TURKEY, say the geopoliticians, is the most important member of the new, expanded Atlantic alliance; and they may well be right. This is a huge place, with the biggest land area and the second-biggest population of any NATO country east of the Atlantic. It has the biggest army of them all, including America's, and though its soldiers do not have the most modern weapons they are dogged and uncomplaining fighters: there are gentlemen in England still abed who remember Gallipoli and Kut al-Amara. Above all, Turkey stands where Germany did in the previous period of NATO's existence: on the front line, face to face with the big problem. Now that the Soviet army no longer looms over Germany, NATO's eyes have turned southward, to the bubbling mixture of oil and Islamism and decrepit authoritarian regimes called the Middle East: a bubbling which will not be kept from boiling over by diplomacy alone.

The trouble is that the alliance of the democracies needs Turkey for two different reasons, and both have been put at risk by what is now happening in Turkish politics.

The military value of Turkey is that it sits next door to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, to the mullahs' Iran and to the unpredictable dictatorship of Syria's Hafez Assad. Its own armed forces, the bases it provides for allied aircraft and warships and—not least—its quiet ability to control the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into Iraq and Syria are all weighty pieces in the regional balance of power. But Turkey has been of even greater value for a different, political reason. Until recently, it had looked like the one fairly solid example of a Muslim country that was also a working democracy. It looks less solid now.

On February 28th, Turkey's generals stuck their hand into politics again (they had three full-scale coups between 1960 and 1980) by issuing a list of instructions to the mildly Islamist government. This has made it harder to argue that Turkey was at last settling down to be a real democracy, a place where the people take the decisions. And if the generals have miscalculated—if the Koran-toting Welfare Party, which they have now pushed out of power, comes back into office at the next election on a wave of Muslim resentment—they will either have to live with a new government that will among other things be much more suspicious of their pro-western foreign policy, or do an Algeria and squash the election.

A little time was bought when Mesut Yilmaz, the beneficiary of the generals' intervention, got a rather wobbly vote of confidence last Saturday (a majority of 25 in the 550-member parliament) for a three-party coalition he has stitched together out of his own conservative Motherland Party, its old adversary the Democratic Left, and a small splinter group. The generals would have had an immediate crisis on their hands if Welfare and its ally in government since last July, the True Path Party, had beaten Mr Yilmaz. Only two weeks earlier a majority of parliament's members had signed a plea that Welfare and True Path should stay in office. The necessary votes were, in the end, cajoled or bought. But the crisis is far from over.

Even if Mr Yilmaz's majority survives the year, which is by no means certain, some hard questions have to be answered. All those involved—the generals, Mr Yilmaz and Welfare's leader, Necmettin Erbakan—have to try to work out what sort of country they want Turkey to be.

They went over the top

The generals' answer is that they want Turkey to remain the secular state created 70 years ago by their hero Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, “Father of the Turks”. They went into action last February armed with Article 118 of the constitution, under which the National Security Council—five senior officers and four civilian ministers under the chairmanship of the country's president—can say what it wants done to preserve “the independence of the state” and “the peace and security of society”. They gave the prime minister a list of 18 things they wanted done to reduce Islam's influence on the workings of government.

Mr Erbakan, relying on his parliamentary majority, fudged and dodged. The generals replied with a creeping barrage.

Further demands were made on the government, including its approval for the dismissal of military officers considered too pro-Welfare. A handful of big firms that had shown sympathy for Welfare got a dressing-down. The lady in charge of True Path, Tansu Ciller, who had used her coalition with Welfare as an umbrella against the charges of corruption raining down on her, came under renewed attack. Towards the end, the newspapers suddenly revealed that a government ministry had been tapping the soldiers' telephones. Most curiously of all, the country's chief prosecutor, shortly after saying he did not think such a thing could be successfully done, brought a suit before the Constitutional Court calling for the Welfare Party to be banned.

Not all of these things were organised from military headquarters, though many of them undoubtedly were. Nor have the generals had unanimous support among secular Turks who enjoy a western-style way of life: the main businessmen's association, in a list of proposals to improve Turkish democracy, suggested abolishing the National Security Council. But eventually the pressure worked. Mr Erbakan said he would go; a vain attempt was made to get the prime ministership transferred to Mrs Ciller; President Demirel said he preferred Mr Yilmaz; Mr Yilmaz won some more defectors; and on July 12th he got his majority, and the generals got their way.

The problem with all this is not just that their victory could be short-lived. A sizeable chunk of Mr Yilmaz's majority last weekend consisted of the Republican People's Party, but this party has refused to join the government and would like a new election in 1997, whereas Mr Yilmaz wants to wait until next year. Motherland and the Democratic Left, the two chief parts of the new coalition, will not find it easy to run a joint government programme (the Democratic Left is keen on bigger pensions for public-sector workers, Motherland wants to cut the budget deficit and do some more privatisation).

