Is it in Turkey’s interests to join this Christian club?

A common enough sentiment in the Europe of Giscard d’Estaing and Edmund Stoiber. But this was a Turk, not a European, speaking, and not just any Turk but the man who is today Turkey’s new prime minister. Abdullah Gul is now the right-hand man in government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan – the leader of the Justice and Development party who, prevented by a legal ban from standing for parliament, cannot take the office of prime minister himself. In 1994, Gul was the deputy chairman and a spokesman on foreign affairs for Refah, a predecessor of the Justice and Development party. "Turkey should not join the European Union, we have said this from the beginning," he told me during an interview in his office in the Turkish parliament. "Look at a European city, and then look at Istanbul. It’s not a Christian city."

Gul’s recent pronouncements on this subject have, of course, been very different. He said a few weeks ago, for example: "We aim to leave no excuse for the EU to say ‘no’ to us at Copenhagen". Senior men in the party, known as AKP after its Turkish initials, some time ago began comparing it to the Christian Democrat movements of Europe, in spite of the fact that the most substantial opposition to Turkish entry into the EU comes from within the ranks of such movements.

Erdogan and Gul have not tried to deny that their views have changed. That would in any case be impossible, given the frequency with which in the past they demanded that Turkey cease knocking on the door in Brussels, withdraw from Nato, and devote itself instead to the creation of an Islamic common market and to its ties with Turkic central Asia.

They have explained the shift many times. It is permissible to wonder, however, how completely they have changed their minds. And it is also permissible to wonder whether their original position was sound – representing a real understanding of the limits of the possible in Turkey as well as a recognition of its duties, as the most developed and stable Muslim society, toward its Muslim neighbours and the rest of the Islamic world.

There is a hint of the old attitudes in the remarks AKP leaders have made about what their course might be if Europe continues to rebuff Turkey. A dramatic rejection, as opposed to the calibrated reluctance that will almost certainly come into play in Copenhagen, as it has on such occasions before, is not at all likely. Should it come at some stage, however, it would allow a party like the AKP to turn to the Turkish electorate and play on its resentment of Europe, as opposed to its enthusiasm for it, in order to return to the old line.

The Islamist party in Turkey, through the various changes of name forced on it by legal bans, has been flexible in policy but fixed in its basic aim, which has been to take society back "from the foes of Islam who have governed Turkey for almost a century", as a party paper put it in 1996.

Flexibility has meant a readiness to shelve or change policies in order to achieve or stay in office, as Necmettin Erbakan, the founding leader of the party, did during his time in power in 1996. The fixed purpose has been expressed less in international policy than in the use of office to pack the public service with party supporters, a process which began in Turkey’s big cities after the Islamist victories in local government elections in the early 90s and continued in 1996, when the party came into a national coalition government.

The basis for this penetration had earlier been laid by the growth of imam hatip schools, which was assisted by several of Turkey’s major parties. These schools, originally for the education of the clergy, were vastly expanded to form a parallel educational system for Islamists and a source of the personnel who began to flood into government offices, where their arrival could be measured by the number of beards and headscarves. It was this process above all, rather than any particular policy at home or abroad, which impelled the armed forces to intervene in 1997, bringing about the fall of the coalition government in which the Islamists were members.

In preparing for a new attempt to take power, the once again re-named Islamists moved beyond the flexibility they had displayed in the past, which was a matter of proclaiming in opposition what they were ready to drop in office. They moved instead to steal the clothes of the secular parties by shifting position on Europe and Nato. The unavoidable political reality was that most Turkish businessmen wanted the country in the EU, that a large portion of the electorate in general identified "Europe" as code for jobs, prosperity, and the freedom to travel and work in the continent, and that the army insisted on Nato and the American connection.

Skilfully combining these positions with a continuing Islamist message and with not unjustified charges of corruption and economic mismanagement against the secular parties, gave the AKP a stunning victory. But that takes us to the heart of the Turkish problem now for Europe, which is that the Islamists have used Europe to take power for what we must still assume are Islamist purposes. The secular parties, meanwhile, and much of the Turkish middle class, see in that same Europe an antidote to Islamism, as well as to the military authoritarianism of the past. Turkish liberals are sure that democratisation in Turkey would be far less advanced had there not been the spur of Europe’s requirements for entry.

Perhaps the Islamists have really changed. The party and the movement certainly include various currents of opinion, and both Gul and Erdogan are from its moderate wing. Yet it seems probable that two very different projects are still under way in Turkey, the one to make the country more Islamic, and the other to make it less so, and that both have now seized on Europe as a means to their ends.

Whether Europe really is an answer for either side is the question that Gul raised in his earlier incarnation. The suspicion must be that the Islamists’ hearts are not in it, and that the secularists’ need for both an icon and an ally has led them to overlook the real obstacles to union with what is indeed a Christian club. Totting up improvements in human rights or democratic practice is not the point. Turkey is an unfinished drama in which Europe’s role has become even more central than it was before. But whether it will or should end with the country’s incorporation into the EU is an open question.