Turkey’s EU rejection was driven by religious identity, not stated criteria

Evidence

Why was Turkey passed over and why does it always seem to be at the end of the queue? In public, European officials referred to Turkey’s low level of economic development and its less than Scandinavian respect for human rights. In private, both Europeans and Turks agreed that the real reasons were the intense opposition of the Greeks and, more importantly, the fact that Turkey is a Muslim country. European countries did not want to face the possibility of opening their borders to immigration from a country of 60 million Muslims and much unemployment. Even more significantly, they felt that culturally the Turks did not belong in Europe. Turkey’s human rights record, as President Özal said in 1992, is a “made-up reason why Turkey should not join the EC. The real reason is that we are Muslim, and they are Christian,” but he added, “they don’t say that.” European officials, in turn, agreed that the Union is “a Christian club” and that “Turkey is too poor, too populous, too Muslim, too harsh, too culturally different, too everything.” The “private nightmare” of Europeans, one observer commented, is the historical memory of “Saracen raiders in Western Europe and the Turks at the gates of Vienna.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 396

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the immodesty-dress article’s theme of official justifications masking identity politics — same pattern of stated vs. real reasons.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: has this dynamic shifted since 1992, and does the ‘Christian club’ framing survive today’s EU enlargement debates?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 396