Will Turkey accept Europe?

摘要

After 40 years of hesitation, the leaders of the European Union had been girding themselves for a fateful decision in December: to start membership talks with Turkey, and thus to accept the likelihood that, in a decade or two, the EU'S most populous member state will be Muslim. But is Turkey ready to accept the EU'S values? As relations between Turkey and the EU went into a tail-spin this week, the answer to that question began to look more doubtful. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's moderate Islamist prime minister, flew to Brussels on September 23rd to defuse a crisis that he himself had triggered, when he suddenly withdrew a long-planned package of amendments to Turkey's penal code. He even suggested that he wanted to revive the criminal penalties for adultery that his government had earlier seemed prepared to drop.