The Senate's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee deleted a proposal for a constitutional amendment that would require a referendum in France on the admission of any new EU member state whose population was more than 5 percent of the EU total. That seemed aimed directly at Turkey (although it could also affect Ukraine).

The amendment "might be considered as being against Turkey, which is a friend and ally country, and thus might deal serious damage to diplomatic relations between France and Turkey," noted a written statement from the French committee. That was an understatement. Turkey's Foreign Ministry could hardly have been more clear.

"It is inevitable that this kind of discriminative approach will harm our bilateral relations and will also have a negative impact on images of Turkey and France in each country as well as on the traditional friendship between the peoples of the two countries," commented Turkey's Foreign Ministry in a written statement.

The controversial clause was passed last month by the National Assembly, the lower house of France's two-chamber Parliament, as part of a package of constitutional amendments. The committee's vote may not be the end of the matter. It can be taken up on the floor of the Senate and put to a full vote, but would almost certainly need a strong push from President Nicolas Sarkozy to rally a sufficient majority.

This presents Sarkozy with a difficult choice. French opinion polls are against admitting 73 million predominantly Muslim Turks into the 495 million EU. Sarkozy himself has argued against it. But with 10 percent of France's population now immigrants and their children from traditionally Muslim countries, the issue of Europe's relations with its Islamic neighbors across the Mediterranean cannot be ducked.

President Bush and the British argue there are three main reasons to admit Turkey. The first is strategic, that as a longstanding and loyal member of NATO, Turkey is key to European and Western security in the region.

The second is economic. With European birthrates falling, the EU needs Turkey's large young workforce and its potential for economic growth. Turkey's current GDP per capita is just over $5,000, a quarter of the EU average. Doubling Turkey's GDP per capita means an extra market worth $400 billion; bring Turkey up to the EU average, and it is worth another $800 billion on top of that. That would mean selling a lot more Mercedes cars and Swedish refrigerators, French perfumes and Finnish mobile phones.

The third is cultural: that Europe needs to demonstrate that its traditional happy mix of democracy and prosperity is also open to Muslim countries that abide by the EU rules on human rights and political freedoms, free markets and free institutions. If there is one large Muslim country that can show the world that Islam is no bar to democracy and modernity, it is Turkey.

The importance of that latter argument runs far beyond the EU-Turkish relationship. It plays directly into the EU's relations with the 150 million Muslims just across the Mediterranean in North Africa, let alone the Arab world to the east and the Muslims in Asia. As Tony Blair told his colleagues at his last EU summit, "There can be few more important goals for the West in the long term" than to help establish a successful and prosperous democracy in a predominantly Islamic country.

But down in France's political trenches, local issues intervene. The original amendment to exclude Turkey was backed by Justice Minister Rachida Dati (herself the symbolic immigrant of Muslim origin in the government) but was reliably said to be opposed by Prime Minister Francois Fillon. A further factor for the ruling UMP party is the strength and lobbying power of France's Armenian community, which insists on no deal with Turkey until it accepts responsibility for what they call "the genocide" against their people back in 1915.

Sarkozy is hoping to finesse this row over Turkey by pushing for what he calls a "Mediterranean Union," a much broader and closer relationship between the EU and all the Muslim countries around the Mediterranean coast, with a generous new budget for foreign aid and much closer trading relationships.

It sounds good, but it already has been tried with a special trade and aid deal called the Barcelona Process, started over a decade ago, which has shown only modest success. Moreover, Turkey has long had a customs agreement that gives it essentially free trade with the EU. Along with Turkey's NATO membership, that means Turkey has long enjoyed precisely the kind of special relationship that Sarkozy now wants to extend more widely. And since Turkey says its current second-class status is no substitute for full EU membership, other Arab countries are likely to say the same.

Sarkozy's plan is to be launched July 15, but five North African states and Syria met in a summit last week in Tripoli and were highly critical. Algeria denounced the idea that Israel could be included in the Mediterranean Union as a backdoor way to normalize Israel-Arab relations. Libya's Moammar Gadhafi called the whole Sarkozy plan "an insult."

"This is taking us for fools," Gadhafi said. "We do not belong to Brussels. Our Arab League is located in Cairo, and the African Union is located in Addis Ababa. If they want cooperation, they have to go through Cairo and Addis Ababa."

The final decision on the French constitutional amendment will be taken in July when the upper and lower houses gather for a plenary meeting. The text has to be agreed to by a three-fifths majority. By then, Sarkozy will have launched his Mediterranean Union, President Bush will be back in Washington, and Turkey will still be trying to decide whether it is a Western democracy that happens to be Muslim or a Muslim country that is not welcome in the West.

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