ABSTRACT
While a secular policy is not unusual in the European context, especially when the strict laicism advanced in France is considered, the stringent interpretation of Turkey’s particular ‘brand’ of secularism in a country where the population is almost entirely Muslim, is somewhat remarkable.1 With such a rigorous secularist policy in place, it may seem surprising that the issue of religion should enter into the debate surrounding Turkish accession at all. Indeed it would appear that it has remained ancillary to the more public debates taking place on issues such as Turkey’s ability to fulfi l requirements related to human rights protections and its willingness to resolve the Cyprus dispute, examined earlier. Yet the path of Turkey’s road to EU accession suggests that this ‘secular’ Muslim state raises the ‘clash of civilisations’ debate that integration would bring.2 Casanova makes an interesting point in this regard on the current presence of the ‘other’ already in Europe:
Publicly, of course, European liberal secular elites could not share the Pope’s defi nition of European civilization as essentially Christian. But they also could not verbalize the unspoken ‘cultural’ requirements that make the integration of Turkey into Europe such a diffi cult issue. The specter of millions of Turkish citizens already in Europe, but not of Europe, many of them second-generation immigrants caught between an old country they have left behind and their European host societies unable or unwilling to fully assimilate them, only makes the problem more visible.3
