TURKEY: Opinion polls in Turkey regularly show that 70 per cent of Turks want to join the European Union but only 30 per cent think Europe will let them in.
Following the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights last Thursday that Turkey's 1999 trial of Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan was neither independent nor impartial, it is a contradiction that risks becoming untenable.
With a constitution that acknowledges the supremacy of international law, Turkey has little option but to call a retrial. Foot-dragging could jeopardise the government's chances of getting an accession date from Brussels this October.
Explaining that to the Turkish people will be far from easy.
Ocalan was the country's number one enemy well before he was captured in 1999 and condemned to death for treason. Under pressure from the EU, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment three years later.
An extreme left-winger who cut his teeth in the violent left-right clashes of the 1970s, Ocalan went on to lead the longest and perhaps bloodiest Kurdish rebellion in Turkish history. By the early 1990s, around 20,000 guerrillas were fighting for his Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. Their 15-year war against the Turkish state cost 37,000 lives and an estimated $15 billion.
Hatred of the man who threatened to split the country runs deep in Turkey: the media routinely refers to Ocalan as "the baby-killer". Last summer, two Kurdish politicians were put on trial for calling him "Mr".
In an effort to avoid the death penalty, Ocalan called a ceasefire in 1999. But after five years of relative peace, the PKK are fighting again in the south-east of Turkey. On Thursday, two Turkish soldiers were killed in a fire fight in the central province of Tunceli.
On the same day, a senior army officer confirmed fortnight-long rumours when he warned that the group might be planning bomb attacks in western Turkish cities this summer.
Little wonder the Turkish government responded to the European legal decision by emphasising that its criticisms were merely procedural.
"Whether this dossier is reopened or not," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday, "the matter [ of Ocalan's guilt] is a closed one for the nation's conscience." He was echoing a statement made earlier in the week by his foreign minister. "Even if [ Ocalan] were retried a hundred times, he would get the same sentence", Abdullah Gul said.
What makes the Ocalan decision so sensitive in Turkey, though, is that many Turks have long interpreted EU insistence on broader Kurdish rights as tacit support for the PKK.
As the army chief of staff Hilmi Ozkok put it late this April, the PKK "is dictating its demands in the guise of cultural rights with the EU acting as intermediary." A week earlier, Mr Erdogan had accused "elements in the west" of using the Kurdish issue "to divide Turkey". With the legal issue in the open, Turkey's Eurosceptics have lost no time in turning the decision to their own advantage.
"The European Court of Human Rights ruling is entirely political", deputy chief of staff Yasar Buyukanit said on Thursday.
The retrial of Ocalan "means playing with Turkey's honour, inciting the people on an issue where Turkey is indisputably right", the nationalist leader of Turkey's parliamentary opposition, Deniz Baykal, told journalists on Tuesday. "It is unacceptable now for us to bend our necks merely because of EU pressure."
Most observers believe a staunch response by the government should be enough to ride out the growing storm. The technique worked last year, they point out, when the European Court of Human Rights ordered a retrial of imprisoned Kurdish politician Leyla Zana and her three colleagues.
But the atmosphere in Turkey has changed. This March an attempt by a group of teenagers to desecrate the Turkish flag at Kurdish celebrations in the southern city of Mersin sparked a wave of nationalism.
Turks often point to their country's lack of racism, but the recent anger has a distinct anti-Kurdish edge. After the flag incident, police in the central city of Konya had to intervene to stop local shopkeepers attacking their Kurdish neighbours.
For the moment, all is quiet. But the Ocalan story is far from over.
EU politicians are expected to make a final political decision on the legal ruling this July. And Turkey must repeal a law passed in 2003 specifically to make Ocalan's retrial impossible.