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To:
m.bunting@guardian.co.uk |
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Dear Madeleine (Ms Bunting),
In response to your comment in today's Guardian: "With Turkey in the club . . ., "
I remember MY first visit to
Istanbul, about 35 years ago, as a young man venturing for the
first time from England's green and pleasant shores and
travelling overland through Europe. How English and homesick
I felt amidst the foreignness of successive countries from
Belgium to Greece. But arriving finally in Istanbul was a
real shock (culture shock, I later discovered it is called),
like entering a totally alien world. I realised in a flash
that I wasn't just an Englishman, but also a European, and
that beyond was another world.
I do not believe that in such a
short space of time so much could have changed.
What unites Europeans is not just
geography (on the basis of which there is no reason to
exclude Turkey), but shared history, culture and ethnicity.
The reasons for including Turkey
in Europe are strategic and economic: never mind the colour
of their skin (ethnicity, culture, history), it's the colour
of their money (and access to resources) we are interested
in. What we have here, Madeleine, is an unholy alliance of
well-meant but totally misconceived left-wing multi-culti
ideology, politico-strategic interests, and capitalist
economics - in short, a recipe for disaster.
As if we don't have enough
problems as it is . . .
The country we really need to set our minds (and hearts) on getting into Europe is Russia, not just because they too (most of them) are ethnic Europeans with whom we share much history and culture, but also because we complement each other so well in respect to population density and access to natural resources, and, no less important, to prevent us going down the familiar and (this time perhaps terminally) tragic path of military rivalry. With Russia in the EU, we might hope to persuade them, along with Britain and France, to transfer control of their nuclear weapons to a European authority, thus setting a hugely positive example for nuclear non-proliferation and taking a major step towards their control by a global authority. |
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