Oh please. You can hardly go judging the Osman Empire by modern standards - for the standards of the time, it was at times impressively multicultural and tolerant, even if there were also periods of strife and less tolerance. I assume you're familiar with the story of Shabtai Zvi? Do you really think he'd have met as much forbearance in Europe as he did in the Osman Empire? There's the devshirme of course, but that wasn't constant, and for all the traumas that left in the Balkan, there *are* worse things that can be done to a population than forcibly enlisting their sons and offering them nice careers.

And I don't know if you're aware of it, but (mostly Greek) European citizens of the Osman Empire were prominent among the big merchants of the empire, as well as having many leading positions in the fleets and the administration.

And lastly of course, today's Turkey is not the Osman Empire anymore. The loss of all its Middle Eastern possessions automatically made it less focused on the Middle East, and as I said, Atatürk's legacy has made it a state after the European model, focused more on the West than on the East, even if the AKP is now trying to bring more balance to that. Sure, it's a state that has a rather 30's-like view of nationalism, but still.

And? Those states weren't converted by force, nor by expulsion of the Christians. They just converted over time and managed to form a large enough Muslim community that they weren't converted back when the Balkan states gained their independence. Same with the Muslim minorities in Bulgaria and eastern Greece.

More importantly than Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia, though, Muslims have become a significant presence in Europe through immigration to many countries. The mere fact of Turkey being predominantly Islamic is hardly enough reason to keep them out. And no, they won't join the EU any time soon, but if some decades down the line they try to join, they will be let in.

You don't think opening diplomatic relations with Armenia, agreeing on the formation of a commission to look into the genocide and planning to reopen the border after all these years constitutes progress? We'd have to disagree on that then. Of course actually recognizing the genocide is still a few steps further, but it certainly is progress.
Same story with the Kurds. The nationalism of the Turkish establishment still prevents the Kurds from having full minority rights as they are in Europe, and yes, there's still the occasional violence. But how you can claim to see no progress when the government has started Kurdish-language state television - with a speech in Kurdish by the PM - and talked of going further still while investing large sums in the region, when Abdullah Ocalan has not only not been executed but is now publishing books and manifests from his prison that contribute to the debate about how to treat the Kurds, that's beyond me. That's a rather far cry from the "Kurds do not exist, there are only Turks and mountain Turks" stances of the past. Here too, they're not going remotely far enough yet, but the progress is certainly significant.

That's really just silly rhetoric that I'd expect from neocon fools, not from you. The dangerous elements in Turkey, and the elements that most adamantly oppose any concessions either towards the Kurds or on the Armenian genocide matter, and are most opposed to genuine free speech, are the ultranationalists and ultrasecularists, in the armed forces and the judicial system. Of course the AKP is still rather nationalistic by our standards and still not too eager to go as far as we think they should, but they're better than the CHP and the MHP in the opposition. And as for "one step closer to implementing an Iranian-style theocracy", are you referring to the attempts to allow the wearing of headscarves at universities? Because honestly, that's a matter of religious freedom (even if I can understand the arguments against children wearing them in schools and against state employees in Europe wearing them), not of theocracy. And religious freedom for minorities has improved in recent years, even if that's more thanks to the courts than to the government.

I mean, you know, of course Erdogan and others in the party have Islamist roots, and of course a lot of the positive change he has brought has been in order to fulfill the EU entry requirements (which if you ask me is a fairly important reason why we should let them in eventually), but still he has done all those things. What he really thinks of all that, or what he would do if the secular establishment allowed him free rein, who knows, but if he's willing to make this his political legacy, he mustn't disagree with it all that much. And allow me to point out that European contemporary politics has a number of leading politicians who were rather radical or even extremist at the beginning of their political careers, but have moved towards the center and become respectable. Examples include ex-fascist Gianfranco Fini in Italy, who is now ironically becoming the favourite right-wing politician of the Italian left, and former communists (or at least radical-left, what with May '68 and all that) Joschka Fischer in Germany and Daniel Cohn-Bendit in France.