Turkey

From Gothpoodle

• Population: 87 million
• Aspects: Stable, Powerful, Fourth Wave

Turkey has long been an anomaly within the European Union, set apart by ethnic, geographic, linguistic, and religious factors. It has also suffered long-standing hostility from its closest European neighbors, Bulgaria and Greece. Even so, over the course of the 21st century Turkey has become a major partner in the European Union, and is now close behind Germany and the United Kingdom in economic output and influence.

Turkey is one of the few Union nations which has experienced significant population growth during the past century. The country has rarely been stable. Social disputes between secularists and devout Muslims have often spilled over into unrest and street violence. Meanwhile, relations between the central government and the minority Kurds have always been poor, and periods of separatist violence were common early in the 21st century. The Kurdish regions were given considerable local autonomy in the 2040s, and violent unrest there is now rare, but visitors associated with the central government face a hostile reception.

Turkey openly embraced Fourth Wave biotechnology, and indeed much of the country’s current prosperity is based on biotech industries. For a time in the 2050s and 2060s, Turkey was Europe’s largest producer of bioshells and genetic constructs. Today, variant human types are probably more common in Turkey’s urban areas than anywhere else in the European Union. The country’s urban population is moving rapidly into the Fifth Wave economy, although rural districts (especially the Kurdish provinces) lag far behind.