Turkey's Legacy Casts Long Shadow Over Talks With EU

The ghosts of the past are brooding over one of the most important decisions yet to face the European Union.

The decision is over when to begin the practical business of extending EU membership to Turkey, a relatively poor Muslim country of 70m people.

Today Gunter Verheugen, the EU's enlargement commissioner, will hold talks in Ankara with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister.

A month later, on October 6, the European Commission is expected to say that the basic conditions for the start of membership negotiations have been met. And in December, EU presidents and prime ministers will decide whether to fix a date for the process to begin.

Officially, the debate is about whether Turkey's government has met the EU's criteria on human rights and political reform.

It has been EU policy since 1999 that Turkey's"destiny" is to join, subject to its meeting of the conditions. Many Commission officials and national governments believe that Mr Erdogan, who is both reformist and Islamist, represents a historic chance for negotiation that has to be seized.

But many European leaders are wrestling with doubts. Some problems concern the future: what will happen to EU integration if Turkey becomes the most populous member state, with more voting power, by 2015, a possible date for entry; whether Turkish immigrants will pour into richer lands to the west; and what the impact will be on the EU budget of its accession.

"The geopolitical questions connected to Turkish accession (to the EU) seem to be among the most important geopolitical issues of the 21st century," Mr Verheugen said last week.

Other problems attend the past - and a legacy that goes back to the time when Tur key's Ottoman rulers first challenged the continent's established powers early in the last millennium.

According to historians such as Britain's Norman Davies, the entity known today as Europe is the heir to a medieval concept of"Christendom" forged through battles with the Moors and the Turks.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican's head of theology, told Le Figaro last month, outlining his opposition to Turkish membership:"Turkey has always represented another continent throughout history, in permanent contrast with Europe. There were wars with the Byzantine empire; think of the fall of Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453 and the threat to Vienna and Austria."