For centuries the crossroad between East and the West, Turkey today finds itself at a crossroad of its own: The militant secularism installed in the 1920s by the country's founding father, Ataturk, is being challenged by an emerging middle class no longer willing to hide its Muslim beliefs. Meanwhile, the religiously conservative party that has governed Turkey since 2002 is pushing the country toward membership in the European Union, even though many Europeans don't want Muslim Turkey in their Christian club. While Turkey is often seen as role model for how democracy can co-exist with Islam, the historical enmity between Arabs and their non-Arab former Ottoman overlords limits the extent to which Turkey can be a stabilizing force in the region. Adding to Turkey's turmoil, its long friendship and military alliance with the United States has been badly damaged by both the war in Iraq and a move in Congress to label as genocide the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians in 1915.

Brian Beary -- a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. -- specializes in EU-U.S. affairs and is the U.S. correspondent for Europolitics, the EU affairs daily newspaper. Originally from Dublin, Ireland, he worked in the European Parliament for Irish MEP Pat 'The Cope' Gallagher in 2000 and at the EU Commission's "Eurobarometer" unit on public opinion analysis. A fluent French speaker, he appears regularly as a guest international relations expert on various television and radio program. Apart from his work for Congressional Quarterly, Beary also writes for the European Parliament Magazine and the Irish Examiner daily newspaper.