Despite voters' uneasiness, it is time to talk to Turkey

Earlier this year, some Turkish officials thought of a way of increasing ordinary Europeans' knowledge about their nation and its culture.

They planned to build on the success of "The Turks", a London exhibition of a millennium's worth of Turkish artefacts, and take the show to France. It did not work out.

A little sounding-out made it clear that, at a time when Turkey's membership of the European Union is on the agenda, the French public had little interest in the artistic masterpieces of the country.

Not just in France but across the EU, Turkish accession inspires little enthusiasm and plenty of downright opposition among electorates. Yet next Monday, Turkey is set to begin membership talks.

The overriding question is whether the EU is really serious about its plans for Ankara to join. A last-minute diplomatic push by Britain, which holds the presidency of the EU, has cleared most of the obstacles to the talks beginning on time, with Austrian reservations the main remaining hurdle.

If the negotiations succeed, no one doubts that both Turkey and the EU would be transformed. But the risk is substantial that something will go wrong during the 10 years of negotiations that lie ahead particularly because France has the final word on the country's accession.

A recent amendment to the French constitution means all EU membership deals after 2007 will have to be put to referendum.

The signs are not good. A poll released this month by the German Marshall Fund of the US put support for Turkish membership at 11 per cent in France, 15 per cent in Germany and 32 per cent in the UK, with more than 40 per cent undecided in all three countries.

"The unpopularity in France is due to the fact that Turkey is perceived as not being European, not looking West and changing the whole nature and identity of the European project," says François Heisbourg, director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research.

"It serves as a proxy for everything that is Arab and Muslim, even though Turkey is of course a non-Arab country with a deeply ingrained separation between the mosque and the state."

In a crisis

Opposition to Turkish membership has risen at a time when the EU is itself in crisis after the failure of the European constitution in French and Dutch referendums, and when national leaders are at loggerheads over the EU budget.

In such circumstances, politicians are loath to ignore the preferences of their electorates.

That unease is reinforced by concern about some of the news from Turkey this year, such as the imminent trial of novelist Orhan Pamuk for denigrating the state.

After an extensive series of reforms in 2003 2004, the pace of legislative change in Turkey has also slowed dramatically this year.

"We have a vicious cycle at the moment, so that negative public opinion in Europe has an impact on political leaders," says Olli Rehn, EU enlargement commissioner and a champion of opening the talks.

Last December, the leaders of the EU's three most powerful states Gerhard Schroeder, Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair championed Turkey's cause at the Brussels summit that fixed October 3 for the beginning of the talks.

Today, Schroeder is struggling to hold on to power in Germany, having lost an election, Chirac is distracted by the rise of Nicolas Sarkozy, the French presidential hopeful who opposes Turkish membership, and only Blair's government is left actively campaigning for Turkish entry.

In a speech this month, Jack Straw, UK foreign secretary, argued that "by welcoming Turkey we will demonstrate that Western and Islamic cultures can thrive together as partners in the modern world".

He added that continued enlargement helped the EU deal both with economic challenges from India and China and international issues such as terrorism, crime and climate change.

"Turkey's geographical position makes it of vital strategic importance in every way," he said.

Sometimes, however, such arguments do not ring true. Turkey was strategically most important to the West during the 150 years before the fall of the Berlin wall, when it served as a check on Russian expansionism.

Indeed, when EU leaders made their decision last December to begin talks, they were motivated less by strategic considerations than by a desire not to renege on four decades of promises of closer ties to Ankara.

EU membership could well fail to cement relations with the wider Islamic world, since Turkey is non-Arab, close to Israel and has a difficult relationship with much of the Middle East because of its secularism and record of empire.

Turkish diplomats also insist that, even if Turkey fails to become a member, it will still look West.

However, one school of thought holds that opening negotiations as they are envisaged only increases the risk of failure.

Austria, successor state to the Turks' historic Habsburg rival, is alone among the EU's 25-member states in insisting that the negotiations contemplate an EU Turkey "partnership" as an explicit alternative to membership.

"Since December the attitudes in Europe and the developments in Europe have confirmed our point of view … We should take one step after the other and try to be realistic," Ursula Plassnik, Austrian foreign minister, said in an interview.

Angela Merkel, Germany's potential Christian Democrat chancellor, has proposed a similar idea of a "privileged partnership" between Turkey and the EU, though her coalition's failure to score a clear victory in this month's elections will impede her ability to influence the debate.

Turkey has rejected any such scheme, arguing that it is interested only in membership. But Plassnik argues the two sides can still do much more to grow closer to each other.

Other EU governments hope to overcome Austria's objections in the next few days. Britain argues that they would unpick last December's delicately crafted compromise and stop the negotiations before they started.

But, in any case, Turkey is unlikely to be offered the same kind of membership deal as last year's entrants from the former Soviet bloc.

But once the negotiations start, politicians on both sides will have to play a more active part if Turkey is ever to join the EU.