Which Turkey?

摘要

"Europeans' perceptions of Turkey are often shaped by the Turks they know. In Germany, these tend to be the Gastar-beiter (guest workers) who moved there in the 1960s to take up low-grade jobs that the booming post-war economy could no longer fill from the domestic labour market. Over 2m Turks came, and they were mostly honest, hard-working and religious people. But they were economic refugees, poor villagers from the east, not model citizens of Ataturk's republic. Many of their children, though, have moved on, to become anything from prominent European parliamentarians to star European footballers. One of them even married one of the sons of Helmut Kohl, a former German chancellor. It is just the sort of transformation that Ataturk would have wished for his countrymen.