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Comment by saool | Hacker News Reader

> In a 2010 meeting with the Austrian Foreign Minister, United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said “With respect to Turkey, the United States, along with many other countries in Europe, support the membership of Turkey inside the EU. I know that it is an issue that divides the European Union. We don’t have a vote, but if we were a member, we would be strongly in favor of it.”[176]

> European Union During a televised debate on May 20, 2014 for the 2014 European Parliament Elections, President of the European Commission candidates Jean-Claude Juncker and Martin Schulz (of the EEP and S&D blocs respectively) both argued that they would "promise" that Turkey would never join the European Union while either one of them were President, with the view that Turkey has turned its back on "European democratic values".[177]

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_of_Turkey_to_the_Euro...

updated: broken link

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Turkey in the EU would be great for Turkey and its citizens, but probably not the EU. Turkey doesn't have its house in order with regards to corruption, and their labor is too cheap (which becomes a problem because they don't have the tax base required to support EU initiatives). Labor prices won't rise as long as Syria is in turmoil, because Turkey is flooded with refugees who are a source of cheap labor.

Turkey would quickly become another Greece, only likely with a violent Islamist opposition instead of a violent Fascist opposition.

The fact that the EU considered Turkey was hypocritical, they've been occupying half of Cyprus for over 60 years now.

Sadly it no longer seems that there is much hope for Turkey, in the 90's and early 2000's they seemed to make so much progress but now they seem to be just fine with devolving and going completely away from the path that Ataturk set for them after the fall of the Ottoman empire.

What people seem to forget is that the majority of their population is very rural, uneducated and really in opposite with western and European values and their power base since the latest regime change just been growing, the "Islamist" opposition you speak off is not an opposition any more it's the ruling party.

They seem to be much more of a mix between Iran and Russia in their form of government than a the disorganized EU nation like Greece or Italy they were in the 90's and It's a shame. Turkey could have offered a huge boost to the Eurozone they on a steady path to become one of the largest individual economies in the world.

I don't really take any issues with your comments about the outlook of the political situation in Turkey in relation to the EU, but the hypothesis that this is related the influence of rural populations can't be right. The percentage of the population living in urban centers is roughly 70%, on par with Germany, Austria, Czech Republic et al. [1]. Furthermore about 1/3 of Turkish people live in cities with over 1 million people [2], which in a sense makes Turkey even more urban than most of the big European countries. To reiterate, I don't think this means your points are wrong, only that the reason that they are right must lie somewhere else.

[1] http://www.geohive.com/earth/pop_urban.aspx [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey#Demographics

Well "rural" wasn't the best choice, i didn't want to use "backward" or "traditional" because it really doesn't reflect the exact situation either and i didn't want it to come out too negative or condescending.

Turkey has the lowest educational attainment in the OECD, only 32% of adults have high school education, and amongst the younger generation it's still bad as less than 40% of it's male populations and less than 30% of it's female population completes a high school equivalent education, and only a fraction of that get higher secondary education.

Much of it's population is really on opposites sides of current western values and the government crackdown on free press, opposition parties, taking control over the courts and legal system, dismantling the (for once in a life time remarkably positive) influence of the military, and just the complete mockery of all attempts at democracy just put it on a completely different course than it used to be only 2 decades ago.

Broken link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_of_Turkey_to_the_Euro...

Turkey will never be in the EU. They don't think/want to be either.

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