Gwynne Dyer: Turkey on the road to Europe

"I am absolutely in favour of Turkey's membership in the European Union," said Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski in September.

"We will support it. But - if we say 'yes' to Turkey - it is a question then what we will say to Ukraine."

The EU probably will say "yes" to starting negotiations for Turkish membership at its summit meeting in Brussels on Friday, although it could be 10 years or more before Turkey is actually a member.

Ukraine is not even a candidate yet, and has not begun the lengthy process of reform that would be needed to bring its laws and practices into conformity with EU human rights standards.

But it is Turkey which faces the higher hurdles. President John F. Kennedy was still alive when Turkey was first promised EU membership over 40 years ago.

Since then the EU has expanded from six to 25 members, with three more scheduled for entry in 2007 (including two, Romania and Bulgaria, with a lower per capita income than Turkey).

The reason that Turkey is still at the end of the queue is not its relative poverty (though that is an issue), but its location, its size and - above all - its religion.

Turkish membership would give the EU borders with Iran, Iraq and Syria, and make it a major power in the Middle East.

Turkey would be the biggest country in the EU (its population, 71 million, will overtake Germany's within 10 years), and since most EU decision-making is weighted by population, that would give it a huge voice in EU affairs.

Above all, it would kill the notion of "Europe" as a Christian club.

Add, say, 80 million Turks to the 20 million Muslims who already live in various EU member states, and an EU that includes Turkey would be an entity whose population is about 20 per cent Muslim.

This has prompted bigots like former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing to warn that Turkey's membership would mean "the end of Europe", but such voices are in the minority.

More representative of mainstream official opinion in the EU is French President Jacques Chirac's comment that "We have an interest in having Turkey with us", or the Advisory Council on International Affairs' September report to the Dutch Government that "admitting a Muslim country may be new to the EU, but it does not differ in principle from earlier expansions. One way or another, Islam should gain a place within the EU".

So far, so good, but the problem until recently was that Turkey simply wasn't a sufficiently democratic country to meet the EU's standards.

As Britain's Minister for Europe, Denis MacShane, put it: "The process of the entry negotiations should promote as radical a reform process as that initiated by Ataturk."

An immense amount has already been accomplished on this front in the past two years. After a decade of political turmoil and deadlock, the Turks elected a Government in November 2002 with a large majority in Parliament and a clear mandate for change.

The new governing party was, remarkably, an "Islamic" party whose predecessors had once been seen as opposed to the whole secular republic founded 80 years ago by Ataturk.

Under the leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan, however, the Justice and Development (AK) Party repackaged themselves as "Muslim Democrats" along the lines of Europe's many "Christian Democratic" parties, and proceeded to remake the whole Turkish state in order to fit it for EU membership.

In only two years, Erdogan's Government has rewritten a fifth of the constitution, ending the death penalty, bringing the Army decisively under civil authority, granting language rights to the Kurdish minority and entrenching European standards of free speech in Turkish law.

Abuse and torture of prisoners in Turkish jails is one area where more work is needed and there is a continuous tension between the AK party leadership's Europeanising intentions and its conservative religious base over questions having to do with women's rights and family law.

Nevertheless, enough progress has already been made that in October the European Commission declared Turkey had met the political and economic conditions to be considered for EU membership.

What remains is the political decision to open negotiations, which must be taken unanimously by the governments of the 25 existing EU members.

The Turks have been promised an answer, they have worked themselves to the bone to meet the conditions, and it looks as if they will get the right answer.

There is great anxiety about Turkish entry at the popular level in a number of European countries, but the governments are mostly taking the longer view, and in some cases showing considerable political courage in doing so. (Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, for example, has consistently backed Turkish entry despite the German public's clear opposition to it.)

As Yusuf Kanli remarked in the Turkish Daily News when the European Commission gave its approval in October: "What we got is just a conditional green light to start a journey on a road on which for some reason many red lights were erected with great skill."

But it's a start - and no country that ever started membership talks has failed to join the EU in the end.