The conqueror rode into the city on a white horse. His troops took control of the docks, the barracks, the police stations, and the tram network. It was 8 February 1919; the commander was the French general Franchet d'Esperey; and the city was Istanbul. The arrival of British and French troops in the capital marked the end of the Ottoman Empire. The way it was staged was supposed to call to mind the invasion of Constantinople by Mehmed II. He had entered the Byzantine capital in 1453 – on a white horse. The grey on which d'Esperey rode into the Ottoman capital 466 years later was a gift from the Greeks of Istanbul. Like their compatriots in the kingdom of Greece, they saw the occupation of Istanbul as the beginning of the realization of their bold project: a greater Greek empire in emulation of Byzantium.

Anyone who considers the relationship of modern-day Turkey to the Europe of today must not forget this scene, for it is not only the Ottomans' historical advance into Europe which is once again conjured up with this reminder of the "Turks at the gates of Vienna". The role played by Europe and the European powers on the territory of modern Turkey has been far more profound, continuous, and momentous.

The "eastern question" had been one of the central problems preoccupying the great powers since the beginning of the nineteenth century. They wanted to strip the "sick man of the Bosphorus" of its European territories and take away its control over the straits between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The empire, overstretched as it was, was under the economic supervision of European banks. It was European capital that fuelled the penetration of Anatolia, along the very railway lines financed by that capital.

Had this plan worked out, Asia Minor would long since have belonged to the European economic area as a quasi-colony. But in World War I, the new Turkish regime backed the Central Powers – and so in 1918 found itself once again on the losing side. At Versailles, the Ottoman Empire was to have come under the hammer: it was decreed not only that it would hand over its last European and Arab territories, but also that its core area of Asia Minor would be carved up. Istanbul and the Zone of the Straits were occupied by Allied troops, the Italians in Antalya and the French in Adana. In May 1919 the Greeks occupied Smyrna. The European powers had granted them custody of a wide zone around the most important port in Asia Minor. In August 1920 the division of Asia Minor was sealed in the Treaty of Sèvres. The west was to have become Greek and an Armenian state was to have been created in the east. Only central Anatolia was to have remained as a Turkish rump state.

Since then, Sèvres has been a traumatic concept for the Turkish people. Had the treaty been put into action, there would be no Turkey today. Greek sub-imperialism had not only conquered western Asia Minor, but also penetrated it economically. If the Greeks had refrained from ethnic expulsions, the Muslim population would have become the peasant and servant class of a Levantine state dominated by European capital, which had – at least economically – also annexed eastern Anatolia.

If the "eastern question" had been answered by one of these alternatives – quasi-colonial infiltration or Hellenization – the question of whether or not Asia Minor was part of Europe would never have arisen. The Turkey of today would be the south-eastern extremity of the Old Continent. The key geographical focus – the continental frontier at the Bosphorus – would have become geopolitically irrelevant. And the Muslims of Asia Minor would of course have belonged to Europe. All the more so considering that half a million Balkan Turks, who were resettled in Anatolia in the course of the Greek-Turkish population exchange, would have remained in southern Europe. Asia Minor and the Balkans would have formed a huge tract of land whose Christian and Muslim roots would have changed nothing of its European character.

In the debate over Turkey's accession to the European Union, such hypothetical observations are a salutary lesson. More important still is remembering real history. On 19 May 1919, four days after the Greeks had marched into Izmir (Smyrna), Mustafa Kemal declared a war of national liberation. In August 1922, the Greek invasion was repulsed. It was the Greeks of Asia Minor who paid the price; they were driven west over the sea, along with the Greek army. The treaty of Lausanne in 1923 formalized an almost total exchange of populations between the Greeks and the Turks – the first forcible displacement of citizens agreed between two states in history.

Thus, in defence against plans for conquest inspired and licensed by Europe, Turkey created the conditions for the construction of a "modern" nation. And even the nationalism mobilized by Atatürk as "father of the nation" in a war against a threat to Turkish existence – which became the ideological cement of the new nation – was a reversion to European models. The Kemalist "invention of a nation" is reminiscent of the establishment of other nation states in southern Europe. In order to create "proud Turks" from a nationalistically indifferent Muslim population, a combination of social mobilization, compulsory education, and the forcible elimination of particular identities was required. This strategy was one not unfamiliar to the Europeans either.

Kemalism's particular patriarchal character can be explained by the fledgling state of Turkey's social development at the time. But it also goes back to the model of other "delayed nations": the ideological blueprint of the Turkish project was shaped by the fascist era. Even the panicky negation of all religious and ethnic subgroups and minorities – a defining feature of the Kemalist concept of nation – had a historical justification: that the European Muslims who had been deported in the exchange of populations should not feel excluded in their new country, but at home, as Turks with equal rights.

The most important parameters in the story that culminates in modern Turkey as the legacy of the Ottoman Empire were thus set in the process of the European "eastern policy". It would therefore not only be unjust, but historically unwise and shortsighted, to leave the Turkey of today alone on its special path, shaped and imposed by Europe as this has been.

Yet at the same time there are some insights here for modern Turkey with which even the political elites have difficulties. For one, the realization that Turkish society has by no means already been fundamentally and irreversibly "Europeanized", as Kemalist ideology claims. Atatürk did indeed introduce a strict programme of "westernization" and accomplished important reforms – language and literacy reform, the abolition of the caliphate, and the neutralization of religion through the state. But a paternalistic dictatorship of education seldom leads to democratic conditions. Nor did Atatürk ever define himself as a "democrat": the ideological combination of "statism" and "nationalism" left no room for the fundamental western idea that state and nation should serve the development of the individual, not the other way around.

