Before you join ... Turkey, and the rest of us, should rethink its accession to the EU.

WELL, at least the Belgians are against it. And Hans-Gert Poettering, chairman of the Christian Democrat bloc in the European Parliament. And Durmus Hocaoglu, an associate professor at Istanbul's Marmara University. And, er, me.

Strange bedfellows, Alex!, I hear you all cry. What ever can have persuaded this disparate band to unite? Why, the question of Turkey's becoming a member of the European Union, an issue resurrected in December when the EU decided that negotiations should open later this year. In a decade's time, should the country satisfactorily fulfill the "Copenhagen Criteria"--so becoming a lawful, stable democracy that respects human rights, has a market economy, and adopts the common rules of the EU--Muslim, Middle Eastern Turkey will be officially European. It's a momentous thought. Still, we unmerry few are against it, even if everyone else seems cock-a-hoop over the idea. I'm a new convert, to the con side, having energetically backed Turkey's bid for years. I took another look.

There are four arguments consistently put forward by advocates of Turkish accession. The most often heard is the Ebony-and-Ivory ("li-ving in per-fect har-mo-ny") Ploy. In short, not only does Turkey sit at the "crossroads of civilizations" between the "Christian" and Muslim worlds, it has always been part of Europe thanks to its empire in the Balkans.

Geographically speaking, Turkey does indeed sit at a crossroads, but so what? Since when did geography act as the sole determinant of history? And, further, politics hinges on present realities, not on pseudo-historical claims. Consider, too, that Russia also sits at a geographical crossroads, that between Europe and Asia, yet no one is suggesting that she join the EU. As for the imperial claim to member-ship, Ottoman possessions in the Middle East dwarfed those in Europe, yet Turkey does not belong to the Arab League. True, Turks aren't Arabs, but if geographical and historical determinism really matters so much, that's a mere quibble.

The Bush administration, which has backed Turkey's suit from the get-go, has developed a variant on the Ploy we might call the Neocon Defense. That is, Turkish integration will demonstrate that Secular Democracy Works. We will witness a series of democratic revolutions sweeping, like Lawrence of Arabia, through peninsula and gulf and wadi. Yet Turkey has been a working secular democracy since 1923 and doesn't seem to have had much impact heretofore. Why will Europe's imprimatur make a difference?

If anything, the Iranians and the Syrians, whose countries border Turkey, are rather more likely to be aggravated than inspired by the sudden arrival of the "Christian" EU on their doorstep when the "European" border shifts to the Anatolian hinterlands. It's going to look to them like the Crusades all over again, and you know how worked up they get about that. (And don't let's forget Turkey's troubled borders with Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, as well as Kurd-controlled Iraq.) So many flarepoints, so little time: Is allowing Turkey in really worth the hassle? And Washington should ask itself: Does it want an expanded EU competing with it in the Middle East for influence?

Another variant is the Or-Else Threat. Blackballing Turkey will, we hear, cause its secularist system to fall victim to Islamists. Yeah, maybe. But this is to forget that Turkey, where secularism has a different meaning than in the West, already has a moderately religious government, and in any case, what's to stop the Islamaniacs from taking over once Turkey is in the EU? Keep in mind that the longtime EU membership of France, Germany, and Britain has not inoculated them against unpleasant radicalism among their Muslim populations.

Moving on to the second argument: the Free Lunch Scam.

Faced with a decrepit population, the Euros want to import cheap labor to keep them in beer and boules after their pension system collapses. But this Edenic scenario ignores the practical problem of integrating tens of millions of Muslims into a Europe where tensions are already high between unassimilated ones and the natives. In EU institutions, I should add, voting power and influence depends heavily on size of population. At 71 million now, by 2015 Turkey would have equal weighting with the current leader, Germany; given the relative birth rates between the two countries, Turkey is predicted to overtake its rival by 2025.

For their part, the Turks, touchingly, are laboring under the misapprehension that the EU is going to give them so much cash they'll be able to swim in the stuff, as Scrooge McDuck used to do. But there is a price: Turkey must surrender its sovereignty and assent to the acquis communautaire, the existing and expanding body of EU law that enjoys primacy over national legislation. No longer will Ankara make her own decisions on everything from dairy hygiene to "audio-visual policy" to interest rates to dealing with Iran.

