From personal experience (I live in the centre of Rotterdam with many muslims) I can say the muslims here are a group that I don’t like, while I like interacting with any non-muslim. This is just because that’s the way it is. I’m still forming my views on this matter, you form yours.

There is no ’silver bullet’ here, and there are no guarantees, but if we all make the effort of trying to understand one another, and try to agree on a common goal - a free and democratic modernised Turkey in ongoing dialogue with other members of the EU - even while differing on precisely which may be the best road to get there, then we may be getting somewhere.

This involves addressing - as we can see - stereotypes on both sides of the fence. It was for propagating what I consider to be a useless and harmful stereotype that I pointed the finger at Bolkestein in my original post.

I cannot help feeling that quite a lot hangs on how we move forward from here on in.

Your comment to female flesh at the Eurovision song contest should surprise Rupter or Dennis, not me I would like to add another fact that might surprise them. Turkey has become a target for retiring or just emigrating Germans, about 20,000 permanently live there. So what do do about the new Christian population? The major of Alanya built a church for them.

If EU membership is not delivered though Erdogan will be blamed for empty promises.

“and fulfilling EU membership criteria and being credible in the developed world are not separated terms.”

Right, thats why I think the latter is the stronger road to take because if you get into the EU you don’t lose anything but if you don’t get into the EU you’ve already stated that there is a “higher reason” for the reforms.

As for the adultery law proposal its being atttacked from all sides and pretty furiously by the media. The CHP has finally picked the right argument and the AKP has been backpedalling and clarifying ever since the word got out. In a debate, one AKP politician said that the fact that Europe does not have such a law is not important because some countries in Europe approve gay marriage, so does that mean Turkey must? And he continued by saying that family values in Europe are deteriorating rapidly and this law protects the family. The CHP politician countered by saying that, first of all, not all European countries approve gay marriage whereas all countries reject adultery as a crime, and that if European society and families are in such an absymal state as described by the AKP, why the hell are we trying so desparately to get into Europe for the last sixty years in order to mingle and integrate with such people?

The AKP guy couldn’t really answer but said the law is aimed to protect women in the rural areas who are afraid to ask for a divorce. The CHP guy shot that down by asking how on earth a woman who is afraid to ask for a divorce could possibly gather the courage to report her husband to the police. He ended by saying that no public organization, including human and women’s rights groups, asked for such a law change and accused the AKP of attempting to “rally their hardcore conservative base” and shooting down Turkey’s EU prospects in the process.

“the Eurovision song contest had a great significance for Turkey, due to the acceptance in hosting an international event, thus the face of Turkey chosen to be presented says something - and I saw quite some female flesh.”

Turkish people are surprised when others are suprised by this, but then again, most people don’t know that Turkey had a thriving porno industry in the 70s either–although for years Europeans have been coming to our beaches in order to take their tops off because they prefer not to do so in their own country.

Indeed, there have been more advances on rights issues, Kurdish issues, Greece relations than any previous Kemalian government. And, while Western Europeans (especially Britons) might dismiss this, but aegean disclosure should correct me if I am wrong: the Eurovision song contest had a great significance for Turkey, due to the acceptance in hosting an international event, thus the face of Turkey chosen to be presented says something - and I saw quite some female flesh.

Regarding the adultery ban proposal, I would remind of similar lawas not long ago in EU members, or the abortion ban in Ireland - I’m not at all saying that this is not a negative, but that it is not of an insurmountable quality. More - read I quote three sections from a BBC article on the issue (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3641026.stm):

The adultery law is part of a package of sweeping changes to the penal code, which include the abolition of torture and the expansion of individual liberties. The changes are an effort to bring Turkey’s legal code into line with European human rights legislation.

The above could be headlined “don’t miss the big picture”.

Mr Verheugen, who has spent the last few days touring Turkey, expressed his concerns in an interview with the Turkish Vatan newspaper.

“If Turkey tries to include crimes that are not in other countries’ laws in its penal code, European Union countries could interpret this as Islamic law entering Turkish law,” he told the paper.

He added that he was not “defending adultery”, but said “Turkey should not give the impression… that it is introducing Islamic elements into its legal system while engaged in a great project such as the EU”.

So yes, the EU does exert pressure on Turkey in this issue.

On the other hand, I submit to Edward and Hektor that EU pressure on accession countries was not consistent, for example, after nothing much happened about the bad treatment of Gypsies in my region, despite pressure, we could still join. Hence with the benefit of hindsight, I agree with aegean disclosure that joining shouldn’t be (our own shouldn’t have been) rushed (should take a decade or two); on the other hand, I disagree on using future EU membership as an argument for reforms: I think that is a good thing, it worked on some issues here, and fulfilling EU membership criteria and being credible in the developed world are not separated terms.

But the main opposition party says it will not challenge it, provided men face the same penalties as women.

The BBC’s Virginia Gidley-Kitchin says adultery used to be illegal in Turkey until 1996, when the Constitutional Court struck the law down because it penalised women more than men.

…so the ’secular establishment’ is not necessarily better. Actually, on the issue of Cyprus, it is worse, sabotaging Erdogan’s efforts to get peace.

