serbianna
March 14, 2011 – 8:11 am
NOVI PAZAR, Serbia — The minarets and Turkish coffeehouses in this southern Serbian town are reminders of the Muslim empire that once shook Europe’s foundations by pushing armies all the way to the gates of Vienna.
Now Turkey — the modern state that replaced the Ottoman empire — is staging a comeback. Turkey’s fast-growing economic clout is allowing it into Europe through the back door, even as its dream of joining the continent through the path of EU membership founders.Turkey’s trade with the Balkan countries increased to $17.7 billion in 2008 from about $3 billion in 2000. Turkey’s companies have built the largest university campus in the Balkans, in a suburb of Sarajevo, Bosnia. And its banks provided 85 percent of loans for building a highway through Serbia for Turkish transit of goods to the EU.
NOVI PAZAR, Serbia — The minarets and Turkish coffeehouses in this southern Serbian town are reminders of the Muslim empire that once shook Europe’s foundations by pushing armies all the way to the gates of Vienna.
Now Turkey — the modern state that replaced the Ottoman empire — is staging a comeback. Turkey’s fast-growing economic clout is allowing it into Europe through the back door, even as its dream of joining the continent through the path of EU membership founders.Turkey’s trade with the Balkan countries increased to $17.7 billion in 2008 from about $3 billion in 2000. Turkey’s companies have built the largest university campus in the Balkans, in a suburb of Sarajevo, Bosnia. And its banks provided 85 percent of loans for building a highway through Serbia for Turkish transit of goods to the EU.
On a 2009 trip to Bosnia, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu explicitly linked his nation’s Balkan strategy to the Ottoman Empire, which ruled the region between the 14th and early 20th centuries.
read more: serbianna.com
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