| November 6, 2002 | Wednesday | Sha’aban 30,1423 |
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Lessons of Bali
Birth of a daughter
Trade in Americas
EU’s eastward expansion
THE recent massacre of hundreds of western tourists in Indonesia’s Bali island has served to remind the world that developing countries are becoming increasingly off-limits to citizens of the affluent West. In particular, the atrocity in Bali shocked Australians to the core. Reportedly two-thirds of the murdered belonged to Australia. Since it is not everyday that their fellow citizens become victims of such carnage, common Australians have quite naturally been asking what they did to deserve this.
The EU annual report on enlargement, the recently held poll in Ireland and the EU member states’ willingness to extend all sorts of help to the new entrants have not only strengthened the process of European Union enlargement but have also augmented the efforts of the Commission in this respect.
LEONID Brezhnev (remember him?) died and went to hell. He was welcomed at the gates by Lieutenant-General Lucifer Satanovich Iblisov, who offered him a guided tour of the facilities, in order to enable him to choose his own punishment.
He saw Chengiz Khan being trampled by horses and averted his gaze. He saw Adolf Hitler thrashing about in a pool of boiling oil and turned away in horror. Then he caught sight of Josef Stalin on a king-size bed, having what could euphemistically be described as a good time with Marilyn Monroe.
“That’s the one!” he shouted at Iblisov. “That’s the punishment I want.” “It’s your wish,” replied Lucifer. “I hope you realize, though, that it’s Marilyn who is paying for her sins.”
Among the questions raised by the British writer Martin Amis’s recent book, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, is why the horrors of Bolshevism are frequently laughed off, while no such reaction is possible to the horrors of Nazism.
Amis’s relatively light-weight contribution to an old debate about western intellectuals’ intermittent love affair with the Soviet Union has excited a minor controversy in Anglo-Saxon literary circles, and the 85th anniversary tomorrow of the Bolshevik Revolution offers an appropriate opportunity to contemplate, and perhaps challenge, some of his allegations, insinuations and conclusions.
Most historians are disinclined to take Amis’s book-length diatribe too seriously, not least because it’s over-personalized. The author’s father, Kingsley Amis, was a member of the British Communist Party for 15 years before swinging sharply, and irrevocably, to the right. An early colleague who became one of Martin’s best friends was Christopher Hitchens, who saw himself as a Trotskyist in the late 1960s.
Amis can’t understand how his father worshipped at the altar of communism for so long before seeing the light, so to speak. Nor is he able to reconcile himself to the fact that Hitchens, although an anti-Stalinist, remains more or less unrepentant about his admiration for Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin. “These two men did not just precede Stalin,” he writes in an open letter to his friend. “They created a fully functioning police state for his later use. And they showed him a remarkable thing: that it was possible to run a country with a formula of dead freedom, lies and violence — and unpunctuated self-righteousness.
“An admiration for Lenin and Trotsky is meaningless without an admiration for terror.”
It is not particularly surprising that Amis regurgitates this rather stale argument, given that his knowledge of Russian and Soviet history appears to be based largely on the works of cold war historian, Robert Conquest, who approaches the discipline via an entrenched ideological bias.
This is not to suggest that the crimes against humanity committed during, as well as before and after, Stalin’s reign can be overlooked or excused. But a historical perspective necessitates the recognition that every significant revolution before then — the English, the American, the French — had been attended by varying degrees of violence. The incipient Bolshevik regime had to fight for its survival, and a great deal of cruelty was exhibited by all sides in the civil war that followed the revolution.
It’s worth noting, though, that the initial backdrop to events in Russia was provided by a campaign of mass slaughter through much of Europe, otherwise known as the First World War. Besides, the Bolsheviks had seized control in Petrograd not with the idea of establishing a vast fiefdom for personal gain: their intention, broadly, was to transform society through a complete overhaul of the relations of production and the sources of power. It was this social and economic emancipatory project, rather than Stalin’s gulags, that attracted millions of adherents to communism.