Turkish parties are anyway much given to fragmentation; pieces regularly drop off and join other parties, and it is only half-jokingly said that the average parliamentarian's price is between $2m and $5m. Mr Yilmaz is a clever enough politician, but not the only one with the technique of making converts. He is also rather a dull dog, with little taste for big ideas and no known ability to capture people's imagination. He could have trouble holding on to that 25 majority.

But there is a bigger reason for worrying about what has happened over the past five months. When you inspect the list of accusations that are said to justify the Welfare Party's removal from government, they turn out to be remarkably vague.

Not proven

The chief prosecutor's reasons for saying that Welfare should be banned include only a couple of things actually done by Welfare during its past year in government—its attempt to insist that women should be allowed to wear head-scarves in public buildings, despite a ban dating from Ataturk's time, and Mr Erbakan's invitation to dinner at the prime minister's house of some controversial people who, good gracious, “attended in attires in violation of revolutionary laws”. It is perfectly true that the Welfare-led government did encourage the wearing of scarves in schools and other buildings. But that is hardly reason enough to ban a party. It even seems a rather liberal idea, when you reflect that peasant mothers whose soldier sons have been wounded in the civil war against Kurdish rebels are made to remove their daily headgear if they want to visit their boys in a military hospital.

Probe a little deeper than the public prosecutor does, and you dig up two further charges. One is that Welfare has allowed money to be brought into the country, and has perhaps itself provided money, for Masonic-like secret societies dedicated to spreading the Islamist word. This may or may not be true. It is hard to tell, because apart from one or two clear-cut episodes—such as the arrest at Istanbul airport of a man trying to smuggle in money from Islamists in Germany—most of the evidence offered is distinctly murky. “Our control system is very good.” “The information is to be found in Welfare's computer system.” This is less than wholly convincing.

The other chief complaint of the defenders of secularism concerns religious education. Turkey has about 500 Imam Hatip (“Parson-Preacher”) secondary and high schools—a small fraction of the total number of schools for children of that age—which offer a modest dose of Muslim education to 11-to-14-year olds on top of the regular state curriculum but a much larger dose, up to a third of the total week's work, to those above 14. The secularists' fear is that these schools will pour out a flood of fanatical young graduates like the Taliban students of Afghanistan.

Unfortunately for the secularists, however, the Imam Hatip schools are a product of the secular regime. They were started, with the generals' blessing, back in the 1950s, and most of the existing ones were founded in the 1970s and 1980s; not one was added during Welfare's just-ended year in government. They are run, and inspected, by the state. They are also popular with parents, since they tend to be more orderly than other schools, and to get better results. The generals want to cut the ground from under them by building more non-religious secondary schools. But that would seem to clash with many parents' wishes, as well as adding to the government's over-spending. If Imam Hatip graduates subsequently do illegal things, they should be arrested. But unless a disproportionate number of them do, the case against these schools does not seem to stand up.

After this, the charge-list grows even mistier. Mr Erbakan has supported the idea of building a mosque in Istanbul's Taksim Square, which is a bit like proposing a Christian revivalist centre in Piccadilly Circus. The Welfare mayor of a small town earlier this year invited the Iranian ambassador to a Muslim revivalist rally, which was provocative but no dafter than a communist mayor in cold-war Western Europe inviting the Soviet ambassador to his country to a joint denunciation of capitalism. Various Welfare people have said heated things at public meetings. A few of these are worrying (Istanbul's mayor is quoted as saying that democracy is like a tram: you take it where you want to go, and then you get off). But most were just politicians saying in the rough accent of Anatolian politics that, if they get elected, the other side had better not try keeping them out of office.

The flavour of the 1930s

To be sure, all Islamic revivalists need to be examined through narrowed eyes. Some of them are ignorantly and brutally dictatorial: look at the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the wilder specimens in Algeria, Egypt and Pakistan. But not all are like this.

The mainline revivalist parties in Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan have said that they wish to operate within a democratic system—multi-party free elections, alternation of government and all. Malaysia's Islamists, in that country's admittedly creaky semi-democracy, are obeying the rules. The heartening discovery of the past few years is that the Muslim world's revivalist movement is not a uniform entity; it is a spectrum, ranging from incurable authoritarians to devout searchers after God's will who are nevertheless prepared to accept the people's judgment. With any luck, Turkey's plump if occasionally excitable Mr Erbakan, and most of his party, are at the moderate end of the spectrum.

The fact that the leaders of the anti-Welfare campaign will have none of this says much about the psychology of Ataturk's Turkey. No, they insist, you can never trust a politician with the Koran in his hand; these people are trained to say one thing and do another; we secular Turks know in our bones that they are plotting to force a fundamentalist dictatorship on us. There is a neurotic edge to the way many secularists talk about the awkward, rather earnest, just-up-from-the-country sort of people who make up most of Mr Erbakan's following.

