Turkey and the E. U.

Michael J. Totten has a very interesting column up at Tech Central Station in which he discusses some of the considerations in admitting Turkey to the European Union. Here’s how he concludes his column:

If the fear of History, fear of the “other,” or some combination of both prevent Turkey from joining the union, the danger is that Turkey may drift, like a spurned would-be lover, away from the Europe it aspires to join. If it turns from the West, it can only turn back to the East. Turkey, then, is in play.

Europe is at a crossroads, too. It can wallow in stasis and passivity. Or it can the initiative and act.

Europe can still have a role, if not as a super-power then at least as a civilizing soft power. What better way to carry out that mission than to admit Turkey into the union, to “Europeanize” at least one part of the House of Islam, and to set up a permanent Western camp on the edge of the Middle East itself.

Annexation is risky. But there will be problems in the Turkey-Iraq-Syria border region whether Europe moves into the neighborhood or not. Europeans should act while they can instead of waiting to be acted upon. They can handle it, in theory. But not unless and until they burst their psychological bubble where they pretend History is over.

Michael lays out some of the diplomatic and security considerations in admitting Turkey to the E. U. pretty well. But I think there are a few very basic things that Michael isn’t taking into consideration. Turkey has a population of of roughly 62 million people. That would make Turkey the largest country in the E. U. other than Germany. The people there speak Turkish. And Turkish is not an Indo-European language. Here are the approximate populations of the countries currently in the E. U. which have a non-Indo-European official language:

Hungary	10,000,000
Finland	5,000,000
Estonia	1,500,000

For a speaker of a Romance language (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, etc.) to learn another Romance language takes some effort but it’s not that costly a matter. It’s similar for speakers of Germanic languages. And the Slavic languages are even closer, having differentiated only within the last 700 hundred years or so. Within each of these language families there are lots of cognate words, similar constructions, and similar sounds and concepts.

For a speaker of a Romance language to learn a Germanic language (or vice versa) is a bit more of a stretch. But there are still some cognates, particularly in words that both languages have borrowed from Latin or Greek.

Forget about that with a non-Indo-European language like Turkish. It’s not inflected like the Indo-European languages and the Semitic languages all are. It’s agglutinating. That means the language is built on an utterly different basis. And forget the handy Latin and Greek borrow words. The ones that are there are unrecognizeable.

So there are real and substantial costs in learning a non-Indo-European language.

Will either Europe or Turkey be willing to pay the costs?