"Talking Turkey: The centuries of implications for EU
BY JONATHAN POWER
18 September 2005
ANKARA — A ‘NO’ to Turkey starting negotiations to enter the European Union on October 3rd 'will have centuries of implications', as one influential academic, Husseyin Bagci, put it to me last week.
It would push a wounded Turkey back into the arms of the nationalists, even perhaps the hard line fundamentalists, and be grist to the mill of those who argue that the Christian Western world will always consider itself superior and apart from the Muslim one. It would, as the provost of Istanbul’s Bahcesehir university, Eser Karakas, told me, make clear that Europe has no interest in becoming the great power that Turkey could help make it with its large population and army, able to play an influential role in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus, and not being subordinated always to the policies of the US."
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