Look into the dark heart of Europe
Turkey is now a real Muslim democracy. We cannot ignore it.
Peter Preston, The Guardian, November 11, 2002 - Consider this amazement. A nation of 68 million goes to the polls. Not a single MP from the previous coalition survives. The party of the departing prime minister, which received 22% last time round, nets 1% of the vote. Both the new party of government and the new opposition are also new to parliament. Eat your heart out, IDS. Swing off on your old swingometer, Peter Snow.

And consider a second amazement. Last summer, while the rest of Europe slept, this same nation (within a matter of weeks) abandoned the death penalty, lifted draconian curbs on its press and reached out inclusively towards the separatist minority it had repressed for decades. The biggest victory for human rights in two decades.

It is time to talk about Turkey and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It is time to think long and hard about a land whose fate affects all our futures. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who is paid to think about the constitutional future of Europe and its enlargement, has done enough pondering already. No, he tells Le Monde, Turkey must "never" be allowed to join the EU. It has "a different culture, a different approach, a different way of life. It is a country close to Europe, an important country: but it is not a European country."

There now ... somebody of weight, somebody of influence, has said out loud what EU politicians and diplomats have been muttering behind their hands for years. Turkey may be sweet-talked and strung along, led to believe that what 70% of its population wants most dearly - a seat in the Brussels sun - is possible, and attainable to a fixed timetable. But, when push comes to shove, it can just shove off. Our fine words are the dross of hypocrisy.

And that does matter in crucial ways. It matters here and now, in Britain, just down the road from where I live. Down that road, Greeks and Turks, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, live and work side by side. Here's a Greek Orthodox church. Here's a mosque. Can Cyprus - a scar of a crisis waiting to re-open - be put back together again? Can the "will of the UN" we hear so much about be respected at last? Can ancient enemies find modern peace?

It could matter within a few months if Turkey is spurned again at the Copenhagen enlargement summit and decides to annex Northern Cyprus. It will matter, make no mistake, a dozen or so years on, if Turkey does join the EU and millions of those (swiftly proliferating) 68 million follow their brothers and sisters into Europe - into Germany and France and the UK - chasing work and a chance of prosperity: but this time with the rights of full EU citizens.

It matters immediately in the squeeze on Saddam. Mr Erdogan and his AKP (Justice and Development Party) are Islamists. Their military help is make or break for any successful strike at Baghdad. Through their winning campaign, they sought to withhold such help. Today, offering reassurance in victory, they promise to do anything the UN wants. But it's a fault line in the planning.

This election result did not come out the way those "western experts" we pay to read the runes predicted. It brings the threat of yet another army coup closer. And it raises fundamental questions of principle. We say - Bush says, Blair says - that we have a mission to bring democracy to the Muslim world, beginning with Iraq. Well, good on us. But do we start by conniving at the destruction of a genuinely democratic Muslim government on our doorstep?

The thing that matters most of all, though, is to look into the dark heart of the Europe we're building. Is it fundamentally sort of white-ish and kind of Christian? Does Mr Giscard d'Estaing ring bells when he talks about the impossibility of absorbing "different ways of life"?

More visceral issues flood in every which way, of course. There is the Washington-Ankara connection. Washington can't understand why Europe doesn't just turn the key and sweep Turkey in tomorrow (like Mexico into the North American Free Trade Agreement). There is the Nato bind. Turkey is a vital member and (sotto voce) Nato enlargement has been proceeding rather faster than the EU version. Get those two enlargements tangled and you're in trouble. There is the dear old EU debate about "wider and shallower" or "narrower and deeper" integration, which sets the French hopping.

Don't underestimate the likelihood of this stew boiling over. What happens to Turkey, and Turkey's place in the world, is high on most diplomatic agendas. From wars against terror to wars against poverty, it's the tops. But we still have to confront and answer the central question. Is Turkey - inside the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and NATO - nevertheless not European? Is Mr Giscard d'Estaing dismally, finally right?

The tawdry truth is that, yes ... racism and cultural bigotry and fear and economic failure still stalk the Europe and Britain in which we live; that France can't cope with its Algerians, Germany with its existing Turks - and perhaps we can't cope either. So close the door quietly, muttering excuses.

And the hope, with great expectations attached? That those summer human-rights reforms in Ankara, the transforming magic of the EU we forget, is only the start of freedom's wonders. That when Mr Erdogan offers a Cyprus solution at last, he means it. That our Europe of declining birth rates will need the youth and dynamism Turkey brings. That our bravest new world, inescapably, joyously, is multi-cultural and multi-ethnic.

Travel with trepidation, I think. But above all: travel hopefully.