World View: Turks resent the idea that they are a bridge between Europe and Asia, saying it implies they lack a cultural identity of their own, writes Paul Gillespie.
But undoubtedly the issue of their membership of the European Union poses profound questions about Europe's geographical limits. The word limits derives from the Latin limes, meaning a boundary or a frontier - and the region now occupied by Turkey formed the boundary of the Roman empire.
The debate about whether to open negotiations with Turkey has revolved in large part around cultural identity and the extent to which it is determined by geography, shared history, or the democratic, economic and legal values set out in the 1993 Copenhagen criteria determining EU enlargement.
Depending on how the question is framed there are issues about whether the EU is relatively inclusive or exclusive towards further enlargement and relations with neighbouring states and peoples; has open or closed borders with them; and regards them as different or less European rather than potentially hostile others with inherently alternative values.
These questions revolve in turn around Europe's own values and how they relate to its history, geography and culture. A good case can be made that, for the EU, Europe's destructive and fragmented military and imperial past is more of an "other" than the Islamic Middle East, Russia, the Balkans (or currently in some quarters the United States), against which its political and cultural identity has been affirmed. This would give the EU a future-oriented, task-based identity rather than a culturally essentialist one based on Christian values, for example.
In the same way Europe's own internal diversity and the fact that it has always been host to migrations and mixing of peoples at national and continental levels must be understood, as against the cultural homogeneity assumed by those who say Turkey is not European but Asian.
Cultural homogeneity has been a major theme in the discussion on Turkey. Its extent and meaning is highly contested, however, both in the EU and in Turkey itself. Critics of deeper political integration in the EU often base their case on the lack of a transnational we-feeling or demos, which is possible only through the common language and political culture at national level.
They tend to object less to Turkey's entry than those who argue that Christian, classical, Renaissance and Enlightenment values form a common cultural substratum defining European identity, which differentiate it from Islamic cultures such as Turkey's.
But this is to assume a basic incompatibility between Islamic and European values - and to deny their historical and contemporary intermingling. Tariq Ramadan, a prominent writer on Islam, argues that the geographical argument for excluding Turkey is flawed by denying its long Ottoman past, in which it was linked intimately with Europe's construction and shape. The Ottoman empire was the sick man of Europe in the late 19th century, after all - not of Asia.
Geography is used here to disguise culturalist or religious arguments against Turkish membership.
The European legacy includes a strong Islamic component since the Middle Ages, when Muslim thinkers, jurists and philosophers deeply influenced European civilisation.
That influence has continued through the migration of millions of people from Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa to Europe over the last hundred years and the determination of their children and grandchildren to stay here. This is notwithstanding plentiful evidence of popular resistance or concern, reflected in hostile attitudes towards Turkish EU membership. An opinion poll reported in the Wall Street Journal last weekend showed that 52 per cent of Western Europeans believe there is "a lot" of disapproval of Muslims living in Europe, as against 35 per cent who say there is little or none.
Ramadan advocates an "independent European Islam" as a means of reconciling and affirming these values. Europe cannot base the self-confidence of its identity on opposition to Islamic culture and the rejection of the other's identity. He sees the Turkish issue as a "heaven-sent opportunity for Europe to reconcile itself to its ideals of pluralism, equality and constant renewal: Turkey is paradoxically its greatest chance".
Historically, states such as Spain, Portugal or Greece have gone through similar stages of political growth as Turkey, with endemic governmental instability, underdeveloped political parties and recurrent interference by the military in civilian governance. EU membership was designed to reinforce their democracy - a precedent for Turkey.
There is paradox and irony here. The great modernising and Westernising drive led by Kemal Ataturk after the first World War was strongly inspired by the French Jacobin republican model defined by homogenous citizenship and unitary state structures. With it, Ataturk led a ruthless drive against Ottoman cultural diversity and religious tradition. The legal system was transformed, women proclaimed equal and the state secularised.
The military was given a central role in implementing this programme - more and more so when Ataturk's party lost ground after the second World War.
This meant the military took the brunt of the rebellion by the large Kurdish population in south-eastern Turkey, who were denied cultural and political recognition. The armed forces also came up against Islamists, during the religious revival of that period. The military's periodic interventions in Turkey's politics were driven by a fierce determination to defend the Kemalist heritage, which enjoyed, and still enjoys, widespread popular support.
But it has fallen to the moderate Islamist party led by the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to drive the latest phase of modernisation in Turkey designed to prepare it for potential EU membership. It has been described as a reform package without precedent in Turkish history for both its speed and depth. Mr Erdogan represents a new generation of politicians with deep roots in its society, which is most unlikely to be reversed - unless by a backlash arising from rejection of the aspiration to join the EU.
The reforms cut back the military's role, recognise Kurdish cultural and political rights, strengthen women's equality and transform human and legal rights. In many respects they recognise the diversity that was a feature of Ottoman culture but was suppressed or denied under Kemalism. By expressing them in more universal terms they become compatible with European values as they too focus more on diversity and cultural recognition than on a spurious homogeneity. That is how these two cultures can be reconciled.