"Turkish delight?
Chris Morris's The New Turkey is a brave attempt to chart the challenges facing the EU's new applicant, says Andrew Finkel
Saturday October 8, 2005
The Guardian
The New Turkey: The Quiet Revolution on the Edge of Europe?
by Chris Morris
288pp, Granta, £17.99
'Happy is the one who says 'I am a Turk',' is the much quoted maxim of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. What sweet agony, by contrast, for the rest of us trying to follow the corkscrew path to modernity taken by the republic he founded. Ask the Pentagon, which confidently expected the cash-strapped Turkish government to accept the multi-billion dollar inducement to support the war in Iraq; or the Turco-sceptics in Europe who never believed the ultra-nationalists would reprieve the convicted leader of the PKK by voting to abolish the death penalty; or Turkish liberals who still support a prime minister who, as a youthful radical, sat at the feet of the proto al-Qaida warlord Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, as the best way of safeguarding the country's secular democracy. Getting at the heart of contemporary Turkey is a bit like peeling an onion modified by Escher."
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