There was a time when the Left loved Turkey. When Kemal Atatürk died in 1938, he was given a glowing obituary in the London Evening Standard. The writer was Michael Foot, the future leader of the British Labour party. The young Leftie scribbler looked upon the 58-year-old Atatürk as his kind of hero. A secularist, author of the biggest modernisation project undertaken in recent history - bigger and more successful in historic terms than Roosevelt's New Deal or even Lenin's deformed Soviet dream-turned-nightmare. It's odd, then, that secular Turkey should now be the object of so much hostility, not least on the Left. In too many quarters Turkey is seen as backward and Islamicisit. Nothing could be further from the truth.
To be in Istanbul or Izmir today is to be in no doubt that one is in a modern, bustling, energetic European city. One million Brits and three and a half million Germans visit Turkey each year, and its western coast on the Aegean Sea has the feel of Andalusia or California - a mix of blue skies, blue water and a restless economic energy. Turkey is now a confident nation state whose key actors are anxious to make progress. In the past 18 months Turkey has adopted a range of laws on human and minority rights that were unthinkable only five years ago. Civilian control of the military is entrenched in legislation. By allowing languages other than Turkish (including Kurdish) to be broadcast and taught, the Turkish government is strengthening cultural pluralism in Turkey for the first time. All good stuff, but there is still more to do.
Leyla Zana is a Kurdish writer and former MP who is still in prison for her political activities. She has become a test case for the excellent Writers in Prison committee run by Amnesty and Pen. The irony is that most Turkish politicians would like her to be released, but will not intervene in the judicial process - because they want to behave in ways that correspond to European ideals.
In Ankara, I met her lawyer and other human and women's rights activists. They told me that despite the legislative reforms, there were still too many examples of bad practice in prisons and local adminstrations. So should the EU delay starting accession talks with Turkey until there is a better record of implementation? 'No, no,' they said. 'We want the Eu to begin negotiations with Turkey, to be present here, to force our people to change their practices. If the Eu slams the door in Turkey's face, it will be a disaster for all of us working for fair trials and journalists' freedom.' In a letter to the European Parliament's president, Pat Cox, Leyla Zana has herself argued that it would be better to be a prisoner in a country negotating EU membership than free in a country barred from the EU. I told them to start making their case in Le Monde and Die Welt, since it is conservative elements of the French and German political class that need to be persuaded.
Why they should need to be persuaded is a mystery. In terms of economic growth, controlling inflation and creating jobs - especially in tourism - Turkey is one of the best performing economies in Europe. More to the point, the Turks now want to repeat the great modernisiation of Atatürk to shape a new 21st-century Turkey. Their recipe for doing this is joining the European Union. As with Ireland in the 1970s, Spain and Greece in the 1980s, Poland and Hungary today, Europe is seen as the key to regaining national self-confidence.
This summer is the 30th anniversary of the arrival of Turkish paratrooopers on Cyprus after the chaos that broke out when the last putsch in Athens took place. Cyprus will enter the Eu as a sovereign republic on 1 May. If Turkish troops are still manning a barbed-wire-frontier dividing an EU member state in half, those who want to slam the door on Turkey's EU ambitions will be given extra ammunition. But if the Turks clear away all objections to a Cyprus settlement, then they will get a huge boost for a positive decision in December.
The prize is enormous. A Muslim state that embraces democracy and modernity and shares its sovereignty with others in the EU. An Eastern country firmly looking west. After the onslaughts of crusaders on Constantinople and the arrival of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna, the beginning of an end to a thousand years of conflict and worse between Christianity and Islam is in prospect. Iraq, Iran and Syria would have a border with a state obliged to live by the common rules of the Euopean Union. Turkish politics have never been so important. If Ankara fumbles Cyprus, or the German and French Right defeat Turkey's EU ambitions, as backed by Blair and Schröder, it will be a bad start to 21st-century history - and a blow to Atatürk's hopes for his century.
