TURKEY: History is dictating the strongest views within the EU on Turkey's proposed membership, writes Peter Murtagh.
Europe and Turkey have been out of sorts for centuries and the root cause is history - some of it distant, some more recent.
Austria is the country most overtly opposed to Ankara's admission to the EU. For much of the 17th century, Austria and Turkey - in the guise of the Habsburgs versus the Ottomans - fought for primacy over eastern Europe, with control of Hungary, Romania and the Balkans being the focus of combat.
The rivalry peaked with the siege of Vienna from July to September 1683 when the Ottomans tried - unsuccessfully - to break the Habsburgs. The Ottoman action prompted Poland, Venice, and Russia to join the Habsburg Empire to repel the Turks.
In 1686 Habsburg forces moved into central Hungary and captured Buda, the mirror city on the western bank of the Danube to Pest on the east bank. Within a year, the Ottoman Empire had been eliminated as a power in central Hungary.
While no one pretends that morning conversations on the Vienna trams are dominated by events over 300 years ago, history nonetheless forms a backdrop to present day political attitudes in Austria.
In the first World War, the Ottoman Empire, with a Turkish army of some 600,000, allied itself to Germany in an opportunistic bid to regain territories lost by declaring, in November 1914, a military jihad against France, Britain and Russia. But Turkey was no match (even with German support) for the military and industrial might of Imperial Britain and lost the war - with the result that Turkish influence across a vast swathe of the middle east (from Iraq and Mesopotamia, to Egypt, Palestine and Syria) was replaced by British influence.
As part of the general policy of the first World War victors of extracting retribution from the vanquished, Greece, at the request of Britain, France and the US, expanded its presence in Asia Minor (the ancient name for western Turkey) by occupying Izmir (Smyrna) and the city's hinterland. After consolidating its control over a fairly large zone, in spring 1920 the Greeks, again encouraged by London, further expanded the area of their occupation, taking Panderma (on the Sea of Marmara) as well as Bursa and Uak.
Once the Turkish sultan's government in Istanbul had signed the Peace of Sèvres (which gave Greece possession of Eastern Thrace and supreme authority in the Smyrna region for five years, to be followed by a plebiscite), the Turkish nationalist regime in Ankara, headed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, vowed to fight back.
In August 1922, Atatürk launched a series of major attacks against the central and southern sectors of the Greek front. Though they encountered fierce resistance in some places, the Turks soon made headway in several strategic locations.
The country reclaimed, Atatürk set about securing for Turkey a determinedly secular form of government with the army guaranteeing political power - factors which have made Turkey the most stable and liberal of Muslim states but one in which the military has a role at odds with the practice in more advanced democracies.
The catastrophic rout of the Greek army in Asia Minor saw the Greek presence there reduced essentially to what it is today: a number of islands in the eastern Aegean such as Rhodes, Samos and Lesbos and all mainland Turkish territory ruled from Ankara.
Revolution, a coup, executions and political instability followed in Athens. Under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, Greece and Turkey agreed to the single largest forced exchange of people known at that time: nearly 400,000 Turks were evacuated from Greece to Turkey, and some 1.3 million Greeks were expelled from Asia Minor. Tellingly, the determining factor for who went where was not nationality or language but religion: there were to be few Muslims in Greece and few Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey.
The tensions within Greece that arose from having to cope with so many refugees, many of them destitute, plus the parallel instability between monarchists and the Orthodox church on the one hand, and secular nationalists and communists on the other, infected Greek politics for the rest of the 20th century.
Fossilised politics helped create the neo-fascist dictatorship of the colonels junta which ruled from 1967 to 1974.
The junta imploded when, at its behest, Nikos Sampson, a psychopathic butcher in Cyprus, staged a coup toppling the government in Nicosia. Sampson, a Greek Cypriot nationalist, was well known for the zeal of his killing of Cypriot Turks. The overthrown government was imperfect but was a functioning coalition of the island's ethnic Greek and Turkish politicians.
Not surprisingly, the mainland Turkish army responded to Sampson by invading to protect the island's Turkish community. Ever since, the northern part of Cyprus has in effect been annexed by Turkey.
The passage of time and the confluence of governments in Athens and Ankara that want to rub along together in the sort of working partnership that the EU can sponsor means Cypriot politicians will next year come under unprecedented pressure to consign their differences to history.
Peter Murtagh is author of The Rape of Greece - the king, the colonels and the resistance