To broker peace, Germany and France had come together in 1951 and founded the European Coal and Steel Community, which had six members, including Belgium.
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During the invasion of France in WWII, while she was alone with her three-year-old child in her house, the Gestapo knocked on the door of her house around 3 AM.
Marine Le Pen’s popularity in France, Brexit in the United Kingdom, the anti-migration policies of the Alternative für Deutschland can all be perceived as a new wave of mobilization of the silent majority.
Even though Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had implemented laws which were borrowed from France, Switzerland and Italy, his Kemalist followers and their party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), resisted the necessary regulations for full membership for decades.
At the dawn of the next year’s presidential elections of 2017, two journalists wrote a book on the actions and opinions of the socialist president of France.
So, it is not surprising that some European states have revived the “mission to civilize” by banning the burqa and burkini (as in France), or even forcing Muslim students to eat pork (as in Austria).
Take, for instance, the US attempt at making Ukraine and Georgia NATO members, which, in 2007, was blocked by France and Germany to a considerable extent.
Russia, Brazil, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Pakistan, and France are among the many middle or great powers with which Turkey has established amicable relations, at least for a limited time (in the case of Russia and Iran), under AK Party governments since 2002.
The EU agreed to open the Economic and Monetary Policy chapter which was once blocked by Sarkozy’s France, because Sarkozy believed that once this chapter is closed, Turkey’s full membership would be unstoppable.
Precisely a hundred years ago, on 16 May 1916, the iniquitous Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) was signed between Britain and France –Sir Mark Sykes and Georges Picot- whose goal was to partition Anatolia and the Arab Middle East among the two should the Ottoman Empire be defeated in the First World War.
During the war, three allied imperialist states –Great Britain, France and Russia– secretly negotiated an agreement to invade the Ottoman territories in the Middle East, since the Ottoman State was the main target of the war.