German Chancellor Angela Merkel (R) and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. © Tobias Schwarz / Reuters
Douglas Murray, The Spectator: How Recep Erdogan became the most powerful man in Europe
Turkey’s thuggish president has European leaders exactly where he wants them.
Update: Since this article was published Ahmet Davutoglu has resigned as Turkey’s Prime Minister. Reports suggest this comes as a result of a rift with President Erdogan caused by the increasingly ‘Presidential’ nature of Turkey’s politics.
Is Turkey part of Europe? For most of our civilisation’s history, to have even asked such a question would have been to invite derision. The Ottomans were kept out of Europe not by some early-onset prejudice, but by the armies of Europe having to beat back their repeated invasions. The question became slightly more plausible a century ago with the rise of Ataturk and the modern Turkish state (one of the only successful efforts to reconcile the Islamic religion with state power). For a brief period around the turn of the millennium, some serious people (including the British government) supported Turkey joining the EU.
But today, the question has become academic — first because Turkey’s liberal trajectory long ago halted and began rolling backwards. And secondly because the country is now coming into Europe anyway. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, has persuaded the EU to grant visa-free travel to his 75 million countrymen inside Europe’s passport-free Schengen area. In so doing, he has made more progress than any of his predecessors. Using a combination of intimidation, threats and blackmail, he has succeeded in opening wide the doors of Europe.
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WNU Editor: When Turkey threatened to escalate the conflict against Russia in Syria and to ask NATO for help .... I was relieved to see Europe's leaders get together and bluntly tell Erdogan that if he should follow this destructive course he was on his own. That was a few months .... but today .... a different story. European - Turkish relations is the poster child (for me at least) on how weak and dysfunctional Europe has become. In the past .... Europe would never have bothered to listen to someone like Erdogan .... they would have ignored him, and they would then impose a political and economic cost on the Turkish government. Today .... utter and complete appeasement .... and this is coming from a people (i.e. the British, Germans, etc.) who know what appeasement can bring about.
Update: Erdogan continues to lecture the West .... Erdogan Blasts West for Leaving Turkey to Fight IS Alone (VOA).
5 comments:
Editor: you are absolutely right in your analysis. I'm born in Europe just after WWII,in a devastated country, and when I see things like that... I am speechless. Crazy, absurdity are just weak words.
Yes the Western Europeans are bat shit crazy on many levels ....but not so much on Eastern Europe....
The Western Europeans are being hoisted on their own petard.
In order to expand the EU into the Warsaw Pact and break up Yugoslavia, they came up with the Shenegen Agreement.
Labor became "mobile", which assured the poor counties of the Warsaw Pact and the aspiring countries of Yugoslavia that signed on, while their economies would be overwhelmed by French agriculture, British finance and German products,
Would remitt monies from expatriates in the rest of the EU.
This basically allowed the economically dominant members if the EU to remain dominant, while the poorer member of the EU enough crumbs to join.
Ergodan has blown this up by pushing a million refugees into Europe, when Europe refused to back his annexation of northern Syria.
The EU has also hosed themselves by not divorcing themselves from US Policy in Afghanistan and the ME, which is the source of the refugee's.
Europe repeat the wrong choices because European governments and institutions have not the intellectual honesty to admit that at least half of the motivations that make the EU possible is the need for West to counter Soviet Union and communist influences.
In effect, if EU really wanted to not repeat the horrible path that leads to two World War, their members have to avoid the policy of imperialism and start the decolonization of third world by their own will.
But no, EU remain filled of empire-nationalist mentality, even today.
The unwilling to admit that resemble in most ways ours errors.
It's old hat for the Europeans.
In '38 Britain and France sold the Czechs out to Hitler while Benes waited outside in the hall. They were more interested in sicking the NAZIs on the USSR than they were on supporting their ally against the Austrian Corporal bully. Just as the EU today is more interested in grovelling to Washington, hugging up to the Saudis, supporting the head choppers in the Middle East, over throwing Assad, and antagonizing Russia.
Poland played her part too. Denying the Soviets passage to fight for the Czechs while annexing territory. It was no little irony that a year later, the same "allies" the Czechs had, did little but declare war on Germany while Poland was overrun and the Soviets grabbed their territory in the East as a buffer.
To this day, the much ballyhooed agreement between the Soviets and Germans, which included the provision on Poland, has been played a part of the broken record song of Stalin = Hitler, "Alliance of Evil", and Molotov-Ribbentrop while the real Alliance of '38 is, in the words of Michael Parenti, "antiseptic ally referred to as 'Munich'."
I agree with YC here. A direct conflict is coming and old players are reverting to type.
The old imperialists are lining up with fascists. Russia, and her allies, are preparing to fight.
The Communists that exist in these countries (and, like them or not, they do) are, once again, on the right side of history. Just as they were in '38,'39 and on to '45.
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