When a chess player recognizes his opponent is just moments from checkmate, a smile slides across his face.

That’s the smile you see these days on European leaders who don’t want Turkey in the European Union. They know they’ve won.

The Turkish state is seized with a constitutional crisis. Deep divisions between the nation’s secularists and religionists have generated a legal challenge that could put the current government out on its ear. Should that happen, EU officials say it would set back Turkey’s bid for Union membership indefinitely.

In reality, even if it doesn’t happen, Europe would still have all the reason it needs to keep Turkey locked out. For Turkey, it’s a Catch-22.

And Europe is using the occasion to display its oily sanctimony. It’s ugly to watch.

First, observe the relationship between European leaders and Turkey’s ruling political party, which is openly Muslim.

On the surface, the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, comes off as a progressive and an enthusiastic proponent of integrating with Europe. The president, Abdullah Gül, has been a leading supporter of his nation’s seemingly perpetual EU membership bid. The ruling political party, the Justice and Development Party (akp), has implemented several reforms to improve Turkey’s résumé in the EU enlargement office.

Europe seems content to leave it at that when it comes to doing business with Turkey—particularly business that involves receiving energy via Turkey. But you don’t have to look far to see a more complicated picture.

President Gül was a cabinet member in an Islamic government the military ousted in the 1990s. The akp has an Islamist pedigree and maintains pan-Islamic ties throughout the region. Flush with an electoral victory last year that made it the biggest party in Turkish parliament, the akp is increasingly brushing the nation’s secularists aside. It has punished journalists critical of the party. It has finagled control of prominent media companies into the hands of akp-loyal businessmen. It has jailed opponents based on information obtained through dubiously intercepted phone calls and e-mails. It has loosened regulations on religious schools—regulations intended to prevent Islamist indoctrination. It is imposing a more conservative morality. In several ways, the ruling party has relaxed the nation’s constitutionally strict separation of religion and politics. Critics accuse it of inching the nation toward Islamic sharia law.

Prime Minister Erdoğan, while seemingly loyal to EU ideals, shows telling signs to the contrary. Back in 2004, he sought to criminalize adultery; when EU officials criticized the idea, Erdoğan told them to mind their own business. In 2005, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Turkish universities should not permit use of the Islamic headscarf, Erdoğan condemned the judgment and said the matter was for Islamic religious scholars to decide.

Additionally, Erdoğan has taken underhanded steps to swell the number of akp-appointed judges and prosecutors in the judiciary. He has installed political loyalists in key government departments and ministries. Michael Rubin, in the June 20 American, detailed how the prime minister has actually used the EU accession process to “unravel Turkey’s system of checks and balances” and “run roughshod over Turkish secularism and democracy.” “As he consolidates power,” Rubin wrote, “Erdoğan has become the Turkish Vladimir Putin.”

Not exactly the kind of stuff you’d expect European leaders to support. But on the whole, they have basically looked the other way.

Unsurprisingly, under Erdoğan’s leadership, the nation is becoming more Islamic in identity: A 2005 survey showed that 43 percent of Turkish Muslims considered themselves Muslim first and Turkish second; a year later, that figure had risen to 51 percent. The secular nature of the Turkish state is slipping as politics-minded Muslims gain strength.

But Turkey’s secularists don’t plan to let these trends happen without kicking back.

The final straw for them came in February, when the akp passed a constitutional amendment lifting the ban on wearing Islamic headscarves at universities. This is a deeply emotional and divisive issue in Turkish society—analyst Soner Çağaptay likens it to the abortion issue in America. For the akp to decide the matter suddenly, unilaterally, without public debate, was an act of extraordinary gall.

In fact, the secularists viewed it as something of an act of war.

Shortly afterward, the country’s highest court, the secularist Constitutional Court, reversed the government’s decision.