Many leading Bolsheviks, including Lenin and Trotsky, were convinced that the experiment could only succeed if the revolution was able to spread westwards. But it didn’t. It is intriguing to imagine the course of events in Europe had Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s succeeded in establishing a German beach-head in 1919. But perhaps — as Hitchens has pointed out in a response to Amis — the German communists weren’t ruthless enough.
Virtually no historian would argue with the proposition that the October Revolution could not have triumphed without a degree of ruthlessness. In retrospect, there appears to have been insufficient justification for the revolutionary terror. But a different verdict is at least conceivable, had the Soviet Union indeed turned out to be a workers’ state in any meaningful sense of the term. Amis’s indictment of Lenin hinges on the latter’s alleged amorality. But, surely, it does not make a great deal of sense to judge on the basis of western bourgeois morality someone who was determined to decisively break with that particular systems of assumptions and beliefs.
The Soviet Union was in several ways a flawed experiment from the outset, which is hardly surprising, given that it wasn’t based on any existing exemplar. It has been argued, with some validity, that the level of Russia’s economic and political development in 1917 fell far short of the conditions theoretically required for a relatively smooth transition to socialism.
It nonetheless needs to be clearly understood that the USSR did not acquire the trappings of a grotesque tragedy until Stalin started gravitating towards an absolutism that owed less to the Leninist precept of democratic centralism within a revolutionary vanguard than it did to the feudal tyranny of Russia’s tsarist past.
The problem for those who argue (often on the basis of little more than the ancient Latin fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc ) that Stalin’s reliance on purges and forced labour camps to maintain his rule was the logical next step for Bolshevism is that his techniques proved fatal for many communist ideals.
This wasn’t a coincidence. Within a little more than two decades of the revolution, Stalin was the only surviving member of Lenin’s original Central Committee. Most of the others had perished at his behest. The labour camps too were populated to a large extent by dedicated communists. The Red Army initially floundered in the face of Hitler’s invasion in 1941, at least partly because its leading tacticians and strategicians had become victims of Stalin’s paranoia. Trotsky hit the nail on the head when he described Koba (as the thickly moustachioed monster was nicknamed) as the gravedigger of the revolution. Not long afterwards, a hired killer pierced Trotsky’s skull with a pickaxe.
So those determined to establish some sort of moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin ought not to lose sight of this crucial detail: Hitler’s actions were geared towards advancing the perverse Nazi cause; Stalin’s doings served to thwart socialist goals. The Soviet Union was never able to fully recover from his legacy.
The fact that millions of people all over the world did not become disenchanted with the USSR during the dark days of Stalinism (the first notable exodus from communist parties in the West occurred following the 1956 invasion of Hungary, three years after Stalin had died) can be put down to two main causes. Many of them simply did not believe what they heard from western sources for the reasonably valid reason that it was difficult to distinguish between facts and propaganda. Others, who knew or accepted that evil was afoot, were nonetheless unwilling to abandon all hope. For them, the concept of a society free from exploitation and discrimination was too precious to be sacrificed on the basis of distortions of the ideal.
In retrospect, the Soviet Union can in some ways be seen as an object lesson in how not to go about the task of building a socialist society. However, that aspect of the past does not interest the likes of Amis and Conquest. After all, their not-so-hidden agenda, as Seumas Milne has pointed out in The Guardian, is to promote the end-of-history thesis: the idea that human civilization has reached its apex with free-market capitalism and economic imperialism. What an awful thought!
“The battle over history,” writes Milne, “is never really about the past — it’s about the future. When Amis accuses the Bolsheviks of waging ‘war against human nature’, he is making the classic conservative objection to radical social change.”
