The Wall Street Journal’s Turkey correspondent, Marc Champion, has another great article out, this time taking a look at the spectacular recent growth of Turkish Airlines (THY) and how that is both mirroring and working hand-in-hand with Turkey’s rising political and economic ambitions.
Poor old Turkey has been getting mixed messages from European governments again, after visits by Britain?s David Cameron and Germany?s foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, this week. The UK prime minister was very outspoken in his support for Turkish membership of the European Union. ?I will remain your strongest possible advocate for EU membership,? he said. ?Together […]
What?s the main driving factor behind the US-Turkish disagreement about Iran? Much has been said about an Islamist tilt in Turkish foreign policy. Some call this an ?axis shift? ? a paradigmatic change whereby Turkey is slowly distancing itself from the West.
(BERLIN ) – Turkey is far from ready for full EU membership but for economic and security reasons it is vital that Ankara be “on Europe’s side,” Germany’s foreign minister was quoted as saying on Tuesday.
Turkey?s relationship with the EU has reached an impasse because of the attitudes of some EU member countries that have developed the habit of vetoing everything concerning Turkey, including matters that have nothing to do with the Cyprus issue.
It was an astute reader who alerted me to the politically charged posters adorning İstanbul?s Fatih mosque. A poster vilifying Netanyahu appeared one day and was replaced the next with one of the Mavi Marmara, one of the ships that attempted to run the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
British Prime Minister David Cameron?s first stop on a week-long foreign tour was Ankara. While delivering a speech in the Turkish capital Tuesday morning, he very clearly expressed his support for Turkey?s European Union membership. He said he wanted to help pave the road from Ankara to Brussels. The question is: Can he convince his fellow EU heads of state and government on this matter?
Excerpt from Ece Ozlem Atikcan (2010) ?European Union and Minorities: Different Paths of Europeanization??, Journal of European Integration, volume 32, number: 4, pp. 375-392.
The Turkish Republic, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, adopted the French model of a unitary nation-state. The official citizenship policy suggests that anyone who lives within the borders of Turkey is a Turk, irrespective of his/her ethnic, linguistic or religious background. Within this framework, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne shaped Turkish minority policy. This treaty classified people on the basis of religion, as Muslim vs. non-Muslim. Thus, only Greek, Jewish and Armenian communities were regarded as minorities; none of the Islamic groups such as Bulgarian Pomaks, Circassians, Arabs, Kurds or Bosnians were mentioned. No language other than Turkish could be taught at schools, the only exceptions being Greek, Hebrew and Armenian. All information and news were transmitted in Turkish (Yagmur 2001).
Armenian-Americans file a federal lawsuit against two Turkish state-owned banks, T.C. Ziraat Bankası and the Central Bank of Turkey, but some international law experts say a local court cannot sue a state in this way. Others say there is a possibility for the court to accept the case
Lawyers for two Armenian men have sued Turkey and two of its major banks, claiming they and others were victims of genocide and seeking what could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
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