In a post earlier today, Daniel Pipes notes that Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, has expressly stated that “Turkey is not part of Europe” and should never be “accept[ed] as a full member” of the European Union. This is a refreshing bit of honesty. It is a commonplace for European elites to hold this view privately while publicly supporting an “integration process.”
In shrewd irony, Turkey’s Islamic-supremacist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has capitalized on this phantom process to facilitate his goal of re-Islamizing Turkey — i.e., destroying the secular underpinnings of Ataturk’s state, which looked to Western liberalism, rather than sharia, as its model. In Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, I outline how Erdogan has exploited the EU Integration Charade. We’ve just posted a column adapted from that part of the book.