Turkey and the EU. Will Turkey accept Europe?

A bad-tempered argument breaks out over values

AFTER 40 years of hesitation, the leaders of the European Union had been girding themselves for a fateful decision in December: to start membership talks with Turkey, and thus to accept the likelihood that, in a decade or two, the EU's most populous member state will be Muslim. But is Turkey ready to accept the EU's values?

As relations between Turkey and the EU went into a tail-spin this week, the answer to that question began to look more doubtful. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's moderate Islamist prime minister, flew to Brussels on September 23rd to defuse a crisis that he himself had triggered, when he suddenly withdrew a long-planned package of amendments to Turkey's penal code. He even suggested that he wanted to revive the criminal penalties for adultery that his government had earlier seemed prepared to drop.

Yet both Mr Erdogan and the European Commission (which on October 6th must deliver its opinion on Turkey's eligibility for the Union) had a strong interest in avoiding a complete derailment. Turkey's parliamentary speaker has acceded to opposition demands for an emergency session, likely to be held on September 26th, at which the new penal code should be adopted. After his talks with Mr Erdogan in Brussels, Gunter Verheugen, the European commissioner in charge of enlargement, declared that “no outstanding obstacles remained on the table.”

Even if the immediate row over the penal code is resolved, advocates of Turkey's EU membership have had a shock - their biggest since 1997, when a brush-off from EU leaders provoked fury in Ankara. Mr Verheugen called the proposal to re-criminalise adultery a “joke”. Not a very funny one, either: as he warned Mr Erdogan, it served to provide ammunition for those who want to keep his country out of Europe, by giving the impression that it might want to introduce Islamic rules.

On September 17th, when the squabble was at its height, a defiant Mr Erdogan told the Europeans to mind their own business. In a still odder change of rhetoric, he even insisted that “EU membership is not the be-all and end-all.” The financial markets told a different story. The value of the Turkish lira took a pounding, as did the main index of the Istanbul stock exchange.

Does Turkey really have an alternative to closer ties with Europe? Relations with the country's most powerful ally, the United States, have been overshadowed by differences over Iraq. Links with Israel, another important friend, have also been under strain, with Mr Erdogan making sharp attacks on Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. Some Turks dream of new relationships with Iran, Syria or Russia - but these countries have a history of backing Turkey's internal trouble-makers, from Kurdish separatists to Islamists.

Unless it was a cunning political feint, Mr Erdogan's anti-EU outburst is thus hard to understand. Some officials say the damage inflicted by Mr Erdogan's wobbly behaviour will be hard to repair. European heavyweights such as Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and France's President Jacques Chirac have incurred political costs at home by backing the plan to open membership talks with Turkey. They are said to be furious over the Turkish prime minister's erratic line.

Even before the latest row, the camp of naysayers, who are opposed in principle rather than on specific grounds to Turkey's EU membership, was gathering strength. For example, Frits Bolkestein, the single-market commissioner and a former leader of the Dutch liberals, said in a speech earlier this month that the Union could “implode” if the Turks were allowed to join. If they did gain entry, he added, Ukraine and Belarus - which were “more European ” - -should be let in as well.

Given Mr Erdogan's reputation as a savvy politician, there is puzzlement in Ankara over why he shifted his ground on the penal code so abruptly. Conventional wisdom says that he was acting under pressure from conservatives in his Justice and Development party, who are disgruntled by his failure to deliver on other issues. In particular, he has failed to keep pre-election promises to ease bans on the Islamic headscarf in state schools and offices; and to enable graduates of religious schools to enter secular universities.

One Machiavellian school of thought has it that the row over adultery was part of a devious plan to focus European attention on the penal code - and away from even thornier issues such as the discrimination still faced by Turkey's non-Muslim minorities, and the ban on theological training for Orthodox Christians. But there is another, simpler explanation: as a devout Muslim, Mr Erdogan may sincerely believe the behaviour of straying spouses should be a matter for the law, and not simply for private morality.