Berlusconi’s Arab Dancer

„The European Union must rethink its relations with the Muslim world at its doorstep, beginning with accepting Turkey, whose membership would help usher the Continent from the small-mindedness Pamuk describes. I’m not sure booming Turkey’s still interested; keep someone at the door long enough and that person will turn away. But a Union with Turkey in it would not have responded to the Arab awakening with such tiptoeing awkwardness.

A new European pact with democratizing Arab neighbors is also urgently needed. Cancel the funds for nice environmental projects and those Barcelona bureaucrats’ salaries. Put European money behind forming decent democratic societies across the water. This will be a generational project, but it’s the only way to stop the desperate human tide into southern Spain and Italy.

The first major international challenge for post-Lisbon Europe has revealed that the 2009 treaty did nothing to change the lowest-common-denominator approach that makes the E.U. such a foreign-policy pygmy. I guess that must be the way middling-power European nation states want it. One shout-out is called for: to Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen for being first to say: »Mubarak is history. Mubarak must step down.« Contrast those declarative sentences with Brussels mumbo-jumbo. Danes, as World War II showed, sometimes stand apart from the crowd and do right.”