Amis is also wrong, incidentally, about the use of laughter as a tool for survival in the face of formidable odds. If there are more quips about Stalin than about Hitler, that has something to do with differences between the German sense of humour and those of the Russians. But Nazism has hardly been spared the barbs of humourists — a tradition bookended, arguably, by Charles Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator’ and Roberto Benigni’s ‘A Beautiful Life.’ (The joke cited at the outset, incidentally, is borrowed not from Amis but from Brezhnevite Moscow.)
A considerably more sensitive summation of communist tribulations than Amis’s diatribe can be found, as the following verses bear out, in British singer-songwriter Leon Rosselson’s Song of the Old Communist:
“I was only a lad when we read that in Russia/The workers, the soviets had taken all power/And the man they called Lenin, who led them, was our inspiration,/ His triumph was our finest hour./ And I’ll always remember how fear shook the wealthy/Like thieves who have just been caught out in their crime/But we who had known only war and the workhouse/Rejoiced that a new world was born at that time...
“Now when I look back, I see what we fought against:/ Homelessness, hunger, injustice and war./But what did we fight for? What dream did we strive for?/I used to know once, now I’m no longer sure...
“But you who have nothing at all to believe in/You whose motto is ‘money comes first’/Who are you to tell us that our lives have been wasted/And all that we fought for has turned into dust?”
E-mail: mahirali@journalist.com
The question goes to the roots of a commonly held view in Australia in which they imagine themselves to be a nation of laid-back sunbathers who “live and let live”. They see themselves to be the one developed nation that has not colonized any other country in the world and thus should be immune from the current backlash against certain American policies and actions in utter disregard of international law and morality.
Australians have two courses of action open to them in this moment of grief. They can either take the view that the American government did in the aftermath of September 11, and understand this event as an attack on their ‘freedom’ and their ‘way of life’ and avenge this loss by killing an equal or greater number of people somewhere else in the world. Or, they can use this moment to reflect on the role that their country plays in the world today, and thus come to some understanding of how and why a part of the world fails to appreciate their democratic values and love of freedom.
If they take the latter route, we might be delivered from the cruel calculus of human lives that we are currently witnessing and enter a better, fairer world in which Australians can rightly take credit for playing their part. Such a step will not be ‘giving in’ to ‘terrorism’ but rather a step towards a world where terrorists will fail to elicit sympathy from the world and thus be finally vanquished.
Unless Australians start reflecting on why there exists such a wide gulf between their conception of themselves and how a large part of the developing world sees them, little will change. The Australian worldview is shaped by the largely fictional history that they are taught. An increasing number of historians and social theorists have written about the extent of ignorance or collective amnesia surrounding the colonizing of Australia itself which, contrary to what children in Australia were taught until recently, was not an empty continent waiting for the white people to arrive. It was inhabited by a race of people that were brutally exterminated by the British colonizers.
More importantly, this is not something that has ended. Aborigines in Australia continue to be treated with the worst kind of segregation, perhaps unrivalled even by the rigid caste system of parts of India. Aborigines continue to live in gated compounds that even today may lack the basics of health and sanitation facilities. They continue to be denied access to education and jobs unless they can excel in sports or their ‘traditional’ crafts in which case they are upheld as models of Australian pluralism.
More pertinent still to the bombing in Indonesia, is the role of Australia in the politics of South-East Asia. Australia has for long played the role of America’s proconsul in this region and has provided extensive support to furthering American interests in the area. This support has ranged from bases for nuclear weapons that the Australian government hid even from its own citizens, to sending Australian men to die in wars in Malaya, Korea and Vietnam. Australians even today, can be found to refer to their closest neighbours as the Far East, which depicts a certain mind-set that views the world from the perspective of the West.
An independent non-aligned Indonesia was not in US interests and thus the CIA engineered a coup to overthrow President Sukarno. This, contrary to the media portrayals of the time, was not a peaceful, bloodless coup but in fact entailed the massacre of approximately 500,000 to one million communists and Sukarno supporters and sympathizers. The immediate recognition that the Australian government extended to the Suharto government at the behest of the US was a negation of the will of the people of Indonesia and helped legitimize the CIA-backed regime. The Australian government’s continued support for suppression and invasion of East Timor in 1975 helped further the interests of a brutal and repressive regime.
