country which is why the EU has barred accession sans significant improvement. But I concur, the very *prospect* of potential accession does foster a motivation and a discipline that Turkey may not have otherwise had, and I do respect the Ankara government enough, whatever its flaws, to believe that they could potentially make dramatic strides by 2025, unless things go truly haywire in Kurdistan, which they very much could. Turkey showed surprising strength in its democratic processes by refusing to allow the US to station bases there to attack Iraq, despite all the inducements and coercions, so I see some resilience there.

BTW, I did read excerpts from that Turkish book "Metal Storm," which is only a quasi-fictitious representation of a sort of scenario that many Turks really do fear-- a Turkish-American War over Iraq and a desire to seize Turkish boron deposits. Apparently Metal Storm is one of the biggest bestsellers in Turkey in many years and is spawning quite a few sequels, and it really is connected to a widespread anger at the US (up to 90% of the population!) over Iraq in particular. It seems be most severe among the younger generation, which gets me wondering if, perhaps, in a decade or so, Turkey might wind up reevaluating its status in NATO to begin with. Ankara would have every right to do just that.

kosmotropic,

I don't think that cosmopolitanism is as well-defined as you make it out to be....

I can't fully understand the issue you take with my comment since my approach to the idea of cosmopolitanism in this case is in direct response to Dan K's framing of the term:

Many very successful countries that are now seen as forming a single nation or political unity are composed of sub-populations that were once distinct peoples or polities. Those countries usually contain urban and commercial hubs around which are gathered many groups, interacting freely as part of a single society, with some remaining attachment to ethic or sectarian sub-loyalties, but with those sub-loyalties no longer play the role they once did in underpinning a "sovereign" community. These hubs provide the social dynamics that generate and sustain unifying trends - intermarriage, social and economic intercourse, novel forms of artistic expression transcending existing cultural boundaries, etc.

If you have issues with the use of the term in this discussion, those issues cannot strictly be limited to how it is used in my reply.  Further, it appears from where I sit that we are more in agreement than dischord on the larger matter of technologically induced interdependence (or globalization, writ large), and a variable response to it by and within nations, individuals or classes.  As you say,

I'm on record for supporting cultural/ethnic/religious diversity for communitarian reasons but I think you can decouple those trends from economic integration.

I'm with you, so far, as I had commented above,

...one may also reasonably reach a conclusion that the liberation [Dan K] mention[s] is more complicated and depends upon much more than the promise of economic prosperity, as does perhaps the ambitions of a prospective nation coming before a multinational collective bargaining organization like the EU.

I've been lurking on this thread for a while, and I have a sort of "compromise" position in mind here, so please pardon the long post. For a question as complex as the prospect of Turkey joining the EU, it's just way too intricate to cast it in an either-or fashion as in the Etzioni-Schmitt debate (either Turkey should, or shouldn't). My answer to that question is, "It depends." If Turkey by some arbitrary deciding date-- say, 2025 or so as suggested here-- meets a certain set of very stringent criteria, not only in terms of human rights and political structure but also, and most importantly, in terms of economics, then it should be given the option to join. But the bar must be set high. More on this in a sec.

First of all, Colore Oscuro, you're clearly a very bright individual and well-informed in a number of areas here. You've also contributed substantially to this discussion and on the basic principle-- the strength and promise of the EU-- I am with you 100%. The EU may well be one of the most promising and constructive international institutions, for promoting peace and prosperity, ever conceived, by combining a strong respect for the rule of law and genuine power, especially soft power-- economically speaking-- and some hard power when needed IMHO, the EU would be a much better candidate for sensible, nuanced, and effective global leadership than the aggressive, blundering, juvenile USA that we in many respects have today.

That being said, Colore, I have to be honest-- I find some of your points to be very poorly thought-out and rather puzzling. First of all, as a word to the wise, on a forum like TPM, you should just about never lash out at a person by imputing things at them like "operating out of (irrational) fear" or trying to cast this as a sort of ideological struggle against impediments of progress as you see it, as you did above. Also, never belittle arguments that challenge yours-- especially when they're clearly elaborated and address your counterarguments point by point-- with the sort of dismissive, childish slight you used above, implying that another's counterarguments are not worth even basic consideration. This may be appropriate in some places, as in a low-rent political campaign, but it has the stench of insulting people's intelligence, and that comes close to being a cardinal sin in a place like TPM, where people are by and large very educated, often with advanced degrees (including some professors here), thoughtful, and elaborate in their thinking, and where we've actually managed to achieve some semblance of productive discourse. I feel some of the commenters here have been unnecessarily harsh on you, but you need to be less inclined to dismiss counterarguments to your specific points, even if forcefully made, as coming from the mouth of "the enemy." As it looks like above, you may actually be insulting a potential ally who merely has a different take from you on a specific issue.

