http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7491484.stm

... and these primitive people want to join the EU. WTF kind of laws have they got? Do they know most of the rest of the world live in the 21st century? :sulk:

Jens' would love them in the EU

I think it is the government that is causing the problems. The "AK Party" enforce conservative laws on the country, and some of the rulings are not liked. Some of the men themselves were against such a ruling:

So it's good to see that people are taking a stand, and realise the archaic nature of such a ruling. I believe it's harsh to call the Turks "primitive people" because you can clearly see many people protesting because they can see how old fashioned such views are. Maybe a change of government is needed, but I am not an expert in Turkish politics to give a considered opinion about it.

Also consider the story where criticism about a Dunkin Doughnuts advert surfaced because of a scarf worn by a celebrity chef, which the complainers believed offered symbolic support for Islamic extremism:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7427206.stm

This is seriously idiotic, and they actually pulled the advert despite the ridiculousness of the claim. Obviously, you can't really draw an analogy between the two situations, because in one situation, an entire government upheld the complaint, and here it's just a US Chain, but I'm just saying that there is backwards thinking in people from all countries, and some of these primitive complaints are sometimes upheld, sadly.

OK - but you also get stupid laws like 'insulting Turkey' and they have doubtful supporters behaving in a racist manner to visiting teams with non-white players, though that applies to a number of central European (ex-communist bloc) countries.

yeah, the problem is that calling Turkey "primitive" is just as stupid and backwards as the stupid and backwards things highlight.

Which does a fine job of proving TF's point about the difficult of evaluating a country/culture on the particular or limited instances.

I suspect, Coney, while admitting that I could well be wrong, that the amount you actually know about Turkey amounts to about half a pile of jackshit. Which means you have no way of putting instances like this in context. And no way of being able to evaluate a claim like "Turkey is primitive."

But, really, that only confirms me in my certainty that English folk are xenophobic, uneducated, and full of misplaced feelings of superiority.

It's Turkey so we're allowed to be brash in our assessment of the country and Turks, us English folk have a soft spot for them...

We do it's true, as touchy as they may be.

Woahh someone touched a nerve... :blink: :run:

So why does the EU continue to refuse entry to Turkey - do all of the EU know jack shit about Turkey?

I do have a wide range of issues with Turkey, including doubts over the current party of government (although I do not know the detail I have read reports which suggest he is keen to repeal some if not all of turkey's secular nature)

It also is documented as having persecutions of Christians currently going on (can provides links at a later point).

amereeecans :rolleyes:





;)

one correction to your logic: Refusing entry to Turkey is not the same thing as finding it a backwards and primitive country. So you've got no warrant, on that basis, to defend your initial post.

Now to answer your question:

In addition to plenty of intelligent and well-positioned people (Jack Straw and Jacque Chirac, for example) who think admitting Turkey is a fantastic idea, there are roughly two categories of people who don't want to admit Turkey.

1. Politicians and business leaders. Many of those oppose Turkey's entry for economic reasons: Turkey has a relatively low GDP, is developing serious inequality in wealth, and has a very large population. The fear is that poor Turks will immigrate en masse to Western Europe. And, they fear, (a) that will flood the labor market, lowering wages for their citizens and making it much harder for them to find work, thus potentially increasing need for social welfare at the exact moment that many of these countries are looking to shift to a new paradigm. And, they fear, (b) the immigration will increase the religious-ethnic-economic tensions that they see as Western Europe's most serious social problem.

(I think this is an entirely reasonable position, though I do find the counterargument more persuasive -- that Western Europe will actually benefit since it's population is aging rapidly and it's birth rate is too low to make up the numbers.)

2. Populations. There is a lot of public/grassroots opposition in some countries to Turkey's accession. And, yeah, a lot of this is ill-informed and has to do with a axiomatic feeling that Turkey isn't part of Europe because it's Muslim.

Actually, there's a third major sector: Politicians and citizens of Cyprus. This is because the island is still divided after the Turkish invasion of '74 and Turkey is still (nominally, at least) supporting the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Cyprus recently used its veto to singlehandedly stop Turkey taking the next step toward accession.

So, yeah, not a lot about primitivism there.

****

Turkey is a very complicated country, one which explodes a lot of the prefabricated categories that Western Europeans and Americans use to understand the world. For example, Turkey has one of the most rabidly (and unreflective) secularist populations in the world. Another part of its population is devoutly (and unreflectively) Muslim. And, many of course, are in between. Of the countries I know about, only the United States has this cultural complexity. (I don't know enough about Pakistan, but it occurs to me that it might have the complexity too, and at much greater extremes.)

