It isn’t that Turkey has not made progress toward the model for a modern state set out for it by the founder of modern Turkey, the iconic dictator Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. One could argue the kind of tutorial top-down reforms he and his cohorts tried and were partially successful in implementing – much of it influenced by events in revolutionary Russia, the Ottoman Empire’s old traditional enemy – never reached the roots of Turkish society in Anatolia. Although their announced purpose was to make Turkey “Turkish” rather than the multiethnic empire it had been in reality under the Sultanate, their success depended to a considerable extent, ironically — something no one would admit until very recently — on the elites of Istanbul and the larger cities with multinational roots inherited from the Ottomans.

But the current crisis of the regime in Turkey again brings its outcome back to a level of high importance to the world. Never mind that Turkey’s bodies are about all the muscle left for a European NATO enfeebled by low budgets and bureaucratization for the kind of world emergencies it has now been called on to meet, such as Afghanistan, and the probable new sanctuaries of worldwide terrorism which will emerge. Never mind that Turkey’s destiny was seen in some quarters – in Washington, for example — as moving into the European Union, but is now challenged by the chief executives of the EU’s two historically core members, France and Germany, supposedly unalterably opposed to accepting them. Never mind a strong cyclical economic upswing for its 70 million going toward 100 is now jeopardized by political instability.

The issue for Turkey, as for the whole of the arc of the umma, the Muslim world, from Casablanca to Zamboanga, is whether a modernized Islam can be created, if not to foster at least not to inhibit, the process of modernization.

Alas! The creation of democratic societies does not lie alone in the electoral process. Politically astute Hamas, the antithesis of most aspects of modernization has won out, at least for the moment, among the Palestinians, and probably Hizbullah among the Lebanese, thought for so long to have the model Arab reconciliation and modernization process. That could be the case in any number of other Arab or Moslem states were the test to be made. It happened in Algeria in 1992 when the military turned back a movement seemingly dedicated to turning the clock back to medieval sharia, the religious law of Islam, and brought on a bloody civil war which still perks beneath the surface. It could happen in Egypt where the Moslem Brotherhood, an organization which invented modern Islamic terrorism in the 1920s and has supplied important cadre to Al Qaida and other contemporary terrorist bands. It could certainly overtake the Jordanian monarchy, perilously propped up with foreign subsidies and the profits from Iraq’s misfortunes, but ruling precariously over an increasingly radicalized Palestinian majority.

Turkey’s AKP [Justice and Development Party] swept into power in 2002 with an overwhelming electoral win [even though 45 percent of the voters went for other parties which under the Turkish system got only a scattering of seats]. It not only surprised foreign observers [some of whose professionals should have had an inkling corruption and cynicism about the old politicos had exceeded its bounds].

The combination of inclinations toward reform, opportunism and its nucleus of an Islamicist reaction sleeping through earlier decades, have obscured the utter lack of strategy of its leadership beyond holding on to power. The refusal, for example, to permit American use of Turkish base facilities and transit at the opening of the Iraq war was a kind of throwaway vote in which AKP leadership dropped the party whip, and one could argue the three-vote decision was the work of anti-AKP secularists with their Europhilism, particulary their association with French antagonism to the U.S.

That’s not to say Turkey’s finding a compromise out of its present dilemma is the only hope of the U.S,’ and the world’s problem of meeting fanatical nihilistic Islamic reaction to modernization. Little Malaysia [only 25 millions] has shown how a bizarre combination of Hindu, Islamic and British institutions can insure relative stability and progress in a deeply divided multiethnic society. A demagogic, West-hating three decades of Mahathir Mohammad and his crony capitalism did not open the way for a legal Islamicist movement which had captured two of the federation’s thirteen states catapulting to control of the federal government. And a new leadership is in that old democratic process of throwing the rascals out and cleaning up the inevitable messes created by too much populism.

But Malaysia is not Turkey, but then neither is Tunisia nor Morocco. The threat of the military to intervene plus popular manifestations of secular sentiments have thwarted the efforts of the AKP to install one of its more cosmopolitan leaders, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, as president. [It is significant he failed, ultimately, when the AKP could not or would not round up the necessary parliamentary quorum.]

The president in the Turkish system with its parliamentary supremacy is the chief of state with nominal powers but in an emergency as in such systems elsewhere could be critical. The army, as in Brazil and Pakistan, sees itself as the conscience – the secular conscience in this case – of the nation and has removed four civilian governments in 50 years. But that would be a no-no in this instance for it would give the European opponents of Turkish entry to the EU another reason to block Turkey’s entry [along with the fact it has a Muslim and therefore culturally a non-European population which would, with its birthrate, soon make it the largest population in “Europe”].

So there would be no disentangling of the issues quickly as the country goes toward elections in July. One solution suggested is the amendment of the constitution for a popularly elected president rather than being chosen by the parliament. But given the likelihood of an AKP victory, if not as large as earlier, its leaders could choose to push through their agenda for an Islamist as the symbol of the state. That would prolong the crisis. And until the AKP leadership sorts out its own mixed bag of attitudes toward modernization, relations between “church” and state, and the role it is to play in European and Middle East politics, the world will be holding its breath.