This attack on East Timor was no better or worse than Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, yet Kuwait merited the unleashing of western fury in which Australia participated fully. Bob Hawke, the then Australian prime minister, explaining why the Australian government was sending warships to the Gulf during the Iraqi attack on Kuwait said, “Big countries cannot invade small countries and get away with it.”
The most important fact that we must realize is that it was during the Suharto regime that the seeds of the current militant Islam in Indonesia were sown directly and indirectly. As in the case of Afghanistan, CIA money provided support to religious groups to root out communism, the “enemy of religion”. In addition, the policies followed under the leadership of Suharto have largely negated the gains made in Indonesia in the 1960s and led to an acute form of political and economic polarization in the country. The increased number of havenots are looking to religion for salvation. Indonesia is, as Ross Gittins put it in a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald, “an arc of instability” not least because of the Asian crisis of 1998 helped on by the IMF and World Bank.
The Indonesians have emerged from the crisis with an economy laid waste, a mountainous foreign debt and a fragile and fumbling democracy. As he claims, “their economy was just starting to get moving again when the bombers blew a hole in the prospects for tourism and foreign investment”.
This is not to argue that the Australians who died in Bali somehow deserved that fate. Far from it. They were, as others have been, innocent victims of a game they did not even realize they were part of. The tragedy for their friends and family is indeed immense. However, the only constructive way of moving forward for all of us who are increasingly enmeshed in this web of terror is to understand its roots. It is for us as citizens to understand the roles our governments play at home and abroad and to try to build a more humane alternative.
There has to be an alternative other than joining either the war on terror led by Bush or the war of terror led by Osama bin Laden. For Australia in particular, it is as Ross Gittins argued, another reason for Australia to stop thinking of itself as part of Europe and start thinking of itself as part of Asia, and to engage more closely and humanely with Indonesia rather than less.
A housewife in Islamabad has given birth to sextuplets of which four are girls. Four daughters at once. The father told pressmen it didn’t matter and he was happy. Was that really true? He must be an extraordinary man, with an attitude to daughters that is so rare in Pakistan.
Looking at the age and innocence of the little ones marching on Children’s Day some time ago, what moved me was the sight of small girls walking blithely towards a future that is anything but bright for daughters. And the horrendous reports of the exploitation of minor girls in the so-called enlightened world outside overshadows the little that we come to know of their fate in this country.
Some time ago there was a report about a village in China where only girls have been born for the last fifteen years. On the other hand, a news item from India tells the terrible story of a small town in Rajasthan where the only two minor girls alive are eight and 12 years of age. During the last 80 years no man has come to the town to find a bride, for the simple reason that the inhabitants somehow contrive to do away with infant daughters. They think girls are a burden and better dead than alive.
I don’t know how the Chinese treat their daughters, but I expect that fathers and mothers in that Rajasthan town could be loving parents. Maybe the belief that grown-up girls are a millstone around the neck has made them take to infanticide. For the poor in India the real millstone is the burden of the dowry, for otherwise there is no divine gift sweeter or more beautiful than a little daughter.
Fortunately, in Pakistan there is no place as evil and cruel as that small town in Rajasthan. But that does not mean that we look forward to the birth of daughters. In certain areas of Punjab that I know of, Sargodha and Mianwali for instance, mourning is observed when a woman is delivered of a baby girl as her first act of motherhood. Can you imagine anything more primitive?
A friend once told us how she had gone with the usual box of sweets to felicitate a feudal family of western Punjab, who were related to her by marriage, where the first-born was a girl. She was properly snubbed, while the reaction of the grandmother, who all but threw the sweets in her face, was, “Have you come to make fun of our misfortune?”
