PERSPECTIVES ON THE BOMBINGS IN TURKEY

The Hindustan Times tries to answer why al Qaeda - types have attacked Turkey recently, here. Among the reasons noted in the article:

• Punishing Turkey for its relationship with the US, which has been improving. The Turks agreed to send troops to Iraq, though because of sensitivities over Kurds in northern Iraq, the troops probably won't be sent.

• Hurting Turkey's economy, which relies on tourism and is emerging from a four-year recession.

• Marring Turkey's efforts to become closer to Europe. European soccer officials postponed two international matches scheduled for next week in Turkey.

• Punishing Turkey for its close ties with Israel. The two have a defence pact, and Turkey has worked to encourage Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.

One should also note that Turkey is up for membership in the EU, and that the bombings there have reinvigorated the debate over whether or not Turkey's membership would somehow "import" terrorism to European soil. Read this article in the Tagesspiegel, which notes that German CDU leaders have voiced their worries about such a possibility. The Tagesspiegel quotes CSU (Bavaria's CDU) politician Ingo Friedrich as claiming that islamists could see Turkish membership in the EU as a "forceful" european appropriation of a "core country in the Islamic world" and that this could lead to increased terrorist violence. The governing SPD in Germany has accused the opposition of instrumentalizing the issue for electoral purposes, but it should also be said that the CDU is not uniformly against Turkish EU membership; as the Tagesspiegel notes, some CDU leaders have even called for more support of the move. See also the Financial Times Deutschland on the political line-up in Germany on this issue, as well as this article in Reuters Deutschland.

This article in Le Figaro has some additional information on the perpetrators of the attacks last week, and this article has a nice round up of the mixed EU-membership related reactions to the bombings. And this article in La Libre Belgique issues a call for creative long-term strategies to deal with the challenges that al Qaeda poses for europeans.

The title of the Libre Belgique article, "The Bosphorous -- that's Europe," indicates the author's perspective, and it's a good one: Europe can't avoid the issue of terrorism because it's already arrived in Europe, just in case anyone is foolish enough to hope or believe otherwise. Thus, German opponents to Turkish membership in the EU are probably engaging in wishful thinking -- if we keep our heads down, ditch the effort to make Turkey part of Europe, pull up the drawbridge, then we can sail along in fortress Europe and avoid ticking off al Qaeda types too much.

For some blog commentary, see Dan Drezner, Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber, and Jim Joyner. Dan and Jim take the bombings as signs that al Qaeda is "falling apart," although for me that seems a little bit too much like the "more enemy attacks means more success on our part" reasoning that seems odd when President Bush says it. One of the french articles I saw noted that some in Turkey are speaking of a Turkish September 11th. I would hazard a guess that a series of violent attacks in Istanbul hardly heralds the end of al Qaeda. Recall that half of Istanbul is geographically part of Europe, and that the Bosphorous is a critical trade route for the Balkans and beyond.