As a joke, he once called the Saudi Arabian soccer team “terrorists,” something Arab states found not so funny. And as a jab at an older politician he was replacing, he said “every man whose wife grows old has earned a younger woman,” something women found not so funny. And last month an audio tape surfaced that was not a jab and not a joke, but an admission of lies, lies, lies about the economy, something the people of Hungary found not funny at all. Hungary’s hip Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurscany has never been in hotter water, but he has [...]
ANKARA, Turkey — Not since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire — the seat of the 400-year old Turkish Muslim caliphate — have Europeans been so preoccupied with Turkey. As poor Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and Africa flood the gates of Europe in search of work, the prospect of Turkey’s accession into the EU has provoked the EU’s most heated existential crisis to date. Turkey, the gateway between Europe and the Middle East, began its Europeanizing mission well over half a century ago when it first applied to join what was then called the European Economic Community. Until [...]
EU Justice and Interior Ministers have just met in Tampere, Finland, to devise a common immigration and asylum policy by 2010. As contentious as the issue proved, it is ultimately no match for the other issue on the agenda, which set alarm bells ringing in a number of European capitals: changing the EU’s system of qualified majority voting (QMV) on criminal justice and home affairs matters. The changes proposed would mean ending national vetoes on highly sensitive issues — and thus a further significant loss of sovereign control to Brussels. Though the two-day conference broke up with little achieved, EU [...]