These positions are represented at the level of government by the AKP, the ruling Islamist party, and the Military establishment, the proud heirs of Ataturk, fiercely secular and suspicious of any religious impulse in state or society. Neither group can be simplistically equated with or opposed to nebulous concepts like "Freedom" (much less located in some dumb-ass "civilization vs. primitivism" worldview).

The AKP has been a champion of electoral democracy (since it has been a beneficiary of it), over and against the secularist Military which, irrationally fearing some sort of theocracy, has tried a lot of dirty tricks to impede AKP's entirely legitimate and transparent ascent to power. The AKP initiated the human rights reforms in Turkey about 4 years ago. (I hope you're not basing your ideas about Turkey on "Midnight Express" or something.) The laws that prohibit "slandering the state" are both opposed by the large majority of the population and are a relic of the semi-autocratic regime under Ataturk and his secularist successors. It would be a profound error to link it to the Islamist party.

But the AKP also has encouraged (or enabled) what we might call a counter-revolution in social mores -- an increasing social conservatism that threatens to turn back women's rights, for example. Again, much like today's USA. (Women had among the strongest of social positions in Europe in the 1920-30's in Ataturk's new state.) And the military defends those rights, since they're part of the Ataturkist, secularist package.

So no one in Turkey is fully on the side of "Freedom" as an American or Brit would likely define it. Nor is anyone fully against it. Rather, different groups defend different freedoms against the incursions of other groups.

*********

I find that, most of the time, people who talk about Turkey fail entirely to understand the subject and, moreover, don't really care to. They're just interested in wallowing in whatever sensationalist angle they can draw out of the complex reality. And, really, most of the time they'd be so much better off just keeping their mouths shut.

JF :bow: :bow:

Fair enough (good post, btw).

I base my impression of Turkey on it's brutal security forces, the way visiting fans are stabbed (some from the Arsenal and 2 from Leeds who were actually killed), the way the Kurd situation is 'dealt with' and not so infrequent stories of the suppression of women. I accept that the situation is more complex with a secular army versus a religious ruling party, but stories coming out of Turkey do seem to have a consistently negative tinge. I accept that reporters may have their own pitch which they wish to peddle so the information is distorted so perhaps my use of 'primitive' was excessive.

Finally.

This means we dont have to apply for work permits if we buy Turkish players doesnt it?

Yay!!



:getcoat:

You'll find their style of play rather primitive, though. ;)

ooh! ... why you! ... I ... :fury:

I appreciate you're having back down from the rhetoric. There's a lot of things wrong with Turkey, but a lot of things right too. Very much like most of the countries out there. (The US is really a great parallel.)

I agree with you about the security forces, though the worst of that seems to be in the past (worst in the 80s).

Also the Kurdish rights problem is much less now. It was actually the AKP who instituted those reforms about 4-5 years ago. Now the Kurdish language can be taught in schools. The remaining problem is how poor the Southeast part of the country is (where the Kurdish population is concentrated) but that's a problem on a very different level, with much less obvious links to political oppression.

As for football fans, on the one hand, it's certainly seems to me that the hard-core Istanbul fans can be violent and scary people (and the Istanbul derbies can be awful); but on the other hand, I have a hard time thinking that this tells us much about the country, especially given English fans in the 70s and 80s (the scourge of all Europe), PSG fans today, the rise of neo-nazi supporters in Germnay and Austria, some of the ultras, especially in Rome, and of course the cream of the crop, the Belgrade supporters groups, whom Milosevic used as paramilitaries to begin his genocidal program.

****

I think Turkey's single biggest problem is the way that democratic process is only shallowly embedded in its system of rule and in popular ideology. Too often, people prioritize getting the right result (e.g., keeping religion out of govt) even when it's done in the wrong way (arbitrary legal decisions or oppressive laws). This is very much in the fabric of Turkey's civic culture because of the ruling style of Ataturk and his some of his successors. While I have little grasp of the complexities surrounding the AKP (Islamist party), I do like them very much in that right now they are champions of democratic process -- respecting the rules of democracy no matter what the particular policy result is.

religeon and politics = bad combination

you know what I think is a good combination?

Religion and Politics.

really?

too often religious governence involves a tyranical government that persecutes or treats badly/less well those who do not adhere to the religion of the government.

I was being pedantic Mr.B, est.'86 spelt religion wrong.

oh, sorry

:getcoat:

We are talking about a country, not your thanks giving meal, calm down and pass me some pumpkin pie ;)

I like Turkey


especialy with cranberry sauce