This may have been an extreme case but it is symptomatic of the general attitude of our people towards the birth of a daughter who is only welcome if she is preceded by a boy. She can then be tolerated as a plaything. Later, as she grows up, extra care and attention are showered on her, but only to ensure that she does not enjoy freedom of any kind. The feeling is ingrained in her that she is nothing more than a nuisance until a husband is found to take her away.
When we congratulate a man on the marriage of his daughter the stress is not on the felicity of the occasion but on the fact that he has been rid of a heavy responsibility. Ad with all our education and enlightenment you can see how both are embarrassed when someone is groping for suitable words to express good wishes on the birth of someone else’s daughter. How often have I not heard the words, “Don’t worry, the first-born daughter is almost like a son.”
There is common talk of the need for women to use their brains in the service of the country. But are we sure that women in Pakistan have been prepared and trained, when they are small girls, to play the role ascribed to them by the social idealist? In the first place the birth of a girl child is taken to be an act of God to be borne with fortitude. Then she is second best to start with as compared to her brothers. The best food in the house is not for her. She has less time to play, for she must supplement her mother’s efforts in the household. She is less educated than the boys in the family. And finally, she gets married earlier, because, as long as she remains single, her parents are dying of suspense.
Naturally I am talking about average middle class urban people. In the cities the young girl is expected to remain indoors most of the time. She must learn to be poised, delicate and soft-spoken so that she is liked for her meekness by her prospective in-laws. In fact everything is done to make sure that she does not do any serious thinking, is frivolous and coquettish, and without any will or opinion of her own. The only way for her to rise in the world is through marriage.
How can we expect a girl brought up like this to take competent charge of her future family? How can she be an understanding companion to her husband and an inspired educator of her children? How can she be guide, friend and philosopher to both, and live up to the platitude ascribed to her by society which believes that although she received no training she is born with the inherent capability to train her sons ad daughters to be good and useful citizens?
Not only is the woman in Pakistan considered physically frail, which she probably is, but she is also thought to be morally weak, which is an evil accusation. She is believed to be incapable of looking after herself, and most men are prone to think that, without their support and influence, she would soon go the wrong way. They conveniently forget that it is men themselves who make a woman leave the path of virtue and modesty.
These misconceptions are widespread, so much so that women themselves come to believe in them. Poor things! They are like victims of hypnosis. It suits man that women should do her bidding. Under his hypnotic influence she moves in a trance, doing what he wants her to do, and believing it to be best for her. Whereas she can be morally, socially, spiritually and intellectually as constructive and creative and useful as man. She may not make a good wrestler or weight-lifter, but she can certainly carry the burden of life competently.
I suppose conditions in that small town of Rajasthan are beyond repair, but we can certainly remould our attitudes and give baby girls the welcome they received 1400 years ago from the holy Prophet. God bless his soul!
EVER since Ronald Reagan invoked the idea of a Free Trade Area of the Americas, the notion has appealed to trophy-hunting presidents. A hemispheric trade partnership, uniting the 800 million people between Alaska and Tierra del Fuego, would help spread prosperity southward, bolstering democracy much as the North American Free Trade Agreement has done in Mexico.
President Bush and his trade representative, Robert Zoellick, deserve credit for pushing this vision forward. Now, ministers from 34 nations of the Americas have gathered for a trade summit in Quito, Ecuador. The intention is to conclude negotiations for a free-trade area by January 2005. But this ambitious target is not remotely plausible unless two of the region’s biggest players — the United States and Brazil — make up their minds that they really want to meet it.
Ambivalence is most obvious in Brazil, whose newly elected president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, once denounced the free-trade area as a U.S. plot to annex his country. There are signs that da Silva has moderated his stance; he is sending a respected representative to the Quito summit. But even if the president-elect essentially reverts to the trade policies of his centrist predecessor, Brazil’s intentions will remain unclear.
