“Is Turkey a part of Europe or the Middle East?” I asked my fellow passengers as we waited for the plane to Istanbul. Two of them, Turks who graduated from Germany with degrees in Engineering, suggested that Turkey is a part of the West because Turkey needs her wealthy European neighbors for economic exports. They seemed to share the same view of Chris Pattern, then the European Union Commissioner for External Relations, who advocated that Turkey can solve the population problems in Western Europe through mass immigration.
Our flight got new passengers after the stopover in Bangkok. Sitting next to me were two ladies wearing black hijab. One of them told me that she lived in Trabzon, a major city on Black Sea Coast. She was going to return home after finishing her studies as an exchange student in Malaysia. She expressed her disagreement over the proposal for Turkey to join European Union. She said, “ The West and Turkey have different civilizations. Most of our lands are in Asia. But the most important thing is that they are Christians, we are Muslims. There is no way for us to integrate.”
After thirteen hours of journey, the flight finally arrived at Ataturk International Airport, named after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the first President of the Turkish Republic after the first World War. The new terminal of the airport was gorgeous.
I booked a seat in a new inner-city coach, and, while waiting for its arrival, I raised these questions to myself:
“What kind of people I would meet?”
“What type of dress do most women wear?”
“Will the involvement of Ankara in Brussels be a sensitive topic for religious people? Is it possible to talk about the separation of mosque and state? Finally, will I be accused of insulting Turkishness if I talk about the Armenian massacre?”
On the road to the city center, I smelled dusty air as lots of old buildings in Baroque style were being torn down and replaced by new skyscrapers. In a city envisioning to be a global financial center, the skyscrapers are meant to attract foreign corporations to set up offices, even their Central Asia headquarters. If Istanbul was characteristically reflecting the development of the whole Turkey, it would be right to claim that the country was intending to open to the world through shifting to financial industry, recruiting talents from the West and encouraging its Diaspora to make investments in its motherland.
Yet, with a large population still living in countryside, will it become “the Turkish Shanghai” - where the rich and the expatriates from Western Europe create lively social lives and are willing to pay 100 U.S. dollars for tickets of violinist Itzhak Perlman while workers from Southern and Eastern Part of the country get low-paid jobs and are unable to meet ends meet? Time will tell. Read More
