If the high school students of Turkey's Hasan-Ali Yucel high school is only a tiny sampling of opinion throughout the overall population of Turkey, then the folks aren't happy about giving up the sovereignty of Turkey or the nationalistic pride that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his fellow young Turks established during the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923 to join the EU. To understand the devotion to Turkey's founding father Ataturk all you've go to do is read what the Financial Times noted a young student saying after he heard that a British MEP said the folks of Turkey should drop its "cult of Ataturk" before joining the EU:
"If they have opinions like this, then Turkey should not join the European Union," says Alp, a 16-year-old who, like nearly every pupil at the school, has ambitions to be a teacher.You really have to be proud of a people who are unwilling to cede their history and culture to please sombureaucratsts in Brussels. Come to think of it, Ataturk probably did more by to help Turkey move out of the backwardness of the former Ottoman Empire and into one of the biggest success stories in the Middle East aside from Israel. I think that maybe the leaders in Turkey need to think a little more about casting aside their history and society just to join the EU. They could create more problems than good on taking such steps.
Kemalism, the ideology of nationalism and self-reliance developed with the founding of the republic in 1923, "is the path Atatürk drew and we need to follow his path because people who follow his principles are successful people", Alp says.
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