With 170 million people and an economy a shade smaller than Canada’s, Brazil has always been tempted by the idea of self-sufficiency rather than producing for export. Though it opened its economy in the 1990s, Brazil remains captive to protectionist lobbies; da Silva’s election merely confirms the lure of autarkic ideas in Brazilian society. Sometimes in the past year, Brazil’s reaction to U.S. trade proposals has been to doubt their sincerity rather than to embrace them and so find out whether they are genuine.
A similar ambivalence exists on the U.S. side, though it is better hidden. Despite the Bush administration’s professed enthusiasm for a free-trading hemisphere, questions exist about its willingness to deliver on the substance. To break through Brazilian misgivings, the United States needs to make concessions on products that Brazil wants to export, and these products happen to be guarded in the United States by ferocious lobbyists.
Brazil exports steel, but the United States has blocked part of Brazil’s exports with anti-dumping measures. Brazil produces orange juice, but the United States hits citrus imports with a mixture of tariffs and a special discriminatory tax on foreigners.
Brazil is a big grower of sugar, but the United States imposed prohibitive tariffs on foreign sugar 20 years ago, causing Brazilian shipments to fall 87 percent almost immediately. Unfortunately, the citrus and sugar lobbies are strong in Florida, a key battleground state in presidential contests and one governed by the president’s brother. Steel is important in swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
It is hard to challenge these lobbies, but Bush has to accept the fact that this is a test of his free-trade credentials. The United States gains nothing from lobby-coddling; the sugar tariffs alone cost U.S. consumers around $2 billion annually. Moreover, U.S. protectionism gives Brazilian protectionists the excuse they need not to engage in serious negotiations for a free-trade area; they can paint the Bush administration’s liberalizing talk as hypocritical and empty. For these reasons, the White House should authorize Zoellick to offer big concessions on sugar, citrus and steel _ and be prepared to make good on them.
—The Washington Post
Last year, the Irish people had unanimously rejected the EU’s enlargement, which had dealt a big blow to the process. In the recent referendum 63 per cent votes were polled in favour of the enlargement, which has given a tremendous amount of relief to the EU mandarins. Such polls in all the EU member states are a sine qua non for the enlargement of the bloc.
The Union endorsed the findings and recommendations of the Commission that Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia fulfil the political and economic criteria and assume the obligations of membership from the beginning of 2004.
Poland is the largest of the 10 countries ready for entry into the EU in 2004 with a population of 39 million. Completing difficult entry talks on critical budgetary and farm aid chapters by December poses one of the greatest challenges in the membership sprint. Also getting what most Poles see as a fair deal on farm and budgetary aid is essential to bolstering support for a yes vote in Poland’s own referendum scheduled for May 2003.
Poland’s chances of joining the European Union are prominent since it has solid support from the United States. Two reasons can be put forth for the US support (1) about six million Poles are living in the United States (2) Poland is strategically important for the Americans. Then, of course the Poles have done a lot to improve their lot. The reforms introduced in the farming sector have yielded positive results and have had a healthy impact on the overall economic condition of the country.
In view of the above, and also taking into consideration the overall progress achieved in the accession negotiations and the commitments undertaken in the negotiations by the candidates, the Union has confirmed its determination to conclude accession negotiations with these countries at the European Council in Copenhagen on December 12-13 and signing the Accession Treaty in Athens in April 2003. The Union has reiterated its preference for a reunited Cyprus to join the European Union on the basis of a comprehensive settlement and has urged the leaders of the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities to seize the opportunity and reach an agreement before the end of the accession negotiations this year.
The Union vowed to continue to fully support the substantial efforts of the secretary-general of the United Nations for reaching a settlement, consistent with the relevant UN Security Council resolutions. The European Union is ready to accommodate the terms of such a comprehensive settlement in the Treaty of Accession in line with the principles on which the European Union is founded. In the absence of a settlement, the decisions to be taken in December by the Copenhagen European Council will be based on the conclusions set out by the Helsinki European Council in 1999. The Helsinki summit had clearly declared that the Greek Cyprus would be admitted to the EU even without the settlement of the issue.
