There was a time when Istanbul was one of the safest cities in the world, because people were afraid of the police. People are no longer as afraid of the police as they used to be. Mugging used to be almost unknown; now everybody is afraid of mugging. In that sense, the downside of liberalization is already being felt in Turkey. And of course some people are afraid of Kurdish ethno-terrorism, which worries Turks very much more than the religious sort.

Historically Turkey hasn't had much success in attracting foreign investment. Slowly that is changing. There's a tradition of arbitrary decisions by government ministers and senior civil servants, which would ruin businesses from one day to the next, and which has tended to deter foreign investment. That's changing, and convergence with E.U. practices is a good thing in that it improves governance.

There are of course economic advantages to having Turkey as a member of the European club. It's a developing country with a large, reasonably well-trained labor force at a time when the European birth rate is dropping at a catastrophic rate and Europe is graying. It offers opportunities for greater trade and investment to the benefit of both Turkey and Europe.

I'm optimistic about Turkey's prospects for reaching the E.U.'s standards of development, governance, and democracy, whether inside or outside the E.U. Provided you have a prosperous, rational society in Turkey that can interact with Europe and the West, I don't really care what kind of institutional arrangement you have. The point to make about Turkey and Europe is that it's a very long, drawn-out process. What's important is that the process not be stopped, that Turkey and Europe evolve in the right direction, on a path of convergence. Convergence is the name of the game.

Turkey's relations with its immediate neighbors are improving. They were pretty bad for a long time - with Syria they were abominable, and with Iran they were pretty bad. In both cases Turkey sees potential for trade, especially with Iran, where it gets a lot of natural gas. In good times Iran and Turkey find mutually profitable objects of exchange, but with Syria things have been very bad; Syria doesn't have much money and never will.

Turkey's relationship with the West is a love-hate one. There are people in Turkey who want to open to the outside world and others who are frightened of the outside world. They don't feel secure; they think that foreigners are trying to harm or even destroy Turkey. But that's not true of the majority of Turks, who want to exercise their skills in a global market.

Turkey, as an ex-imperial power, is all in favor of empires guaranteeing law and order on its borders. Turkey's and America's basic interests with regard to Iraq are identical. They both want a stable and rational Iraq that would use its considerable oil wealth in order to improve its own lot. But there doesn't seem to be very much prospect of that at the moment.