Gerard writes:

Yes, but Turkey has been bucking to be part of the EU for quite awhile.

So what?

Would you feel obligated to take up, say, Indonesia (to take a better example than Taiwan), where as someone said "their main sport is killing each other" as a state, just becaused they'd been "bucking for it" for a long time?!? A third-world country, with an utterly foreign culture, that would at a stroke become your second-largest State in terms of population, adding a fifth again to your pre-joining total?

I very much doubt it, and certainly can't see that we should have any such obligation.

Just because they've been a militarily useful lackey to the USA -- because that's what their having been "a staunch NATO member" really means, isn't it? -- doesn't in any way make them Europeans. With that argument, you could just as well argue that pre-Gulf-War Iraq, or Iran under the Shah, should be "Europeans". Or Chile under Pinochet.

They wanted to be in on the old Common Market. I don't see where Turkey being part of Asia (or Asia Minor) if you prefer makes any difference since the EU is mainly a trading group.

Your information seems to be terribly outdated: That's what "the old Common Market", as you so aptly describe it, was. The new European Union, though, is not just a new name for the same-old same-old -- it truly is a Union; something that is on its way to becoming a USE (United States of Europe).

And anyway (again), just because someone's wanted something for a long while is not a logical reason, per se, that they should have it. Heck, I've wanted a Mercedes for as long as I can remember, and nobody seems to feel obligated to give me one just because of that. (You volunteering? :-)

We had no trouble accepting Alaska and Hawaii, although some native Hawaiians are not pleased.

Whoo, and the parallels are soo convincing... Not! The one populated by Neolithic islanders, thoroughly colonialised by pineapple barons for a century or more, the other an Arctic wasteland barely populated at all, it's no wonder a humongous country like the USA could swallow them without more than a few burps.

Now move Indonesia next door and tell me you can do the same again.

Tell me that you wouldn't even *hesitate*.

Go on, tell me; I'm all ears.

Currently, the EU has restrictions on the internal finances of countries that wish to join. The old Eastern Block countries are changing their economies to be acceptable for EU admittance.

I think you're confusing EU admittance per se, with the criteria for joining the common European currency. (What more proof do you need that this is more like a new country than "a trading group", than the existence of that project?)

Turkey is currently doing the same thing. I do not know too much about what policies a country must have but I believe a lot revolves around transparency in banking and business transactions.

That's waaay secondary -- like, if Vietnam or Paraguay or Malawi fulfilled the requirements for, say, federal highway funding, and tried to argue that therefore they should be a State. Wouldn't you first wonder what the heck they were doing in your Union in the first place? (Sheesh, you haven't even given Tijuana or Haiti statehood yet, have you? Or even Puerto Rico?!? So why the heck should we be forced to gobble up *Turkey*, of all thoroughly non-European places in the world???)

Likewise, it seems to me, it is generally felt in Europe that this new country we're trying to put together is best served, for the forseeable future, by "growing organically" from what has gone before: That the European Union be, at least at its inception, a Union of Europeans, however qualified in secondary respects various African and Asian countries may be. Personally, I find that blindingly obvious and fully agree.

And I must say I'm rather astonished that you Americans -- insular as you are, as a nation -- feel qualified to butt in and tell us whom *we* should include in *our* country. Did the Greeks, the Germans, or the Swedes tell *your* "Founding Fathers" which colonies should be included in this little break-out they were setting up? Did the Italians, the Danes, or the Portuguese?

Naah...? Well, I didn't really think so. (Sure, the British did, and perhaps the French -- but only because that was *their* colonies breaking out, so they wanted nothing of the kind to happen at all.) Try to extend us the same courtesy, please.