A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of Turkey knocking on the doors of the recently expanded union of 25 nations. Should the European Union open its door or should it find another pretext for keeping Turkey out?

The question is on the agenda of the European Union summit scheduled to take place in Dublin later this month.

As things stand chances of issuing an invitation for membership to Turkey appear slim. Several leading members of the union have already announced their intention to keep Turkey out, even if that means exercising their right of veto.

France’s President Jacques Chirac and Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi might have no time for one another but are at one when it comes to opposing Turkey’s application. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is less forthright in his opposition. But he, too, has chosen to play the anti-Turkish card if only not to be outdone by his Christian Democrat opponents at home. British Prime Minister Tony Blair is favorable to Turkey’s membership but is unlikely to go out of his way to actually fight for it.

The official arguments advanced against admitting Turkey into the European Union are well known.

Turkey, we are told, has a large peasantry that could bankrupt the union by demanding subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). But that argument fades when we note that the CPA has already reached a dead-end with the admission of new members from Central and Eastern Europe and mounting pressure for the removal of farm subsidies as the last impediment to global free trade.

Another argument is that Turkey is not democratic enough to enter the union. This is true. It may take Turkey many more decades before it can be regarded as a mature democracy. But one must also note that membership of the European Union could accelerate the process of democratization as it did in Portugal and Greece and is doing in the formerly Communist states.

Turkey made its first moves toward Europe in the 1970s and started its pursuit of full membership in the 1980s. The Europeans reacted by demanding massive economic, political and social reforms as a means of delaying serious negotiations about the Turkish application. Over the past two decades the Turks have patiently worked on a package of reforms, starting with a large dose of economic liberalization under Turgot Ozal. Under the previous center-left coalition government, Turkey started constitutional reforms designed to reduce the influence of the military in politics, and to improve human rights. The process has continued under the current center-right government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan with even greater determination.

And yet Turkey’s compliance with European demands, including some that were hard to swallow, appear to have had little effect on those who are determined to block its membership.

This is because those who oppose Turkey’s membership do so for ideological rather than political or economic reasons.

I raised the issue with Helmut Kohl, Germany’s former Chancellor at a breakfast in Paris just over a year ago. Kohl has been a consistent opponent of Turkey’s membership since the 1980s.

The fact that his son has married a Turkish lady has not changed his position.

Kohl asserted that the European Union was “an association of nations with a Christian heritage” and that Turkey, a nation with “an Islamic heritage”, had no place in it.

Slightly later I heard a similar argument from Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a French former president after a session of the European constitution committee in London. “Turkey belongs to a different civilization,” Giscard asserted. “As a Muslim society, Turkey will not be at home in Europe.”

I admire Kohl and Giscard for having the courage to speak their minds, even though doing so when one is out of power is that much easier.

They are saying aloud what most European leaders think in silence. Turkey means Islam and Islam is the code word for ancestral fears in Europe. But is this enough to shut Turkey out of the union? Not at all.

To start with the claim that the European Union is a Christian club is both false and dangerous. In the 25 member states of the union, no more than 30 percent of the population describe themselves as practising Christians. If the religion of one’s birth is the yardstick, the union is home to some 20 million Muslims. In fact, Islam is the second largest religion throughout the union. There are also almost two million Jews and millions of European converts to a variety of other creeds, from Buddhism to the many currently fashionable sects. Europe today is one big supermarket of religions and political ideologies in which the choice is left with the individual not the state.

European democracy is supposed to be based on the separation of church and state. Thus the union cannot, and does not, have any religion of its own. To use Christianity as a means of inventing an exclusivist “identity” for Europeans is as dangerous as the Nazis’ use of the so-called race factor to distinguish Aryan “supermen” from other “subhuman” races.

The claim that Turkey is an “Islamic” state is manifestly wrong. The Turkish republic has no official religion and has been a secular state for almost eight decades, much longer than many of the members of the European Union. While almost 98 percent of Turks are born Muslims, virtually the entire cultural production of the Turkish nation — from poetry and philosophy to music and architecture — is secular.

For almost half a century Turkey served as Europe’s first line of defense against Soviet imperialism. (The Turkish Army was, and remains, the second largest within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after the United States’.) And yet no one in France or Germany objected to being defended by “Muslim” soldiers” on the edges of Europe.

Paradoxically, Turkey’s membership of the European Union could be a godsend for all those who do not wish to see what was initially a free trade club transformed into a super-state. Kohl and Giscard dream of a United States of Europe, in which the many nationalities of the continent shall use their specific cultures and identities.

This is a dream that they share with many conquerors in history — from Charlemagne to Hitler and passing by Napoleon. They do not realize that Europe was able to create the modern world largely because of its diversity that allowed alternative spaces for innovation and, when necessary, scientific, religious and political dissent. Had Europe been one vast despotic empire, as Russia had been under the Tsars, it would not have been able to foster the pluralism that makes democracy and progress possible.

Turkey’s entry into the EU will re-emphasize the continent’s diversity, thus making it more difficult for the advocates of the European super-state to convince the voters to give up their national identities.

Those who want Europe to stay European must support Turkey’s membership in the union.