As such, the circumstances in which Kemalism was born constitute a handicap which has prevented fully democratic conditions from flourishing in Turkey to this day. This also explains why the AKP government in Ankara, a government characterized by Islamism rather than Kemalism, has made more systematic progress with the programme of reform required for entry into the EU than the Kemalist politicians before Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It also explains why some of the bitterest opponents of systematic democratization are those parts of the political elite described by Murat Belge as "hardcore Kemalists". Their positions of power are in bureaucratic institutions, in the judiciary, and in the military; their most effective instrument is the "deep state", which crystallizes around MIT, the secret service controlled by the military.

So the two political poles facing each other in Turkey today at the entrance to the EU are not simply the supposedly Islamic forces of Anatolia and a western-oriented bloc. On the issue of how swiftly and comprehensively the EU's Copenhagen criteria can be met, the respective fronts are quite different. This was shown at a conference held by the Green group of the European Parliament that took place in Istanbul at the end of October. Intellectuals such as the writer Orhan Pamuk, and Murat Belge, president of the Helsinki Citizens' Assembly in Turkey, sat on a panel discussing the future of Turkish democracy and criticized their own society and political class. Pamuk observed that, until recently, many of the things that were being called for on this platform could in Turkey have led to imprisonment. He said that he had felt safer as a Turkish citizen since he had been under the protection of Europe. The Kemalist reaction came from the audience: "Mr Pamuk, why do you hate Turkey? Why don't you love your own country?" asked an indignant (female) audience member.

The writer replied calmly: "Well, there are people whose love for their mother country manifests itself in their use of torture. My love for my country manifests itself in my criticism of my state." With this answer Pamuk broke two of the hardline Kemalists' taboos at once: in front of an international audience he broached the subject of torture, which until recently was regarded as a legitimate instrument in the defence of the Turkish state; and he rejected the equation of state and nation that constitutes the centrepiece of the Kemalist creed.

That unity of state and nation was a historically inevitable doctrine, the ideological foundation on which modern Turkey was built. That this unity had to be won in a war of self-defence of course had the fatal consequence that the army was able to justify itself as the guarantor of the state: the equation of state and nation expanded into the unity of state, nation, and army. With the introduction of a multi-party system after 1945, the importance of the Turkish army in this equation increased still further. The officer class found itself confirmed as the custodians of the Kemalist inheritance against the dangers of political pluralism. This manifested itself, among other things, in the military coups which took place between 1960 and 1981, and once again in 1997 in the "soft putsch" which brought down the Islamist government of Necmettin Erbakan.

The political role of the army is even set down in writing in the Turkish constitution, which entrusts the army not only with national defence, but also with the "punctual and accurate identification of threats to the unity of the land and the nation". Moreover, the army has the right to act against any "overt or covert attempt to destroy the indivisible integrity of the Turkish nation, wherever such a threat may originate". No doubt hardline Kemalists also see a similar threat in the excessive demands on Turkey entailed by accession to the EU. What they disputed most fiercely at the Green conference were Brussels' demands that the attested rights of ethnic and religious minorities be guaranteed. Self-evident EU concepts such as "federalism" and "a Europe of regions" are synonymous, on this view, with "separatism" and therefore a threat to the state. The Sèvres complex is deep-rooted. And the suspicion that Europe wants to divide or weaken Turkey if possible is not far even from the minds of many supporters of the EU.

The European perspective is the crucial catalyst for the democratic development of Turkey. The critical standard is the development and strengthening of civil society: only when this secures a more important role will Turkey actually be able to qualify for EU membership. And only when the individual as a citizen – and even as a member of a minority – can emancipate themself from the absolute right of the nation to dispose as it sees fit will Turkey develop into a fully-fledged democracy.

Whether this happens will be decided in Turkey, above all in the dispute between statists and democrats. This dispute will unleash a powerful dynamic whose outcome is uncertain. The guardians of rigid Kemalism will attempt to maintain their positions of power. As for those opposed to the traditionalist camp – the earlier accession talks begin, and the more clearly their goals are defined, the better the Democrats' chances will be. Conversely, restrictive conditions that the Turkish people feel to be discriminatory will be like spokes in the wheels of the democratic forces. For example, it would be a fatal error for the EU summit to grandly declare on 17 December that the talks with Turkey will be "open-ended" – because that would be the first time that a candidate for EU membership has been forcibly reminded of the possibility of its own failure.

At the same time, all the political protagonists in Turkey are aware that the outcome of the negotiation process will of course be "open", in so far as it depends on the political power balances which will develop in the country over the next ten to fifteen years.

And in the process, all participants must realize one thing: as a full member of the EU Turkey will not be the same country as the applicant state of today. The hardline Kemalists accuse their critics of basically wanting a "Second Republic". This charge of "high treason" merely reveals the uneasy foreboding that there is no future for an ossified ideology in a European Turkey. Yet the transformation will not take place in the form of a rupture, but as an open democratic process, via conflicts and compromises.

At the end of this process the Turkish army, for instance, will no longer be a "state within the state" whose budget is beyond the control of parliament. Judicial officials will be trained in accordance with European standards. Religious and ethnic groups will, for example, enjoy the right to define themselves according to the identity which they feel is theirs. And people will be able to discuss their own history freely in public, including matters such as the fate of the Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire.

The Erdogan government has created the legal basis for these developments. How they turn out, time will have to tell; but the EU should avoid anything that plays into the hands of the wrong forces. In times such as these, of all times, Europe should not allow itself to gamble away a great chance to bring peace to a region on its periphery that has so often been riven by conflict. Sahin Alpay, one of the shrewdest Turkish commentators, has described this chance thus: "While the USA's hard power destroys Iraq, the soft power of Europe can transform Turkey."

Published 2005-06-24