Where Giscard D'Estaing has got it right
Steve Sailer has an exceptionally thought-provoking piece at VDARE on the future of Turkey. His argument is that her admission to the European Union would be bad for America, bad for Europe and bad for Turkey.
America faces the extension of EU trade barriers and the possibility for the first time of a serious European military 'counterbalance' to the United States, every day more the dream of Europe's liberal elite.
It's simply not in America's economic interest to encourage Turkey to submerge into a trading bloc designed to maximize trade within the EU while penalizing imports from America.
Nor is it in America's strategic interest to make more feasible Brussels' dream of a European military force separate from NATO. So far, such plans have largely foundered on the anti-martial feelings of Europeans unwilling to sacrifice their precious 1.3 children. But Turkey would make a separate EU strike force much more feasible by providing cheap, brave cannon fodder.
For the conspiscuously middling Turkey, Europe threatens to undo those parts of the country that do work.
Nor is it clear that Turkey will be better off adopting post-modern European laws, as the EU insists. For example, the EU demands the abolition of the death penalty, yet the threat of execution encouraged captured Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan to call for peace, thus ending the 15-year-long rebellion in which 37,000 died.
More importantly, the EU wants Turkey's military to get out of politics. But it has only been the threat of a coup by the resolutely secular army that has kept Islamic fundamentalism in check in Turkey.
For Europe, the threat is cultural.
Turkey's population within a couple of decades will be larger than Germany, currently the largest EU state. Turkish Muslims would be the single largest voting bloc within the EU. And it would be difficult to deny Turks for long the right possessed by other EU members to migrate anywhere within the EU.
... Valery Giscard-D'Estaing, who was so weaselly about the Soviet threat when he was President of France, has surprisingly emerged as the Defender of Christendom by publicly expressing strong opposition to admitting Turkey. He says it would be "the end of Europe."
And he's right.
As Mark Steyn noted in last week's Spectator, the prescient warnings of some cultural commentators were recently confirmed by the West's foremost Middle East expert. Princeton's Bernard Lewis has declared that demographic and migratory trends will mean Europe is Islamic by the end of this century at the latest: a new Middle East will be established on our continent, with Italy the new Iran and England the new Egypt. This projection - like almost any - is not inevitable, but it is what will happen if something serious does not interrupt this process.
If you are willing to ignore this threat because the very idea seems unthinkable, just reflect on how unthinkable it would have been only ten years ago that Canada would soon be introducing official Sharia courts in which a woman's testimony has half the value of a man's, that France would refuse to classify Hamas as a terror group, or that Britain would introduce laws banning vigorous religious debate, in accordance with the demands of the Islamic Council that although it is acceptable not to follow Islam, it is unacceptable to "criticise" it. That is the impact that the votes of just a few million Muslims can have.
If you would rather your great-granddaughters didn't live under Sharia law, it's time to start thinking now about what policies will prevent the Islamification of Europe. Permitting free migration across the continent to 69 million Turkish Muslims will only push down the accelerator further towards what could be a new dark age looming at the end of the twenty-first century.
