[jfruh]

I am not at all trying to minimize Turkey's real problems. But many of the Eastern European EU states also have some of the same or similar problems (particularly Romania and Bulgaria). In their cases much of the reason given for admitting them to the EU was that membership would bring them closer to European norms. (Indeed, this is an incentive held out by those in Europe who favor Turkish EU membership.)

My point is that all these problems would be easier to ignore or fix if Turkey had 10 million people. At 70 million, they'd have such a strong voice in EU institutions that they'd be as likely to change the EU as vice versa.

[_delirium]

I agree the population size is a huge part of the problem, though I think it has more to do with immigration worries than voting-in-EU-institutions worries. There was already a bunch of nationalist ire over the proverbial "Polish plumbers" flooding western Europe and undercutting local labor, once they were fully admitted to the EU with free movement of labor. The prospect of 70 million Turks having the right to move to any city in Europe is much more unpopular than that (and good fodder for anti-immigrant populist parties), because there's more of them, they're poorer, and they're perceived as more foreign. If it were 10 million Turks, there might be more of a chance of getting people to agree.

[coldarchon]

you DO understand their population is huge BECAUSE of islam? At the beginning of the last century they WERE 10 million Turks.