Boss
Regular Member
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- Ethnic group
- Greek
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- T2f
If we are to take in the account of history, culture, population genetics and geopolitics Turkey has much in common with Europe and therefor these aspects should not be turned in to arguments against Turkey's EU accession talks. How ever Turkey still has to improve certain aspects of human rights for all her citizens as well as minorities. As a Turk I can say that there has been immense improvement and progress in these aspects but is it enough? of course not and there is still much work to be done.
I've also been encountering certain economic reasoning against Turkey's EU accession process which I don't entirely agree with. I think this reasoning whether positive nor negative would depend on the certain perspective of the individual. If you compare Turkey with the engine economies of Europe, those industrial states such as France, England and Germany than Turkey does lag behind whether its gdp per capita nor total gdp but when compared with Eastern European countries that are in the EU such as Romania, Bulgaria or Poland than at this point I can say that there is not much of a difference. Turkey is even more developed than some of these states located in Eastern and Southern Europe. I think it would also be important to remind the fact that historically Turkey has not been affected by Renascence nor the Industrial revolution. Plus more than %90 of Turkey's population was doing agriculture during the foundation of the republic back in 1923. So it wouldn't be so bad to take a step back in to history and grasp where Turkey has actually risen from in recent years... compared to some European countries I think there has been great progress (in the modern meaning of the word) both socially and economically within the years. I am expecting that these will continue further once we are part of the EU, which we'll eventually join one day.
Virtually none of the Eastern or Southeastern European countries were affected by the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution. In fact, most of them were under Ottoman rule when the Renaissance and the Industrial revolution were in full swing. Some people from the balkans migrated to Italy during and before the Renaissance but the Balkan and Eastern European regions were entirely unaffected by those events (certainly the industrial revolution reached the balkans almost two centuries later).
And Turkey has a good deal lower GDP (purchasing power) per capita than Poland ($20,000 vs $15,000) and they were both more or less growing at a similar rate in 2012 (2.2% vs 2.0%). It's true that Bulgaria and Romania are poorer (Bulgaria slightly poorer though its growing at a much slower rate than Turkey, Romania a bit poorer and also growing at a far slower rate) but I don't think people object to Turkey joining the EU because of its economy. To be honest, I am not sure what the argument is against Turkey joining (I am not sure whether the Turks themselves are interested either)