13/10/2005 (Agence Europe) - Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has asserted that the main reason why Turkey wants to become a member of the EU is to avoid a “shock of civilisations”. “The world must make a successful alliance of civilisations and the strongest response to this challenge is the European Union”, Mr Erdogan said in an interview with Le Monde on 13 October. “If the EU wants to become a world power, then it must be successful in its alliance of civilisations”. Mr Erdogan also assured that Turkey was determined to go forward with reform, independently of membership talks. He said that, “if things do not move forward as they should with the EU, we know the democratic criteria of Copenhagen for EU membership, we also know the economic criteria of Maastricht, required for adopting the euro. We shall simply rename them the Ankara criteria and we shall continue to move forward along this road”.