Turkey knocks at Europe's door

The broad avenues of Ilter Turkmen's neighborhood are lined with posh furniture stores, modern banks and gourmet eateries. At home, he has a nice collection of impressionist paintings. And he admits that his French is stronger than his eloquent English.

One might expect as much of a former foreign minister, but what the world might not expect is that his home is on the Asian side of Istanbul - the start of the Turkish mainland that many in Europe see as belonging to a continent, community, and culture not their own.

Whether Turkey belongs in Europe is the chief controversy surrounding a two-day summit, beginning today in Copenhagen, on the European Union's expansion. The Turkish question is forcing Europe to decide where its boundaries and purposes begin and end.

Turkey's new government has been making a vigorous push for an earlier and exact date for talks on joining the Union - questioning aloud how Western powers can spurn Turkey's bid to become a member of Europe's club yet expect Turkish cooperation in a potential war in neighboring Iraq.

Ten other countries, mostly former Eastern-bloc nations, are about to be given the keys to Europe. That leaves the Turks, original partners in NATO, suspicious that the reason their membership has been put on the slow track is that the banks of the Bosporus - the broad straits separating the European part of Turkey from the Near Eastern - are lined with mosques and not churches.

"Our ascension to the EU can show that Islam and Western values are not incompatible," says Mr. Turkmen. "It is an Islamic country which is trying to have a full-fledged democracy."

So far, Europe says that it has to try harder. Attempting to live up to the EU's political standards, Turkey outlawed the death penalty this summer and passed legislation allowing broadcasting and education in the Kurdish language, banned during years of separatist violence.

But European officials say that some of these changes have yet to be implemented, and that the country must make still others, expanding democratic freedoms and ensuring that civilian power prevails over the military, which removed an elected government as recently as five years ago.

That the disbanded government's heirs are now at the helm is an irony lost on no one. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), formed by the ambitious class of young politicians fleeing banned Islamic parties swept up enough votes in last month's election to form a rare single-party government. Many of the limited democratic policies set by Turkey's secular military establishment had been formed to keep such Islam-oriented politicians from power. While AKP predecessors scoffed at joining the EU and dismissed it is a "Christian club," AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been pushing hard for a date for Turkey's inclusion.

"Now they understand that to improve their own freedom of movement, they need the West, and they need democracy more than anyone else," says Mr. Turkmen.

Mr. Erdogan himself is a symbol of Turkey's internal tug-of-war between democracy and devlet - a Turkish term for a state that also encompasses its formidable security and military forces. He was banned from serving as prime minister, due partly to a sedition conviction.

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