BRUSSELS, 4 October 2004 — Admitting mainly Muslim Turkey into the European Union would mark nothing short of a cultural, economic and political revolution for Europe, analysts say. Accepting the vast country, with its explosive combination of poverty and a burgeoning population, into the bloc would also throw up the basic question of what are the limits of the expanding union.

With a population predicted at 73 million in 2005 alone, Turkey would immediately leap up alongside EU heavyweight Germany, and ahead of France and Britain in terms of voting rights and seats in the European Parliament.

The country is already bigger than the 10 mostly ex-Communist states which joined the EU this year put together. The UN predicts it will have 82 million inhabitants by 2015 — widely cited as a target date for Turkey’s EU entry.

The strategic argument for this year’s expansion eastward was to reunite a continent divided after World War II. Turkey’s backers say admitting Ankara is essential to build a bridge between the West and the volatile Middle East.

“It is necessary ... that after the opening to the East, Europe now turns toward the South so that it can again become the link between the Western world and the Orient,” said former French Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

On the economic front, although Turkey has made vigorous progress for the last few years, the country has a huge backlog to make up with the union, in particular in its farming sector.

Gross domestic product (GDP) per capital remains barely a quarter of the 25-member EU’s, at 6,356 euros ($7,878) compared to 22,278 euros ($27,612).

This huge imbalance means it will cost the EU’s current states dear at the start, notably in terms of subsidies dished out under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

Outgoing EU Farm Commissioner Franz Fischler said the EU would have to spend some 11.3 billion euros per year on farm aid alone for Turkey, with a further 10 billion euros a year expected to be paid out in regional development aid.

But politically and culturally, Turkey’s EU entry would also force the union to think about even more fundamental questions. “Once we let Turkey in, there will immediately be applications from Palestine and Israel and Morocco. Then we’re talking about a completely different Europe,” said Yves Meny of the European Institute in Florence.

Turkey’s EU accession would strain to breaking point the EU’s already stretched common foreign policy, whose limits were dramatically highlighted by last year’s Iraq war, he said.

“The simple idea of a common foreign and security policy seems increasingly crazy to me. Even today we can’t do it,” he said. Strauss-Kahn takes that idea one step further, arguing that spreading south is the logical next step for the EU.

“The challenge is indeed to make the Mediterranean an “internal” European sea. It is this geographical area that constitutes Europe’s natural sphere of influence,” said Strauss-Kahn.

Religion is of course not among the benchmarks which the EU is monitoring as it mulls whether to give Ankara a green light in December to start membership negotiations. But the prospect of a country whose population is some 95 percent Muslim threatens to shake the EU’s geopolitical standing to the core. Stanley Crossick, founder of the European Policy Center in Brussels, questions whether Turkey would create a bridge of understanding, or rather a bridgehead from which large numbers of Muslims will “invade” Western society.