Immigrant Muslims, example: Germany
Muslims in Germany are overwhelmingly of Turkish descent. One 2003 study (see in http://www.st-georgen.uni-frankfurt.de/leseraum/troll20.pdf) counts 3,112,000 inhabitants with a Muslim cultural identity, of which 2,365,120 (76%) profess a Muslim religious identity, but only 309,000 (9.9%) are organised. Even in the year after 9/11 and up to the Iraq War, the number of Friday prayer attendants is just 464,000 (14.9%), and that of daily prayers in a mosque 185,000 (5.9%) - not dissimilar to similar numbers in the ‘Christian’ population. (Prior, weekly attendance was about 9%, down from 22% measured in a study in the middle of the nineties, see towards the end in http://www.bpb.de/publikationen/K4PW7Y,3,0,Reaktionen_auf_muslimische_Zuwanderungin_Europa.html#art.)

Muslim immigrants’ children
From more (and more correct) details of the study referred to in the above link [to which my source is in print - no link, sorry], of under-16 children of Muslims in Germany, 58% have broken with their parents’ religious traditions, 12% consider to do so; and of the 42% still holding to the traditions, 22% percent do so at parental pressure. Another 1997 poll for the Berlin local government asked youth of Turkish origin about membership in an assotiation - 23.5% were, but of these, 19.2% were members of sports assotiations, and a mere 0,4% of a religious assotiation.

Strength of faith of Turkish Muslims
Rupter misrepresented my claims that referred to stats only in case of immigrants from Turkey, while in case of Turkey proper I only encouraged a visit to Turkey. (In my circle of acquitances, there were four recent trips to Turkey [with no matching participants], all leaving similar impressions on the participants.)
However, though scant, there are a few polls to consider. I found one from the sixties in which 50% preferred the “Turk” identity and 37.5% the “Muslim” one, and one from 1993 in which 69% preferred “Turk”, 21% chose “Muslim Turk”, and 4% chose “Muslim” - however, the significance is heavily limited by the fact that these were local samples, taken at two different locations. And a 2002 Gallup poll indeed found that 37% say religion is ‘very important’, 41% say it is essential to life, and for 27% it is the most important thing in life. However, the strong decrease with age of those who think prayer at work is important in a 2000 study of factory workers (on page 9 of this pdf: http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/publications/workingpapers/pdf-files/wrkgpaper21.pdf) indicates a decline, whose importance is heightened by strong population growth.

Population growth
Beyond the points raised by Edward and Antony Jaune about the slowdown in population growth and the comparison with Germany’s weight within the EU-15, some numbers. Population growth is down from 1.47% in 1998 to 1.16% last year and 1.13% this year, with children per woman declining from 2.5 to 2.03 last year and 1.98% this year (CIA Factbook). Projections for the 2050 total now range from 87 to 99 million.
As for the current EU-25, the 2000 total of 451 million is projected to decline to just above 400 million in 2050. That is, Turkey would be less than 20% in 2050 (much less if in the meantime more countries, say Romania join too), while 82-million Germany was 22% of the 376-million EU-15 in 2000 (see f.e. http://www.photius.com/rankings/world2050_rank.html).

“I can only say that the majority of Turks voted for Erdogan whose wife wears the headscarf and walks 2m behind him so by definition the majority of Turks condone this sort of treatment of women.”

The votes also include some of the pro-Cyprus-reunification, pro-EU crowd. A lot of people have gotten pissed off at the center-left oppposition CHP party because of their objection to every (literally) AKP proposal no matter how sane or insane it is (it intensified when the CHP came out against the Annan Plan). As a result a lot of the traditionally CHP politicians ran as AKP candidates.

I cannot see why I should accept this in Europe, as far as I’m concerned all people should have the same rights regardless of race,creed or sex and they should have the same opportunities and freedoms which in Turkey it clearly does not happen for women and minorities. This is the standard that we should be setting for entry in the EU and I cant understand why things as basic as that are being swept under the carpet.

As far as your second point about Germany, well there really is not comparison between Germany and Turkey. Germany has acknowledged and apologised for the atrocities its army commited during the war and it has been on the forefront for the protection of human rights worldwide ever since.

Has Turkey acknowledged and apologised for the Armenian genocide ? Nothing of the sort, if anything they viciously attack anyone who even hints that it even happened. Were the people who got killed lesser people than the rest of us, they deserve as much respect as the victims of the holocaust.

My point is that I do not want people whose priorities are not the protection of bacic human rights voting for my future.

I certainly hope so.”

Hektor after a sound nights sleep this seems to me a totally inadequate answer from me to your entirely legitimate point. You would be certainly within your rights to point out that looking at the continuous fudging which goes on at Commission and Council of Ministers level (and the growth and stability pact is only the most topical in a long line of problems) that it may not be reasonable to ‘hope’ that the EU force anyone to do anything. This indeed is our quandry.

My defence would be that sometimes you need to take risks, and sometimes you need to look at the consequences attendant on not taking them. In other words we need to consider not only the pros and cons of ‘fast-tracking’ Turkey, but the pros and cons of not doing so.

If the fear is of a growing fundamentalist influence in Turkey (of which I am not terribly convinced), then it would seem to me that pushing Turkey away from us would make this problem greater not less. Ditto for all the human rights questions. This is why I think we should take the risk.

It would also send out a clear message across the globe that, as the Commission official said, religion is not a condition for EU membership, whilst democratic values and tolerance are. This is what we need to insist - not hope, insist - that those negotiating on our behalf do not fudge.

DSW