WorldView/Paul Gillespie: 'The imaginative exploration of the other, the enemy who resides in all our minds." This is how Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer who has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, defines the novelist's most important task. His work has been controversial precisely because it reveals how false unitary accounts of political and cultural identities can be.
This shows up in his frank acceptance that Armenians suffered from a genocide in the final stages of the Ottoman empire during the first World War, for which he was prosecuted by a nationalist group for insulting Turkishness; in his novel Snow, which explores the confrontation between secular and fundamentalist Islam; and in his book about Istanbul published last year, which evokes the city's bricolage of overlapping identities. Cultures are not composed of singular, univocal essences, he argues, but are plural and interwoven between multivocal selves and others.
The theme was put in the foreground last weekend at a conference in Istanbul of researchers from think tanks dealing with relations between European and Mediterranean countries. Some 200 people from 55 institutes attended, with a large Turkish presence, including several ministers.
Introducing the conference theme of "paths to democracy and inclusion within diversity" Alvaro Vasconcelos from Lisbon warned against the danger of "culturalism", the assumption that civilisations, like national identities, are composed of such singular essences, have personalities and are bound to clash.
"It is as if nothing has changed since the Crusades." Such a lens obscures and distorts real political and economic changes around the Mediterranean. They are reduced to a monolithic conception of us and them, friends and enemies, closed and unconnected entities.
Turks are becoming all too used to such simplicities as their bid to join the European Union runs into more and more opposition.
The Armenian question was to the fore this week, after the French parliament voted to make the denial of genocide a crime, mirroring a 1990 law about the Holocaust. The measure threatens to upset Franco-Turkish relations, which are anyway fraught following rejection of the EU constitution last year, in which Turkey's membership became conflated with France's difficulty in relating to Islamic culture.
The antagonism is full of irony in that Turkish secular republicanism was constructed by Ataturk by drawing freely on the French experience. Now the assimilationist assumptions of both state establishments are increasingly at odds. Mehmet Aydin, a Turkish minister of state, made the point that when security agendas supplant democratic ones, immigrant communities suffer from the cutting off of funds for multicultural education and language teaching. The ascendancy of right-wing parties has been accompanied by a shift from integration to assimilationist policies in several European states, including France, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria.
This is associated with growing hostility to Turkish EU membership.
Speaking to this conference, Ahmet Davutoglu, an adviser to the prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, made the point that after 9/11 there was a shift from freedom and democracy to security and power as guiding political norms throughout western states. But Turkey was a conspicuous exception to the trend. Erdogan's government came to power in 2002 and Turkey has undergone a huge programme of legal reform in preparation for EU entry. It is led by a reforming Islamic party which believes its cultural rights are best protected and affirmed by European norms of tolerance and mutual respect rather than by Turkish secularism.
Even if that aspiration comes under more and more question the programme will continue, he vowed. It is accompanied by a massive economic growth of 40 per cent over the last three years and a doubling of per capita income. Europe should realise that if it is to be a power centre it must be ready for migration and multiculturalism.
There are growing fears that Turks are becoming disillusioned with these hostile attitudes and turning away from European engagement. The shift goes beyond the normal ebb and flow of enthusiasm seen in other EU accession states as the intrusiveness of their adaptation becomes more clearly apparent. Turkey has other options in its region - with Iran and Russia, for example. The significance of Erdogan's commitment is that it brings a strategic element to Europe's relations with the Mediterranean and Middle East regions.
This speculation is premature, although it could be provoked by a failure to resolve the issue of opening Turkish ports to Cypriot goods next month. Several states are hiding behind the issue and stoking it. Turkish officials believe it can be overcome by reciprocal moves concerning access to Northern Cyprus; but one told me they will have to draw the necessary conclusions if the interests of 70 million people are gratuitously subordinated to those of 600,000 Cypriots. There is a widespread belief that it was wrong to allow Cyprus join the EU, with a veto on relations with Turkey, before its national question was resolved.
The view is shared by European critics of these trends such as former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer. "Safeguarding Europe's interests today means establishing a strong link between - indeed an unbreakable bond - with Turkey as a cornerstone of regional security. So it is astonishing that Europe is doing exactly the opposite: firmly closing its eyes to the strategic challenge posed by Turkey".
Chancellor Angela Merkel was in Istanbul last week. Although she confirmed her party wants to see Turkey in a reinforced partnership with the EU rather than full membership, she declared the process of negotiations should continue.
Much may change over the 10-15 years it may take to prepare for membership. But to Turks it looks as if new conditions are being laid out, such as absorption capacity, recognising the Armenian genocide, or passage of constitutional reform, in addition to the 1993 criteria for EU enlargement set out in Copenhagen.
The new culturalism is part and parcel of that. Pope Benedict XVI seeks to harness it to the notion of a Christian Europe incompatible with Turkish EU membership. He will have an opportunity to elaborate when he visits Turkey next month. His controversial quotation from a 14th century Byzantine emperor under Ottoman siege bemuses sophisticated European Turks like Orhan Pamuk.