So bewitched are they over the prospect of lavish "budget transfers" (as the jargon has it), the Turks have no idea of what lies in store. According to the July 2004 report on public opinion in the older members, the new member-states (NMS), and candidate countries by the EU's official pollster, Eurobarometer, the Turks listed their top three concerns as unemployment, the economic situation, and inflation, and named the army, the police, and the legal system as their three most trusted institutions. They were the most likely of anyone to believe the EU to be effective in reducing taxation--heaven knows where they picked up that bizarre idea--and least likely to say that the EU could fight. Kemalist instincts blazing, nearly three-quarters of Turks said they trusted their national parliament, compared with an NMS average of just 16 percent. What we have here, in other words, is a nation of patriots who think the EU will cut their taxes and leave it at that.

Eurobarometer also found that Turks know the least of anyone about the EU. They received the lowest score in answering a general-knowledge quiz containing true-or-false statements ranging from, "The EU consists of 12 member states" to "The headquarters of the EU are in Strasbourg." No fewer than 34 percent of Turks could not answer a single question correctly. They also recorded the dubious distinction of being the least aware of such entities as the Court of Justice, the European Commission, the Central Bank, and even the European Parliament. I suspect that if the Turks became better informed about the acquis and the institutions invented to enforce it, they might start rethinking this whole EU bag. There is, indeed, no such thing as a free lunch.

The third argument is the Euroskeptic Gambit. A clever one, this. Despite the EU's obsession with becoming a centralized hyperpower, the shattering impact of Turkish entry would "necessarily mean devolving some powers back to the national capitals" to prevent an explosion, as Daniel Hannan, a British member of the European Parliament, recently put it. I quite agree that EU reform is made more probable by Turkish accession, but I think it would be reform in the opposite direction: As it has for decades, the EU, like the Borg (which it kinda resembles), would successfully adapt to the challenge by becoming more centralized, not less, in order to harmonize differences. Ironically, then, by supporting Turkish aspirations so as to weaken the EU, the Euroskeptics would fall prey to the still more fiendishly cunning Europhile Variation, in which the EU actually becomes stronger and more unified.

The final argument is the Head-Patting Principle. Good little Turkey, it is claimed, has patiently waited since the 1950s for its turn, and in the meantime has under-taken wide-ranging structural, economic, constitutional, and social reforms to fulfill the Copenhagen Criteria. Turkey deserves a pat on the head by being let in, put simply. Not quite. Membership of the EU is not solely conditional on fulfilling these criteria. Otherwise, Canada could join. It's subjective, of course, but Turkey does not, as yet, feel or look European enough to pass muster, and demanding rewards for good behavior is a risky political tactic.

In any case, the Turks would have to be mad to rely on non-binding assurances by various European politicians that all will go well for them. All it takes is just one veto by an EU member-state to end a candidate's chances, and Turkey has plenty of enemies lurking behind the scenes. But they should look on the bright side. Thanks to all those reforms, Turkey has amplified itself into a powerful and booming regional power on friendly terms with the U.S., the EU, and its neighbors. There's simply no need to prostrate itself before Brussels, especially since Turkey bagged the elephant ten years ago: a customs-union agreement with the EU that erased trade barriers between them. Since then, Turkish business and the stock market have flourished--without signing up for the leaden weight of the acquis.

If she keeps pushing for full membership while quietly dampening expectations at home, an independent Turkey can even hold out for a "Privileged Partnership" with the EU--a high-status agreement full of economic, security, and political goodies but containing only such parts of the acquis as Ankara wants. The Euros will be relieved just to see the Turkish question resolve itself so nicely. For Euroskeptics across the Continent, there would finally be a working alternative to the determinist, expansionist, self-aggrandizing tendencies of Brussels. And if Ankara were really deft, in league with other non-EU European states it could simultaneously arrange to join a trans-Atlantic version of NAFTA.

These are solutions that will please (most of) the Europeans, satisfy us, and, most important, give the Turks a reason to cheer their pashas.