By contrast, much of Europe today is a museum. Stuffy and conservative, it goes to bed early, demands its welfare-state comforts, whines at the smallest inconveniences, lets inertia determine its foreign policy. That's a fair objection, but disingenuous. The reasons for Turkey's exclusion aren't economic. I'm not a big EU fan, anyway, but membership would provide a huge psychological boost to Turkey, a country with an inferiority complex.
Turkey is on the brink of an economic explosion.
Setting it free is one of the worthiest projects I can think of.