The Union also agreed with the Commission’s evaluation of the progress achieved by Bulgaria and Romania. Besides being a member of the Council of Europe, Romania is also a member of NATO’s Partnership for Peace, associate member of European Union (EU) and a strategic partner of the United States. During the EU summit in Helsinki in December 1999, Romania was accepted for consideration as a candidate for European Union’s membership. Following that event, the December 2000 EU summit in Nice outlined the details for granting Romania accession to the EU.
The aspiring states, including Romania, are somewhat faced with a difficult target of reforming their economic and social structures, but the industrious Romanians are resolute to meet these challenges and proudly enter the EU.
Joining the European Union is the top priority of the Romanian government’s foreign policy. This is quite evident from the words of the Romanian Minister for Foreign Affairs, who had declared, “The integration of the country into political, economic and strategic Euro-Atlantic structures is the pivotal foreign policy objective of Romania.”
Bulgaria, on the other hand has to do a lot to match the EU membership criteria. Like other developing countries, most of the Eastern European countries are plagued with corruption syndrome. That starts right from top to bottom and this is the very factor the EU is perhaps more worried about. Corruption has a number of byproducts and in the longer run it manages to penetrate deep into all segments of society and thus becomes incurable. That exactly happened in the case of most of the Eastern European countries including former East Germany which still present a typical Eastern European country despite many years of unification.
Turkey has taken important steps towards meeting the Copenhagen political criteria and has moved forward on the economic criteria. This has brought forward the opening of accession negotiations with Turkey. The Union encouraged Turkey to pursue its reform process and to take further concrete steps in the direction of implementation, which will advance Turkey’s accession in accordance with the same principles and criteria as are applied to the other candidate countries.
Turkey, however, is faced with some critical problems that may pose serious challenges — capital punishment being at the top. As a matter of fact, from 1984 there hasn’t been any capital punishment rather the death sentences have been converted into life imprisonment. Turkish constitutional experts are actively considering ways and means to deal with this issue in future. There is a wide consensus among the Turkish people and the political parties to give priority to the membership of the European Union. In Turkey priority is being given to the areas which need immediate attention. But the core question is to what extent the EU is really interested in admitting Turkey into its fold?
For the moment, chances are remote and a number of justifications can be cited in this regard. Turkey happens to be the key ally of the US in the war against terror and therefore it wants its early entry into the EU fold. But, on the contrary the EU has unequivocally asserted that Turkey had still a lot to do in many spheres. Mr. Romano Prodi, the chief of European Commission said ahead of the EU summit in Brussels that Ankara was unlikely to get a starting date for European Union membership talks this year.
About 50 minutes’ distance from Helsinki, Finland, by shuttle and about one hour by ferry, Estonia happens to be economically a stable country among the Baltic States. Estonia has developed its economic and tourism infrastructure in a way that it has become a must-visit place. That is why, Estonia turns out to be the strong contender for EU membership. Since it’s a small island with only a few million’s population the European Union might not face any difficulties in further developing this state.
Hungary, as a matter of fact has achieved tremendous progress over the years. It may be declared the most developed nation among the Eastern European countries.
The EU annual report, though, has given green signal to 10 aspirants countries but they may all not be admitted in one go. The EU member countries have a split opinion on the subject. The recently held EU summit in Brussels has raised many objections to the entry of all these countries. The initial idea was to admit only four countries including Cyprus, Czeck Republic, Estonia and Hungary by 2004 but the recent report has okayed the entry of all ten countries.
Denmark as current EU president has been pressing hard for agreement on financial issues. “We are not leaving Brussels without a result, and I will let it take the time it needs. If not we will not be able to conclude the accession talks in December”, Danish Prime Minister Andres Fogh Rasmussen warned.
The process of EU enlargement, of course, is an arduous one. It is not as simple as it looks. However, going by the prevalent trends one can safely conclude that most of the EU member states and their inhabitants are in favour of EU expansion but in piecemeal.