Second, while I do agree that economic concerns about Turkey far, far outweigh cultural or demographic ones, nonetheless cultural concerns are important, and I'm not sure you fully appreciate that. I'm especially perplexed by one of your comments, where you say that Europe's history of wars against the Ottoman Turkish Empire, during the latter's attempts to conquer Vienna, should be merely disregarded as relatively unimportant since wars against Turkey are such a minor fraction of Europe's military history. This is obviously specious reasoning. By analogy, we in the US have been engaged in literally hundreds of armed conflicts with foreign enemies since 1776, and of these, our wars with Britain-- the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and some smaller skirmishes-- are a tiny, tiny minority of these. We've been in far more conflicts with Latin American countries than with Britain. Yet US conflicts against Britain take up a big, disproportionate share of attention in our textbooks, simply because some wars are far more important than others. Most of the clashes with Central and South America were relatively insignificant, while both the American Revolution and the War of 1812 fundamentally shaped the United States itself, even at a basic level of the nation's existence.

By analogy, Europe's wars with the Ottoman Turks were a minority of Europe's armed conflicts, but the wars with the Turks represented some of the very few cases in which European countries faced what was perceived to be nothing less than an existential threat, and by a culture and religion that were quite distinct from what Europe had possessed for millennia. Remember that after the Moorish Conquest of Spain, most of the Iberian Peninsula was a mostly (though obviously not entirely) Muslim, Arabic region, albeit, of course, at a much higher level of cultural and scientific achievement than the rest of Europe! In any case, the wars with the Turks stand out far higher than the hundreds of petty conflicts that the squabbling European nations were constantly waging with each other, because of the potential for fundamental change that could have occurred. There are reasons to believe that even a Turkish conquest may have been short-lived in Vienna, but there is at least a perception that Europe itself would have been irrevocably changed save for the tough defenders of Vienna in 1683, and that's what matters.

Furthermore, people in the EU's countries, and yes, the smaller ones in particular, are determined to protect their cultures from being swallowed up, either by wars or by demographic shifts that introduce high-level and stable political shifts. I've been mostly working in East Asia variously over the past few years but I have also sojourned for periods in Europe, and the concern among countries like Denmark and Belgium about demographic overload is visceral, simply because they have so much less capacity to absorb influxes than their bigger neighbors. While economics is the main factor (their welfare systems would collapse if too many take out and don't put in), culture figures into it as well, and I really have seen this on the ground. You could try all day and all night trying to explain on an intellectual basis, to Europe's small countries, that their concerns of demographic overwhelming are unfounded, but this isn't going to get you anywhere-- there is a sort of collective experience and historical consciousness in that part of the world that most of us in North America can only barely begin to grasp, and until one accepts the very visceral nature of these concerns and addresses them, you really can't move hearts and minds there.

Finally, on the economics front, you seem to dismiss out of hand the prospect of Turkish mass-migration due to the sluggishness of many EU economies and the relative lack of availability of jobs. But you seem to be unaware, then, that over the past 5 years, over 300,000 Turks have settled in Germany alone, despite Germany's severe economic problems over this stretch, high unemployment, and tightening of immigration laws-- and, of course, without the advantage of extra mobility that would come with EU membership. Hundreds of thousands more Turks are in France, Britain, and Italy. And yes, a distressingly high number of Turks in Germany *are* on welfare and social services. Of course non-citizens in EU countries (other than their own, if already in the EU) are eligible for and use social services-- EU countries don't have the cruel heart to toss people out on the street, by and large, so they do try to provide at least basic services to immigrants who can't find jobs. The problem, of course, is that many of the immigrants, and obviously not just Turks, were being trapped in dependency and not finding jobs at all, and Germany was thus getting trapped in a nasty vicious cycle, with public benefits being drained off from the economy to support Turks who couldn't find employment, which in turn reduced funds for effective job-training programs, which further made it difficult to transition to work, which led to more welfare use, and so on. This is why Germany recently tightened its immigration laws even further, which has indeed finally succeeded in largely barring unskilled workers from Turkey almost altogether while Germany's economy recuperates.

Teddy, for your part, you are obviously amazingly well-informed with a wide breadth in many subjects and especially with regard to the history and structure of Europe, and also a no-nonsense, more intuitive grasp of human nature and the concerns of some Europeans perhaps than Colore here. Still, I feel that you don't entirely understand some of the detailed mechanisms that underlie the way that the EU actually functions. Yes, freedom of movement is a basic principle of EU membership, but unlike some other freedoms, it is not absolute. You are correct in pointing out that EU citizens do not need employee sponsorship in a host country to relocate there, and that they don't even need guaranteed employment. However, the EU is cleverly set up in a way such that the smaller countries are able to control things such as housing allocations, as well as work permits and employer operations, to regulate the flow of people coming in. This was indeed set up in part as a way to ease the concerns of countries like Luxembourg, Belgium, and Denmark, and give them ways to limit movement even among other EU members as necessary-- certainly to limit permanent settlement. Remember, they still check your passport at the border of each EU country, and you should try to read up more on these specific mechanisms.

