In his office in the Presidential Palace in Ankara, President Suleyman Demirel directs visitors' attention to a large map of Eurasia which dramatises Turkey's strategic position at the epicentre of East-West relations. From Turkey to the borders of China, a plethora of independent states, many of them Muslim and Turkish speaking, has emerged in the last decade from the rubble of the Soviet empire. To these, Demirel believes, Turkey can serve as a role model and a bridge to the West.
Turkey is the only predominantly Muslim state, his argument goes, that has a secular and parliamentary democratic constitution; it also has a strong commitment to free market values and to Western security structures. It has just entered a new and more positive phase in its turbulent relationship with the European Union. And there are signs that other niggling problems - its tense relations with Greece; the Cyprus impasse; the Kurdish struggle; its human rights abuse record - if not exactly vanishing, may be easing significantly.
Certainly, as the century ends, the Silk Road that was one of the arteries of the Ottoman Empire is becoming operational again, though now under a different guise. Camel trains and turban-clad traders have been replaced by coach-loads of Azeris, Turkmen and others from the southern Caucasus region trundling the highways of Anatolia in search of Western merchandise; in the other direction, oil and gas pipelines are the main constituents of the new relationship with the east.
At the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) conference in Istanbul in November, two important contracts were signed: the Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline Framework Declaration and the intergovernmental agreement on a Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. The signings were witnessed by Presidents Clinton and Demirel, as well as the heads of the Caspian states of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
The Baku-Ceyhan pipeline in particular is a project of enormous potential for the region. Due to come on stream in 2002, it will enable several million barrels of Caspian oil to be piped annually from the Azeri capital, Baku, to the south-eastern Turkish port of Ceyhan for distribution to the West. So extensive are its oil reserves that Azerbaijan has been tagged the Kuwait of the 21st century. Faced with keen competition from Moscow, which favoured piping the oil over Russian territory before shipping it west through the Bosphorus, Ankara won the American-Azeri contract, agreeing to underwrite the pipeline to the tune of $24 billion.
The pipeline is not Turkey's only major development project due to come on stream in the new century. Turkey has also undertaken one of the world's largest agricultural development projects in south-eastern Anatolia, a project called GAP, designed to provide extensive power generation and land irrigation by harnessing the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. This project, which is already part operational, involves the construction of 21 dams and is expected to increase Turkey's arable land by an area half the size of Belgium while doubling its power output. Nearly half Turkey's power is already produced by hydro-electric generators.
These projects have far-reaching political and social implications as well as economic benefits. A central feature of GAP is the Ataturk Dam, a development that has not pleased all of Turkey's neighbours downstream. Turkey's control of major rivers gives it new leverage over Syria and Iraq: already there have been negotiations to guarantee a regulated flow of water to these countries. It was partly this leverage (and partly threats to bomb Damascus) that launched the dramatic chain of events leading to the capture and conviction of the Kurdish rebel leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999 - a development that may have tipped the balance of that long and costly struggle in Ankara's favour.
The control of the rivers may have also been a factor in improving relations with Tel Aviv. Turkey and Israel have formed close economic and military ties in recent years, to the detriment of Ankara's relations with the Arab world. This has been part of a larger pro-Washington strategy. Since Ataturk's time, Turkey has looked more to the US than to some of its immediate neighbours and, continuing this policy, Ankara has allowed the use of its south-eastern air bases for US and British air strikes on Iraq.
In response, Washington has played a vital part in pressuring the EU to face down Greek tactics and accept Turkey's candidacy for membership - a more important factor than the apparent rapprochement between Athens and Ankara following the devastating earthquakes in both countries.
Also, US agents in Kenya (at the time investigating the US embassy bombing there) played a direct part in locating Ocalan in the Greek embassy in Nairobi and assisted in his capture and return to Turkey early in 1999.
Turkey's links with its eastern neighbours are rooted in the region's lingering fear and distrust of a volatile Moscow. For decades during the Cold War, Turkey was NATO's buffer state and Turks harbour memories of the Russian threat dating back to Tsarist times. Turkey still boasts the second largest army in NATO and has played an active part in peace-keeping through the Partnership for Peace (PfP). In recent times it has encouraged the involvement of the southern Caucasus states in the PfP and set up training facilities for peace-keeping forces in Ankara, seizing the opportunity of forging a common command and operational language with the forces of the Caspian region. Not surprisingly, Russia's campaign against Chechnya has sent shock waves through the region and Ankara has joined in the chorus of condemnation of Moscow's actions.
While it will be many years before Turkey qualifies for full EU membership, some statistics put the significance of its application into perspective. The World Bank estimates the population of Turkey to be 68 million; 30 years ago it was just half that figure. By 2023, when the Turkish Republic will celebrate its first centenary, the figure could be as high as 90 million, unless there is a substantial drop in the birth rate - making Turkey potentially the largest member state of the EU at that time.
Already there are some five million ethnic Turks living in EU states, three million of them in Germany. Given comparatively low wage rates and runaway inflation at home - Turkish inflation rates exceeded 100 per cent on two occasions during the late 1990s and never dipped below 70 per cent - millions of Turks aspire to live elsewhere in Europe and this is likely to remain the case for some time. The drift from the land continues, with Turkish cities becoming dangerously overcrowded. Turkey's rapid and poorly regulated urbanisation is thought to have been a factor in the enormous earthquake death tolls of 1999.
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a conception that the Ottoman/Turkish identity might soon vanish from the face of the earth, a view which led to extraordinary miscalculations on the part of Turkey's enemies. In the first World War Churchill thought to strike at the "weak underbelly" of the central powers and devised the plans for a direct assault on the Dardanelles at Gallipoli. The invaders were met by soldiers infused with a new nationalist spirit and led by revolutionary young officers as committed to the overthrow of the ailing Ottoman regime in Istanbul as they were to the defence of Turkish territory.
A similar miscalculation was made after the Ottoman demise when the central powers were defeated in 1918. In 1919 Greek irredentists, with the tacit support of the victorious allies and more active assistance from the Armenians and Kurds of Anatolia, attempted to reproduce the ancient Byzantine Imperium by seizing Izmir and Istanbul. In the ensuing conflict thousands died and entire communities were brutally "ethnically cleansed".
These miscalculations, which served to harden Turkish identity rather than weaken it, were rooted in a prejudice at least as old as the Crusades: that the Turks were murderous infidels baying at the outskirts of the civilised world, an impediment to Western interests in the Middle East and the scourge of Christendom and Hellenism.
Thankfully a more informed evaluation of the Turkish people and their potential contribution to the world is emerging as we enter the 21st century. This is reflected in the words of President Clinton in Istanbul in response to the November signing of the Caspian oil contracts. He said: "These agreements . . . will advance the prosperity and security of a region critical to the future of the entire world."
What happens to these lands on the ancient Silk Road will have an impact on everything from the future of Russia to the security of Europe, to the relationship between the West and the Muslim world, to the strength of the global economy and the continued growth of the American economy."