Dear Sir/Madam,

Monday's editorial praised the opening of membership negotiations between Turkey and the European Union as "a welcome and important step [for those who] want to build a world in which identity is based primarily on shared respect for human rights, not ethnicity or religion" ("The Turks Accede"), thus revealing a frighteningly superficial understanding of human nature, society and history.

America has a history that is barely 2 centuries old and an immigrant population of about 98 percent, while Europe has a recorded history of around 2500 years (preceded by millennia of ethnic European prehistory) and a non-European immigrant population (largely acquired in the past few decades) of less than 10 percent.

America is a melting pot - Europe is not. Trying to make it one - not withstanding the good intentions - will have disastrous consequences, since race, ethnicity, history, culture and religion (with all their potential for conflict) are essential, perhaps not to many Americans, who are preoccupied with making and spending money or watching TV,  but to most other people's sense of identity. Tragically, this is something that many intellectuals don't only fail to understand, but are conducting a crusade against, at least in so far as it applies to ethnic Europeans (white people). Anyone failing to embrace multiracialism and multiculturalism is condemned and declared an outcaste, very much as a non-believer would have been in Medieval Europe (or would be even today in many Islamic countries).

For the sake of national identity and unity , America plays down (or denies) the importance of race, ethnicity, and any culture or history that goes back more than 200 years. In most of the rest of the world things are very different.