“Why Europe must say yes to Turkey”
SOURCE:
“The Economist”, a British weekly magazine which reports news about international economy an policy, on 18th September 2004
TOPIC DISCUSSED:
The article is about Turkey’s possible entry into the European Union and analyses the pros and cons.
CONTENT:
The article is an analysis of the pros and cons about a possible future Turkey’s entry into EU.
It is organized into three sequence:
The journalist writes about some aspects which characterize Turkey: its size, poverty, geographical location difficult to define, Muslim religion.
The article focuses the attention on every single problem.
The first sequence underlines the main cons: Turkey is very large, very poor and besides it is Muslim.
The former is that Turkey is so large and if it enters it will become the biggest Member with the heaviest voting weight and as a result this would certainly influence European decisions.
The second problem is connected to its poverty. The problem of poverty is connected with the possibility of an eventual migration. People‘s life is generally based on agriculture and therefor they could not compete with the other industrialized Member States so far.
A further problem to consider is its religion: Turkey is Muslim; a very crucial problem. The real question is not Islamism but the incompatibility between secular power and regular power: Islam is a regular power, where religion is the lawmaker. It is incompatible with a secular democracy like Europe’s. But Turkish government is promoting reforms in order to join the Union and most of them are introduced to protect human rights.
In the second sequence the journalist discusses every previous aspect in detail considering its possible detriment but making the worries about Turkey’s entry in the European Union prevail.
In the third part he underlines the positive function Turkey could assume as a model of freedom and democracy for other Muslim countries.
PROBLEM RAISED:
The article proposes a reflection on Turkey’s entry. It analyses the problems connected with Turkey’s size, poverty,Islamic roots and the development of Islamic fundamentalism.
PERSONAL COMMENT:
I think that the article is very well written: it shows a high level of information and effective communicative organization of information. The article shows some possible solutions considering its pros and cons. I think that Turkey’s entry in European Union could imply a radical change.