Turkey has been knocking on Europe's door since 1963 but doubts are growing as to how much ordinary Turks want to join the EU, reports Nicholas Birch in Istanbul
Turkey's pro-Europeans have long looked forward to EU membership talks as the consummation of a 40-year courtship.
But Turks are still unclear whether they'll be getting a marriage contract, or a jilting.
Assured by the EU on December 17th last year that it met the political criteria for accession, Turkish anger has been mounting for months as European countries have questioned its Europeanness.
Now doubts are growing here as to how deeply ordinary Turks want the European Union.
Such ambivalence is not new. Bringing Turkey into line with European civilisation was central to the vision of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the country's authoritarian founder.
Yet neither he nor his subjects ever forgot that independence in 1923 was plucked from the hands of invaders, sponsored by western powers led by Britain and France.
For a long time, the prospect of EU accession has been the only thing bridging the deep divisions in Turkish society.
A mixed bag of religious conservatives, liberals and nationalists, Turkey's ruling party was a symbol of the new consensus. However, increasingly overt European hostility to Turkey's accession bid in recent months has only deepened Turks' innate suspicions of European intentions.
Back in December 2004, when Brussels gave Ankara a date to start negotiations, polls showed 75 per cent of Turks supporting EU membership.
That figure has now dropped to about 60 per cent. "The EU will never accept us", Emin Colasan, a columnist for the mass-market daily Hurriyet wrote yesterday.
"They will use us just as they have done up to now, belittling us, forcing us to take decisions based on their interests."
Faced with Austrian insistence that the negotiating framework for accession talks contain the possibility of a "privileged partnership" rather than full membership, Turkish leaders warned last Friday that they could walk away for once and for all.
Analysts say the temptation for the Turkish government to tone down its staunch support for the European project must be growing. "If [ prime minister] Tayyip Erdogan stood up today and said 'Turkey is a proud country and we've had enough of being humiliated', his support would surge," says liberal political columnist Sami Kohen.
Fearful of the staunchly secular army, which is suspicious of its roots in political Islam, Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has no choice for the moment but to carry on.
Some in the West are afraid the present atmosphere may strengthen the hand of extreme religious groups in Turkey. Didn't Turkey's current prime minister once notoriously say "thank God, I am for shariah [ Islamic law]"?
It's a suggestion ridiculed by Turks, who point out that no overtly Islamic party in Turkey has ever won more than 20 per cent of the vote.
Polls consistently show 90 per cent of Turks support the country's secular system.
"Turks are secular not just because they are afraid of the generals", says Fulya Ertekin, a student in Istanbul. "They are secular because they have no memory of any other system, and no inclination for anything else."
What is far more likely, Turkish analysts say, is that growing European hostility will lead to a surge in radical Turkish nationalism.
The foundations have always been there, thinks historian Aykut Kansu. "Turkey," he says, "is a country that has normalised ultra-nationalist ideas."
The trouble is, argues political scientist Hakan Yavuz, that they may already have been activated by issues like the European Parliament's call last Wednesday for Turkish membership to be conditional on its recognition of the 1915 Armenian genocide.
"When a lot of Turks look at the EU, they see calls for better rights for the Kurds, greater freedoms for the country's religious minorities", he says.
"For them, that's worryingly reminiscent of western plans to divide the country up in the early 20th century." He has no doubt that the victims of a nationalist backlash will be Turkey's Kurds.
It's a very pessimistic attitude, but not uncommon.
Back in March, controversial columnist Mine Kirikkanat questioned western fears that the huge sales of Hitler's Mein Kampf in Turkey had anything to do with growing anti-Semitism.
"Turks put Kurds in the place of the Jews targeted in Hitler's book," she wrote in the liberal daily Radikal, "and find in its ideology of hatred a suitable foundation for their growing feelings that enough is enough."
She was referring to the immense anger many feel at the increasing Kurdish separatist violence in southeastern Turkey.
Others point out that while organised crime has long been the scourge of Turkish cities, it is only recently that Turks and the populist media have begun specifically accusing the gangs of being Kurdish.
Nobody is suggesting Turkey is on the verge of an ethnic civil war, but tensions are undoubtedly high.
Bahadir Kaleagasi, Brussels representative of Turkey's powerful pro-European business lobby TUSIAD, thinks the EU would do well to step very carefully as negotiations continue.
"If Turkey has been transformed for the good over the past six years, it's thanks to the EU", he says. "But if present European attitudes do not change, the EU could rapidly become a destabilising force."