Even though it can hardly have been a surprise, Turks have been angered by their latest rebuff from the European Union. On Friday, EU leaders at their Copenhagen summit refused to start talks on Turkey’s entry before December 2004. Thus realistically, Turks cannot expect to become full EU members before 2010, assuming that is, that the talks are successful. The next decade, however, should give Turkey the opportunity to reflect upon what it really wants from European membership. It ought to consider carefully whether it will actually obtain those desires.

Europe is changing fast from an economic club to a nascent superstate. Already the world’s single biggest market, it has its own currency and increasing homogenization of business and financial standards. Ten years ago when European enthusiasts were selling the EU, they made much of the economic convergence issue. Nowadays, that is almost taken for granted. It is political convergence that is now on the agenda.

Turkey’s policy to join the EU was formulated 20 years ago by the government of Turgut Ozal and it has changed little in that time. Fobbed off initially with special associate status, which allowed the Germans to continue to isolate their Turkish guest workers and deny them citizenship, Ankara has merely continued to knock patiently and doggedly on the Brussels’s front door. But the club has changed its objectives.

Even though it has suffered its fair share of economic woes, Turkey’s economy could any time in the last two decades have survived the tough transformation necessary to realign it for the member the European Economic Community.

Now, however, the hoop is higher and smaller. The EEC has transformed itself, without, incidentally, a “by your leave” from any of its citizens, into the European Union. With increasing vigor, Brussels is sucking legislative, regulatory, legal and economic powers from individual capitals into its own domain. Taking ever more power into the center is for the EU perhaps both the source of its future strength but also its greatest danger. Even countries like the UK, well used to devolving decisions to supranational bodies, are concerned at the growing loss of power to the EU.

How much more concerned will Turks be when they are having to conform to the dictates of some faceless Eurocrat 2,000 miles away in Brussels? Given that the Turkish commercial law, undeveloped as it is, will be swept away by EU laws, along with regulations and rules that cover almost every level of life, the shock of transformation could be very great indeed.

Though it is right for the new Turkish government to continue to press Turkey’ EU claims, it is surely time that it also conducted a review of why the EU remains the overwhelming foreign policy goal. Someone needs to work out if the advantages that were apparent 20 years ago are still there for the taking.

Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, when asked to compare the Turks with other nationalities, said that, in fact, the people they most resembled were themselves. Certainly as far as Europe is concerned, the major similarities exist only as a result of the triumph of Turkish culture and arms in the Balkans and southeastern Europe.