Then, in March, came the secularists’ most potent legal challenge. The country’s chief prosecutor launched a suit aimed at shutting down the akp and banning dozens of politicians for five years because of their efforts to undermine the secular state and impose Islamic rule. The case will be tried in the same court that overruled the akp’s allowance of headscarves, and thus is widely expected to be ruled in favor of the prosecution. Hearings began July 1. The verdict will come later this summer.

Heightening the political tension even more, last week the religionists fought back. Police arrested 21 people, including two retired generals, suspected of plotting a coup against the akp.

So here is the situation. Turkey is locked in battle between religion and politics. On one side is a popularly elected government that is tightening its political grip and shifting the country toward Islam. On the other is a secularist movement, supported by the military and business elites, that remains loyal to the secularist ideals institutionalized in 1923 by the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Both sides have several levers of power and won’t go away quietly.

This is no small problem. Nobody wants to see Turkey destabilized, given its crucial location at the crossroads of three geographic blocs, its growing role as an energy hub for many eager suppliers and hungry customers, and its enormous and rising economy. Turkey is just too important to too many countries.

Now—what has Europe’s reaction to this dilemma been?

To condemn the secularists for being undemocratic.

“You cannot explain the disbandment of a political party which received 47 percent of votes,” one EU ambassador told the Turkish Daily News, referring to the akp. That would go against European standards for such party closures, you see.

Very, very serious by EU standards. It couldn’t possibly continue accession talks with Turkey given such an egregious breach of the Union’s vaunted criteria on democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

Some are branding the potential move a “judicial coup.”

“[Y]ou can really see that the prospect of accession is becoming more distant,” said a senior source in the office of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who campaigned on a platform of keeping Turkey out of the EU. “If they start banning the ruling party now, that’s very interesting. That judicial novelty should be thrown at all those who wanted to accelerate Turkey’s integration into Europe,” the source said. Can you see that smile on his lips?

It is absolutely fascinating to hear European politicians suddenly so concerned about the sanctity of the will of the people. They themselves are smack in the middle of figuring how to ramrod the Lisbon Treaty into legal force—a treaty which supposedly requires unanimity among EU member states—despite the Irish publicly rejecting it. The hypocrisy is truly something to behold.

Remember, it was just last year—when Turkey elected the openly Islamic Abdullah Gül as president—that we witnessed no small amount of discomfort among Europeans over the thought of embracing this patently Muslim nation. Now, rather abruptly, it is the thought of the noble Turkish electorate’s choice for president being undone that absolutely appalls them.

This is why Turkey is in a Catch-22.

If it moves in the direction of the religionists, it is simply “too Muslim” to join Europe. The “cultural differences” are too great.

But if the secularists intervene to prevent that from happening, it is clearly “too undemocratic” to join Europe. It is too much at odds with the apparently deeply cherished European conviction that the voice of the people must reign supreme.

Either way, you can be sure that Turkey will remain on the outside of the European Union looking in.

In the secular Turkish paper Kemalist Cumhuriyet, Orhan Bursali exposed the “but that’s undemocratic!” pretense. “This is what the Council of Europe says to Turkey: ‘You should be a Middle Eastern country. Your religion is Islam, so there is no place for you in the secular system of Europe. Go back to where you belong and stay there.’ At least in today’s context, this is also consistent with the EU’s vision for excluding Turkey” (July 1; translated by Mideast Mirror).

Yes, to Europeans, Turkey’s EU bid is dead.

The fundamentally Roman Catholic continent simply has no intention of ever incorporating 70 million Muslims in one swoop. And Turkey—with its Ottoman history, which at one time threatened Catholicism’s very existence—has particularly negative associations in European minds.

Still, given this nation’s strategic value to Europe, you just watch. Somehow, some way, the EU will continue to dangle carrots in front of Turkey in order to continue to benefit from doing business with it.

To understand how Turkey’s status as a perpetual outsider from Europe fits the biblical outline of prophecy, read our article “Why Turkey Matters.”