Germany's former foreign minister Joschka Fischer kicked off his lecture series at Princeton University with a warning that Europe was being shortsighted and even "blind" when it came to Turkey and the Middle East. "Europe's security is no longer defined on its eastern borders, but in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East," Fischer was quoted as saying in the Daily Princetonian, the university's online newspaper.
Fischer is lecturing at the university for the current school year.
Fischer, a member of the Green Party who served under Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder from 1999 to 2005, called European hesitance to admit Turkey into the European Union "blind and irresponsible."
"Turkey should be a security pillar for the European community, and the efforts to derail that relationship are impossibly shortsighted," Fischer was quoted as saying. Fischer said the terrorist bombings in London and Madrid showed that the Middle East "is truly our backyard, and we in the EU must cease our shortsightedness and recognize that." Germany did not back the US in its invasion of Iraq. Fischer said he doubted the American public "really knew that going into Baghdad means taking over the whole burden of the Middle East, and also we felt that with a Shia majority, how could you bring democracy to Iraq without playing into the cards of Iran?"
He said the challenge of Islamic terror must be answered with intelligence, police, and military assets - but also "by answering the intellectual poverty that has prevented modernization in the Islamic nations from bringing peace." |