Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Contrasts
Perhaps the most obvious contrasts between the four candidates are cultural. Turkey, as a predomi-
nantly (Sunni) Islamic country, with relatively high birth rates, a rapidly growing population and a
consequently relative young demographic structure, contrasts markedly with most other European
countries. Yet, with a classical heritage reflected in numerous archaeological sites, it shares a
great deal with much of Europe. The Turkish language is related only to Hungarian, Finnish and
Estonian in Europe, and is not part of the Indo-European linguistic group. The dominant religion of
both Romania and Bulgaria is Eastern Orthodoxy, the churches and monasteries of both countries
representing an important cultural legacy; but whereas Bulgarian is a Slavic language using the
Cyrillic alphabet, Romanian is essentially a Latin-based romance tongue using the Roman alpha-
bet. Croatia is mostly Roman Catholic, particularly since the migrations and other consequences of
conflict in the 1990s saw many Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Bosnians no longer living within the
country.
Recent political and military histories certainly represent a contrasting legacy. Turkey was a
stalwart member of NATO throughout the Cold War and an important base for eavesdropping
across the Soviet bloc. Bulgaria and Romania, as members of that bloc, belonged both to its eco-
nomic grouping CMEA (COMECON: viewed somewhat optimistically by some in its time as
the Communist equivalent of the EEC), and its military umbrella, the Warsaw Pact, and were
thereby part of 'the enemy'. Croatia, meanwhile, was the second most important component of the
Yugoslav Socialist Federation, a country whose leader, Josip Broz Tito (along with India), tried to
steer the non-aligned movement as a third way between the capitalist and communist worlds.
Romania had been put together as a sovereign state with the loss of Wallachia and Moldavia
by the Ottomans in 1859, and then in the aftermath of World War I, following the collapse and dis-
memberment of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with the addition of Transylvania. Bulgaria gained
independence from the Turks in 1878 following intervention from Russia. Croatia, like
Transylvania, had also been a Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary, and became a major compo-
nent of the post-First World War Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the forerunner of Yugo-
slavia. Although south Slavs, and thus regarded as an inferior race by the Nazis, Croatians gained a
degree of independence during World War II following German occupation. The Turkish Ottoman
empire, just as Austria-Hungary, was largely dismembered as an outcome of World War I. What
had been an enormous multi-ethnic Islamicized empire, the western arm of which had stretched
across south-eastern and central Europe, was reduced, in Europe, to a small territory barely
representing the western hinterland of Istanbul.
Tourism Significance
The accession of these four candidates would mean that the EU would embrace the whole of the
north Mediterranean coast except for the relatively short strip between Dubrovnik and Greece,
through Montenegro and Albania. Further, the western and southern shores of the Black Sea would
also be within 'Europe'. This has at least two implications:
virtually all of the summer sun mass tourism locations in Europe and Asia Minor would be
subject to EU directives and laws relating to tourism, environmental and employment issues;
and
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it would act as an incentive for at least some of the other Black Sea and Mediterranean coastal
states, both north and south, to forge closer relations with the EU.
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Further, Turkey's accession to the EU could help to draw closer both fellow Islamic and Turkic
states of Western and Central Asia, whose cultural and natural resources appear to have been little
developed for tourism purposes. None the less, as Chapter 21 indicates, at the time of writing there
