It also explains the Bush administration's about-face in dealing with Turkish AK Party leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan: after being unceremoniously snubbed on his first visit to Washington last year, Erdogan was suddenly given the White House star treatment a few weeks ago, complete with a presidential press conference and exclusive meetings with top government brass, not to mention a pledge for billions more dollars in military and financial aid and U.S. backing for a new multibillion dollar International Monetary Fund bailout.
Ironically, this flurry of cash-for-cooperation activity from the States coincides with the European Union's historic first steps to invite Turkey into its fold. At a recent E.U. summit in Copenhagen, the fifteen E.U. countries agreed to open membership talks with Turkey in 2005, on the condition that it clean up its human rights and economic acts in the meantime. At that point, Turkey would have to begin the mammoth task of adopting roughly 80,000 pages of E.U. law, a process that could take at least a decade and transform every aspect of Turkish society in its wake.
Ironically, this flurry of cash-for-cooperation activity from the States coincides with the European Union's historic first steps to invite Turkey into its fold. At a recent E.U. summit in Copenhagen, the fifteen E.U. countries agreed to open membership talks with Turkey in 2005, on the condition that it clean up its human rights and economic acts in the meantime. At that point, Turkey would have to begin the mammoth task of adopting roughly 80,000 pages of E.U. law, a process that could take at least a decade and transform every aspect of Turkish society in its wake.