"Tread carefully with Turkey
Jonathan Power International Herald Tribune
ANKARA A "no" to Turkey starting negotiations to enter the European Union on Oct. 3 would have "centuries of implications," one influential Turkish academic, Husseyin Bagci, put it 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 to the Muslim one.
Such a rejection would make it clear, according to the provost of Istanbul's Bahcesehir University, Eser Karakas, that Europe had no interest in becoming the great power that Turkey, with its large population and army, could help make it - a power able to play an influential role in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus, without being subordinated always to U.S. policies."
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