This may be because, when you look at it, the Ataturk definition of secularism is not quite what most other westerners mean by the word. There is still a flavour of the 1930s about today's Turkey. It is not just the self-consciously heroic statuary, the assurances that “the army knows what the people want”, the still far too big state sector of industry. The Turkey that Ataturk built two-thirds of a century ago was constructed out of a now rather old-fashioned mixture of nationalism and rationalism.

The nationalism was not too bad: the Turks treat their Kurdish minority very badly, and they are stubborn about their interests in Cyprus, but Ataturkian Turkey has never been a serious threat to its neighbours. The rationalism part, alas, now feels like something out of a dusty past.

For most Europeans and Americans, a secular state is a state in which the church cannot dictate to the government and, in America at least, the symbols and ceremonies of the two are kept firmly separate. But this does not mean that for most people in the West of the 1990s the business of government can be conducted without reference to some kind of moral order.

The rational pursuit of self-interest is the necessary basis of human activity but, if a country is to be worth living in, all those competing individual self-interests have to operate within an agreed set of rules. The rules may be derived from a belief in God, or they may be constructed by a consensus of non-believers; but in either case they will draw upon the instinctive part of the mind—the tug of compassion, the intuitive sense of right and wrong—as well as the purely rational part. Christian Democrats and Christian socialists in Europe, Christian revivalists in America and communitarians on both sides of the Atlantic would all nowadays agree on that much.

For Ataturk, though, rationalism was king. To be useful, he said, religion “has to conform to science and knowledge, to logic.” The phrase “a moral order” would probably have struck Ataturk, with his belief in the absolute supremacy of reason, as something murky dug out of the medieval recesses of the Islamic mind.

This is why his sort of secularism has less in common with the secularism of most of today's Europeans and Americans than it has with that of France's 19th-century rationalists. It is not merely an insistence that religious believers should keep the propagation of their ideas within the rules of the democratic system. It is a preference for excluding their ideas from the public arena altogether. It is not impartiality towards religion so much as a turning of the back upon it. And this is why in 1997 Turks who have inherited Ataturk's secularism and Turks in search of an Islamic revival find themselves gazing at each other across a gulf of incomprehension.

If they don't try

If the gulf is to be bridged, both Mr Erbakan and the generals have to stretch out a hand. Mr Erbakan can reasonably argue that in his year in the prime ministership he did not visibly break any of democracy's rules. He might add that his foreign policy, apart from a smirk towards Iran and a humiliating visit to Colonel Qaddafi's Libya, was just the sort of thing the generals wanted: his government stayed a loyal member of NATO, kept knocking on the European Union's door, and even let the Turkish army get on with its cosy new programme of military co-operation with Israel.

But Mr Erbakan could go further. He could formally commit himself to the democratic credo already voiced by open-minded Islamists in other countries.

What people believe or do not believe, says this credo, is their own private business; the state should keep its nose out. But both believers and non-believers should be free to put their ideas about the government of the country, wherever in heaven or earth those ideas are said to come from, to the country's voters. If they and their allies get the support of a majority of the voters, they can put their proposals into law, provided these laws do not clash with the country's constitution (which must itself have the voters' approval). If at the next election a different lot of people with different ideas win a majority of the votes, the first lot will stand down and accept the changes the second lot make, subject to the same proviso. Full stop. That is democracy.

In reply, the generals could say that their only concern is to preserve the rules of democracy. They do not support or oppose any particular body of ideas; they merely want to make sure that the voters can make the choice, and change their choice next time if they wish. Given Mr Erbakan's commitment to the same principle, the generals will go back to their military business and watch the next election with impartial interest. They might add, sotto voce, that if anybody really does break the rules they will know what to do about it.

If something like this happens, the Turks can resume normal politics. If it does not, they face an increasingly isolated future. A continuation of the army's campaign against the Welfare Party—maybe even a court order disbanding the party—will give new ammunition to the people in the European Union who say that Turkey will never be democratic enough to be a full member of the EU (even though its economic qualifications for membership are in some ways better than those of most of the EU's other current applicants). It would also make it harder for the United States to insist on Turkey's military importance to the NATO alliance, since the countries now seeking to join NATO are being told that they first have to prove they are good democrats. And Iran's mullahs will be even more anti-Turkey than they are now.

If the generals have got it wrong, on the other hand, and their harassment of Welfare wins indignant Islamists more votes in Turkey's next election, the next Turkish government is likely to be colder to NATO, less interested in Europe, and on even pricklier terms than its predecessors with the hard-nosed and ungodly men who run Iraq and Syria. Either way, a country that could have been a demonstration of the compatibility of Islam and democracy would be drifting off into a lonely limbo between the two. That is not what the democracies need, and it is not what most Turks want.