Turkish taxi drivers, Europe and France

I spent quite some time inside taxis in Istanbul last week and I had the occasion to talk with their drivers as the trafic is pretty bad there. We generally talked to each other in english, and as soon as they knew I was french the conversation about Europe immediately started.

As you know they want to apply to enter Europe and the main country unhappy about it seems to be France. So knowing that they explained all the good reasons why they thought we should be open to them, they didn't have to convince me as I already was, but the argumentation was interresting. They were as well thinking that next month's vote in France is about their entrance in Europe. You'll tell me that many french also think so, but I educated them explaining it was about the constitution and that we might actually be stupid enough to say NO.

Here are their arguments:

• we're muslim yes, but we're not arabs, we are very close to the european culture and we have a laic state for a while, we deserve to be in europe.
  
• we are working hard to improve our economy and human rights daily, you accept countries that don't do any effort.
• we have a very healthy economy and our growth rate is very fast, the turkish market is going to be one of the biggest in the area very soon.
  
• you are ready to accept Romania and Bulgaria that are much more poor than us, they don't do nearly as much effort as we do and because they're christians you're going to say yes to them.
• how can France pretend to be a laic country and say no to us just because we are muslims.

These were the core ones around which they were building a pretty solid argument, and from the things I have seen there in 4 days they are pretty right. Anyway it was interresting to see that the average Istanbul taxi driver was able to express that coherent ideas with so few english words, so much more than the average french (let's hope less than 50%) that doesn't understand what this is about even after being told in his own language.