With elections to the European Parliament fast approaching, the public debate, particularly in France, has tended to focus on Turkey’s candidacy to join the European Union. There may be more pressing issues, but this concentration on Turkey reflects anxiety about the very process of European integration, and the definition of Europe.

From a geological viewpoint, Europe is not a continent. The way we have arranged the division of Europe and Asia does not follow physical geography, but geopolitics. If the Ural mountains are seen as a "natural" division, it is because the bulk of the Russian population is Christian, and lies west of these mountains. Assigning Istanbul to Europe and western Anatolia to Asia is a way of reminding us that Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, used to be a capital city of Christianity.

In that sense, the shock of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 can still be felt some 450 years after the event Many of the intellectuals arguing against the Turkish candidacy still draw a map of Europe which essentially coincides with the Middle Age concept of the Christian world. The essence of geopolitics is that ideology, which includes the way one looks at history, also shapes the map. The essence of geopolitics is that ideology, which includes the way one looks at history, shapes the map. The real issue behind the European Union, therefore, is what is its underlying ideology? The answer is not simple since the ideology has changed tremendously since the collapse of the Soviet Union and, even before, with the first enlargements of the European community to include such countries as Britain and Greece.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that the following key words encapsulate the current ideology of the EU: reconciliation, democracy, rule of law, human rights and the protection of minorities, secularism, market economy, security and solidarity.

What we want to achieve is a new kind of political unit, whose identity is based on these concepts. French-German reconciliation, for example - by no means obvious after World War II - is now taken for granted. To look positively at the Turkish candidacy, therefore, is to share the grand vision of a reconciliation between the three monotheistic religions through secularism. Many, in the Muslim world, particularly in Arab countries, look at Euro-Turkish relations with this in mind. Yet strangely enough, French intellectuals who invented the French concept of secularism "laïcité" - have never resorted to the idea of Christendom more than today.

In concrete, political terms, the relationship between the European Union and Turkey has been shaped by a sequence of mutual commitments - including the 1963 association treaty, the 1999 Helsinki European Council decision to recognize Turkey as a candidate, and EU decision in 2002 that made the opening of negotiations conditional on Turkey’s fulfillment of the 1993 Copenhagen political criteria, which are related to some of the concepts above.

These commitments set the following timetable: In late September or early October, the European Commission will issue a report assessing Turkey’s fulfillment of these criteria. Based on this report, the European Council will decide if and when negotiations are to commence.

If the Turks perceive the report to be unfair, failing in particular to recognize Ankara’s efforts regarding Cyprus, there could be a major political crisis in Turkey. It is important to remember that according to public opinion polls, three quarters of the Turkish population accept the reforms demanded by the commission, but a majority of these believe that whatever they accomplish, European leaders will find a pretext to say no.

If, on the contrary, a date is set to start the negotiations, it should be clear to everybody, both in the European Union and in Turkey, that the negotiations will take a lot of time and will have to be extremely detailed.

At the end of the day, were an adhesion treaty to be signed, it would stand no chance of being unanimously ratified unless all shadows have been swept away. Moreover, the difficulty of getting unanimity for the admission of a new member increases with the number of existing ones.

At some point, further enlargement could become practically impossible. Rather than abstract geographical or cultural speculations, the ratification process would then become the de facto mechanism for setting the boundaries of the Europe.

European integration is a long term process, whose "soft power" has already demonstrated a remarkable vitality. The collapse of the Soviet Union forced us to move ahead at excessive speed, putting the whole construction at risk.

Hence the vertigo over Turkey, a country more populous than Germany, and one which most Europeans are not yet culturally prepared to regard as "one of them". We need time to adjust. But surrendering to emotions next Fall, when the time comes to fulfill our commitments, and refusing to start negotiations even if the conditions we set ourselves are met, would be a fatal mistake.