With these principles laid out, however, I'll return to my first point-- which is that Turkey's membership in the EU is possible, and IMHO would potentially be an excellent and extremely valuable addition to the EU. But Turkish admission is also highly conditional, and it depends on Turkey making dramatic improvements in a number of areas. In fact, it's no exaggeration to say that Turkey is basically going to have to reinvent itself in some ways.

In the human rights and political/diplomatic arenas, Turkey is going to have to do some things that are not only difficult but frankly painful for a proud nation to swallow. Turkey is going to have to permanently forsake all its claims on Cyprus, an emotional issue for many decades, and fully recognize the government in Nicosia-- which as Teddy did mention above, would be a tremendous political sacrifice by any government that did it. Even more difficult than this, Turkey is going to have to accept some culpability for the catastrophe in Armenia in the early 20th century. Even if Turkey doesn't go so far as to admit its perpetration of a Holocaust, Turkey will have to swallow its pride in a major way and admit some nasty wrongdoing. Now, I myself have some problems for the way this is being forced on Turkey, because even though some countries (such as Germany) have been very open about fessing up to past misdeeds, some other countries in Europe have not.

Britain, for example, committed deliberate, targeted genocide against the aboriginal peoples in Australia and Tasmania, substantially reducing their populations through a grotesque practice of literally hunting the natives down, as Jared Diamond described in shocking details in his recent book-- http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/rose/tasmania.html
(Also, read Alan Moorehead's excellent book, "The Fatal Impact: The Invasion of the South Pacific, 1767-1840"

Moreover, there's no question here-- this was a deliberate genocide. The British killed millions of Indians in the late 1800s through artificial famines that were much like the Pol Pot and Stalinist collectivist famines of the 20th century, especially the
Bengal Famine of 1943 evicting Indians from their own farms and growing cash crops, while exporting the scarce available food to Britain while compelling Indians to starve.

There's also the matter of the
concentration camps in the Boer War, in which
the Brits killed tens of thousands of Boer and African women and children-- through hateful neglect as much as direct killing-- and also other disreputable things like the British participation in Black slavery, and the British terror-bombing of Iraqi civilians in the 1920's, long predating Guernica, and in which Winston Churchill himself vouched for using poison gas. (A quote: "I do not understand this sqeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.") The British have an incredibly bloody history which they haven't owned up to either, and they may be perhaps the worst among European nations in this regard. (E.g. see
Seamus Milne, "Britain: Imperial Nostalgia" and
Maria Misra's excellent article on this. Therefore this requirement on Turkey, to me, does seem a bit unfair. Nevertheless, it's there. Finally, of course, there's the Kurdish question, for which little introduction is needed.

However, the biggest hurdles to Turkish inclusion are largely economic, and in this regard, Turkey is basically going to have to transform itself into a stable first-world nation. That means not only low deficit and national debt and reasonably stable growth (with low inflation and sound monetary policies), but the conversion of its workforce from mostly unskilled laborers to skilled and well-trained and educated individuals and, as others have indicated above, a stabilization of Turkey's population so that it is no longer rapidly growing and can be effectively employed within Turkey-- thus minimizing mobility. This might at first seem unfair, since Romania and Bulgaria are both poor with many problems but are gaining entry. But these are both very small countries, and their costs can be absorbed. Turkey, unfortunately for its own good, already has about 75 million people and growing fast, with most of the population both poor and mobile.

As long as this dynamic is present, Turkey will never have even a prayer at joining the EU. Because of Turkey's sheer size, a large, growing, poor and mobile population would never be accepted, not only by EU member governments but also the referenda in multiple EU countries. It's not just concerns about mass movements of millions of poorly educated, low-skill Turkish laborers and subsequent welfare costs-- it's also genuine worries about massive EU subsidies to Turkey. Again, such EU subsidies can be borne for Ireland, Romania, and Bulgaria because they are small, but a poor country of Turkey's size could drain so much wealth out of other member countries as to threaten the basis of their very economies. IOW, for Turkey to join the EU, it will have to prove that it brings far, far more benefits than costs.

If I were a betting man, I'd say Turkey has very little chance of joining. But I do hold out some hope that perhaps Turkey could manage such a difficult transformation. It would be quite a feat. However, as others have already written, the looming Kurdish question and Iraq may make this all moot pretty soon, the way things are currently looking.