Turkey

As Turkey's ruling Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party / AKP) prepares to lay out its defence today against the Turkish constitutional court's attempts to shut it down, Ipek Kuran argues that the court case is a chance for the AKP to prove its secular credentials. Much of the western press has painted the ongoing legal wrangle as one pitting the politically-motivated secularist judiciary against the democratically-elected Islamists of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party. But in the eyes of many Turks, Erdogan's party has dallied too long in the controversial arena of symbols, playing majoritarian politics in spite of the law.

In his speech to the Labour party conference this afternoon, UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband again confirmed Britain's commitment to seeing Turkey join the EU. It's not, however, a very popular opinion in the continent as a whole. France and Germany, in particular, are deeply against the idea - and if France and Germany team up, there's not normally much chance of the other EU member states getting their way.

The potential for Turkish entry allows lazy leader writers yet more excuses to trot out the same old editorials about the potential problems/benefits/dangers of an islamic country joining the EU (hoards of dusky-skinned Mohammedans and the collapse of western European society vs. a long-overdue acknowledgement of the importance of Ottoman, Arabic and wider Islamic cultures on the development of the European identity, take your pick),so I'll try and avoid that.