"Risk of Islamist backlash if EU shuns Turkey
BRUSSELS: The European Union should keep alive Turkey’s prospects of joining the bloc or risk a nationalist or Islamist backlash in its neighbourhood, a newspaper quoted the EU’s enlargement commissioner as saying.
Olli Rehn told the European Voice weekly that while acknowledging French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s opposition to Turkey’s EU entry, the European Commission believed it necessary “to keep our word and respect our existing commitments”. “If you look at the current political situation in the Middle East ... we don’t need another nationalist or Islamist problem in the neighbourhood of Europe,” he told the weekly in an interview."
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