ANKARA A "no" on Oct. 3 to Turkey starting negotiations to enter the European Union would have "centuries of implications," one influential Turkish academic, Husseyin Bagci, put it last week. It would push a wounded Turkey back into the arms of the nationalists, even perhaps the hard-line fundamentalists, and be grist to the mill of those who argue that the Christian Western world will always consider itself superior to the Muslim one.

Such a rejection would make it clear, according to the provost of Istanbul's Bahcesehir University, Eser Karakas, that Europe had no interest in becoming the great power that Turkey, with its large population and army, could help make it - a power able to play an influential role in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus, without being subordinated always to U.S. policies.

Yet if there are no good reasons for a "no," there are reasons for caution. And now that it seems likely that Germany's next chancellor will be Angela Merkel, who has said that Turkey should be granted only "privileged partnership" and not full membership, Europe will be compelled to slow down and think hard about Turkey.

Turkey is still just muddling through toward modernity. For two centuries, it has been creating a middle class that belatedly has been trying to absorb the wisdom and philosophy of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. But for still a majority their inheritance remains the Ottoman Empire, which unlike the Arab caliphates of the 8th to 11th centuries did not push forward the frontiers of knowledge, despite its military prowess. The lasting tensions between these two worlds still make it difficult for Turkey to be as European as its present-day rulers want. Turkey is still catching up - and on important issues, this shows.

When I was negotiating last week to interview the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, I was repeatedly told by his closest staff, "This interview will be on condition you promise not to ask about the Kurdish situation." But since it is Turkey's brutal civil war with its 20 million Kurds that has done more than anything to keep Turkey waiting at Europe's gate for so long, this is a very old-fashioned, authoritarian, reflex.

Ankara has not delivered on its promises to the Kurds, which is why the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers' Party, and its 7,000 fighters in the mountains of the southeast began fighting again this year, breaking a five-year truce. The government had promised free broadcasting in Kurdish and education in Kurdish. Yes, there are now Kurdish newspapers for sale on the streets, there is some Kurdish music on the radio, there has been an attempt to open private academies to teach Kurdish, but the sum of it doesn't begin to compare with the freedoms the Welsh have in Britain or the Basques in Spain. There is no free broadcasting in Kurdish nor Kurdish in the primary schools.

The promised reforms have not been pushed through an unwilling bureaucracy. That is why, when the prime minister made a conciliatory landmark speech in Diyarbakir, the Kurdish "capital," a month ago, the crowd was a desultory 600.

To refuse to discuss this subject out loud and to pretend all is well suggests that Erdogan believes that sweeping unresolved problems under the carpet for the next three weeks will somehow make this very serious failing just disappear off the European agenda.

Turkey is still not capable of generating for itself all the essential ingredients of a modern democratic state. It has only made the rapid strides of the last five years to reform its human rights practices, its judiciary and police, and the ubiquitous and powerful role of the army in political affairs, because the EU dangled the carrot of entry before it. Eighty years after Ataturk pointed Turkey's nose in the direction of Europe, it is still lacking in original thinking. All new ideas and high culture come from the West. The liberal, open, law-abiding state is not yet a basic instinct.

Islam has a better historical record of religious tolerance than either Christianity or Judaism. But modern Turkey has been the exception. In 1945, Ataturk's successor, Inonu, dispossessed the Jews and encouraged them to leave. Ten years later, the large Greek Christian community began to be driven out. Today the Byzantine churches largely remain state-run museums. There is little trace of the fact that for more than a thousand years, Constantinople was the center of the Christian world.

A "yes" on Oct. 3 would be consistent with previous EU promises. It must, however, be a "yes, but." There cannot be promises about an entry date. It should probably be a generation away.