long article i saw in bbc news about turkey ... will paste bits i found interesting as the whole article is quite long.
Turkey's unrequited EU love
Two years ago, Turkey won the Eurovision song contest with a tale of unrequited love.
In many ways, it echoed the country's own unsuccessful bid to woo the European Union since 1963, when it signed an association agreement that promised eventual membership of the bloc.
Things began moving in 1999 when Turkey was officially recognised as an EU candidate, and especially after the election of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government in 2002, which quickened political reforms to an unprecedented pace.
Earlier this month, Turkish state television began broadcasting in Kurdish, the language of a sizeable minority in this country of 67 million.
On the same day, the government released four Kurdish activists, including human rights award winner Leyla Zana, who had spent 10 years in jail after trials deemed unfair by the EU.
Over the past 18 months, the government has passed nine reform packages, including a ban on the death penalty, a zero-tolerance policy towards torture in prisons, and curtailing the interference of the military in politics, education and culture.
"I am impressed - because starting with the constitution, they've changed a lot of laws," says Murat Celikan, a human rights activist who writes a regular column in the daily Radikal.
"To give one example, two years ago, a radio was banned for one year for airing a song in Kurdish and in Armenian. Now the state television has Kurdish programmes - so that's a great change."
The EU has also welcomed the reforms, but it wants them implemented across this vast country by local police, judges and bureaucrats. So far, implementation is uneven, especially in the provinces and the Kurdish areas in the south-east.
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The prospect of EU membership, coupled with IMF-inspired reforms, have also brought greater stability to the crisis-prone Turkish economy.
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For Guenter Verheugen, the European enlargement commissioner, Turkey's strategic position straddling Europe and the greater Middle East is an asset rather than a drawback.
At a recent conference in Brussels, he warned that the EU would make a tragic mistake if it stopped or reversed the process of democratisation in Turkey by denying it eventual membership.
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In October, Mr Verheugen will issue a progress report on Turkey which will form the basis for the decision of EU leaders.
While the report is widely expected to be positive, public opinion in France, Germany, Austria and elsewhere is becoming increasingly reluctant to accept a further enlargement of the EU, especially to include a large Muslim nation like Turkey.
Since the Netherlands will be holding the EU's rotating presidency in the second half of the year, I asked Ben Bot, the Dutch foreign minister (and a former Dutch ambassador to Turkey) how worried he is about the lack of public support among Western voters?
"Perhaps there has been a lack of proper communication and now there is, I think, an unjustified fear of Islam, which is perhaps understandable in the context of terrorism and so on, but which is not justified - because I think that the situation in Turkey is completely different.
"They also forget that Turkey has been a member of Nato, of the Council of Europe, that it has helped the West during all these years, also during the Cold War, has been a staunch ally.
"And so, it's in itself astonishing that people all of a sudden are against Turkish participation, whereas we think that Turkey would be a very valuable member of the EU. It will take a long time, that I agree, it will certainly take many, many years of negotiations before they fully comply with all the criteria."
Indeed, in 10 years or so from now, the EU will be a very different union, and Turkey will be a very different country.
But come December, EU politicians face one of the toughest decisions they have ever had to take.
If they say no to Turkey, they risk alienating a key ally in the Muslim world. But if they say yes, they may upset many voters at home who are already unhappy about where the EU is going.
full article : -- >
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3847373.stm