2014! Maybe this is why the dhimmi Swede is impatient. But this story says that the accession talks will indeed begin October 3, as von Sydow wants. "EU sets Turkish entry timetable," from Reuters, with thanks to Anthony:
BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) -- The EU's executive Commission reaffirmed on Wednesday that it aims to bring Turkey into the 25-nation bloc, but not before 2014, in a negotiating mandate which it adopted ahead of starting accession talks with Ankara."The negotiations will be based on Turkey's own merits and the pace will depend on Turkey's progress in meeting the requirements for membership," the negotiating mandate said. "The shared objective of the negotiations is accession."
The document states that negotiations for Turkish European Union membership can only be concluded from 2014, after the bloc's next long-term budget which runs from 2007 to 2013.
Accession talks are scheduled to start on October 3, as agreed last December by EU leaders.
But before that, EU foreign ministers must approve the "negotiating framework" unanimously, which may give rise to more wrangling in a political climate increasingly skeptical of Turkish accession following the French and Dutch "No" votes to the EU constitution.
A Commission spokeswoman said the text, seen by Reuters ahead of the EU executive's weekly meeting, had been adopted with only minor changes in the wording.
That document is not worth the paper it is written on. A lot of things will happen between now and 2014, most of them to do with the growing Western awareness of the evils of Islam, and with the growing European dissatisfaction with our political leadership. And watch for the rise of an increasingly political and interventionist Catholic Church, as notified by the Catholic triumph in the Italian reproduction referendum last month and in the 1.5 Million march in Madrid against gay marriage. Messrs. Chirac and Schroeder, not to mention their dwarfish copy von Sydow, are men of the past. The future will be different.
as notified by the Catholic triumph in the Italian reproduction referendum last month
Ahem. I would not call it a triumph. It was an off election, and very few showed up at the polls.
The new pope, tho', is an ally against Eurabianization. Let us hope he picks his battles carefully.
Now, Loxias is trying to teach me about Italy. Get over yourself, will you? You are neither wise nor knowledgeable. Your remarks show your ignorance. In Italy, voting is regarded as a civic duty, and there is a bit of urban legend - incorrect, as it happens - that it is prescribed by law. Most elections have 80 to 90 percent attendances. NO election or referendum in the history of Italy ever had less than 50% attendance, except one in which one of the parties encouraged its supporters not to vote, and thus to void it. That was an exception; I know, because at the time I was a vote-counter and had ample opportunity to observe turn-up at eight separate referenda, bundled together. It was clear that this particular referendum was deliberately being left unvoted.
Now Cardinal Ruini and the whole national organization of the Church commit themselves to the "double no" - no vote and no support for the law. It is a high-risk strategy. Against them they have the whole apparatus of the Italian media, which are as naturally lefty as in the rest of the West. It is a head-on clash between the Church and the secular power apparatus, with even Mr.Fini, the leader of the former Fascist party, throwing his hat in the ring on the side of the "yes" vote. No politician of any importance has the nerve to take the Church's side; even the supposed Catholics like Prodi ask the public to vote, if only to vote "no". The Church is, if not alone - several public personalities with no political power have taken her side - at least against the whole secular political and media.
Comes the day, and nobody votes. 74.5% of the electorate sit on their hands; or, to put it as the journalist Sandro Magister did, for every person who voted, two went to Mass. There has never been a result like this in the whole of Italian history; no Italian election or referendum has ever recorded remotely so low a turn-out. The closest it ever gets is about 50%, and that is for local and European elections and boycotted referenda. If you have the nerve to say that there was anything normal about this result, you know nothing whatsoever about Italy. The secularists are all still running around holding their heads, in the certainty that the sky has just fallen. Loxias, at least keep your trap shut about things you know nothing of.
9 years might just be enough time to make people realise that Turkey should not join the EU.
If the worst case scenario happens and it does join, then the civil war will happen earlier than we thought it would.
I loved Europe when I went there in peace time; I have no qualms about fighting for her in war time.
Europe may be drifting toward cultural suicide, but we shouldn't allow it, if at all possible, because there's just too much of the fundamental materials of Western Civilization on the property to abandon to Muslim iconoclasts. Giotto, El Greco, Michelangelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Cezanne, DaVinci, Modigliani, Rodin, Dali, Gaudi and thousands of others.
However much the unappreciative locals want to overlook their treasures, we cannot.
For Theo Van Gogh's sake, if no other.
(Although there are also thousands of white crosses and stars of davids in European war cemetaries that would need guarding, as well, against the cemetary-desecrators of Islam.)
Yes, the Church asked everyone to sit on their hands. And the referendum was defeated. But I still would not call it a triumph, but grant you it was a kind of inverse triumph, a negative triumph.
I suspect the Chinese were on the Pope's side in this one: they see the profits from stem-cell research and just adore the West denying themselves all the patent-protected fallout from it.
Loxias: you try and convince one Italian not to vote, and you will find out exactly what it was that Cardinal Ruini and the Church he led achieved on that memorable day. And it is not a one-off: it represents a major change in the strategy of the Church, which Cardinals Ruini and Ratzinger have long meditated under the reign of John Paul II. Quite simply, the Church has completely abandoned the state-Church paradigm, and accepted the position of being just one constituency among many in the country. This is important because in trying to uphold the idea of the Church as an essential part of society, and therefore the inevitable religious referent of the State, the Church essentially tended to hand itself over to the State as a kind of Ministry of Religious Affairs. However, accepting its separation from the State means that the Church becomes by far the biggest pressure group in most countries. The power of this new position has just been seen in Italy, and I strongly suspect that the foolish Mr.Zapatero is going to find out about before he is much older. A Church moving like an independent body, without fear of offending the State, is a much more powerful object than a State Church, and even a stronger influence for a Christian society. The Church has just found, in Italy, that she is strong, and I believe that a new generation of bishops will have less and less fear of using that strength.