It may have taken 40 years, but it finally happened this week: The European Union opened membership talks with Turkey.

I have watched the especially intense year-long run-up to this moment with fascination and disgust. It was like being a spectator at a cockfight, with ugly squawks, blood-soaked feathers and the stabbing of beaks into the meat beneath the skin, the two cocks all the while denying that this was, in fact, a cockfight, oh no, and the EU spectators secretly hoping Turkey would expire in the straw of a heart attack. It wouldn’t look good if an Islamic nation were pecked to death.

Supposedly, the fight was over Turkey being too big, or too poor, or too full of possible migrants. It wasn’t about Muslims joining what former EC head Jacques Delors once called a “Christian club.”

Neither was it about whether Turkey was a European-type nation or more of an Asian-ish, wrong-side-of-the-Mediterranean kind of country. Not that they’re not lovely people, of course. Fine peasants, we’re sure, but we won’t have them in our home. You do understand.

That’s how racism works. One German-American writer in The Guardian, disregarding the fact that the European nations fight their best wars with each other, said white people should be allowed to mourn the eventual loss of their culture to immigrant hordes. What is white culture? Egg-salad sandwiches? Fridge magnets? She did not say.

The key is that while no one in Europe is crazy about the Turks joining what happens to be a largely white association (Hungary is 52 per cent in favour and Britain is 45 per cent), only 10 per cent of Austrians favour Turkish membership. The pollsters were surprised. Austrians were the only respondents who saw “almost no positive side” to letting the Turks in, the BBC reported, not even envisioning “improved understanding between Europe and the Muslim world.”

Every EU nation agreed to negotiate with Turkey except Austria, which said talks should take place only about a “privileged partnership,” not actual membership.

Austria got dirty looks. The conference hall fell silent, I assume. A polite cough was heard from Germany. It’s unlikely there were Jews in the room, Europe having a distinct shortage of Jews on its mainland, but they were on European minds. Far-right Austrian politician Joerg Haider, whose election had once brought EU sanctions against his nation, had campaigned hard against the Turkish membership effort.

So Austria caved, doubtless reassuring itself that the negotiations will take a decade, Turkey has to swallow 80,000 pages of EU law and even then, it will take only one vote to blackball the country.

The EU wants Turkey badly for economic reasons. With a population of 72 million, it has plenty of young, educated people. Europe is getting panicky about its low birth rate, caused by the refusal of working women to have large families and resultant miserable lives. At some point, Europe will need that younger work force.

In addition, Turkey, while mostly Sunni Muslim, is a secular republic. Kurds, who make up 20 per cent of the population, see the EU as a guard for their human rights, which it would be. Turkey, notorious for arrests without trial and severe torture of prisoners, claims to be trying to improve its human-rights record and treatment of women. The charges recently filed against Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk for deploring Turkey’s killing of 30,000 Kurds since 1984 and the 1915 Armenian genocide were inspired by reactionaries aiming to stop the talks. They failed.

After watching the cockfight for a year without taking sides, I am convinced that Turkey’s entrance into the EU, whose human-rights laws are a model for the world, is our last best hope for a peaceful understanding between the so-called Christian and Muslim solitudes.

Those in doubt might wish to read Indian novelist Vikram Seth’s new book, Two Lives, a stunning biography of his great-uncle Shanti (from India) and great-aunt Henny (a Jew who escaped Second World War Germany at the last minute). It brings home the horror of the slow humiliation and demonization of the German Jews, who considered themselves utterly German. It shows how insiders are made into outsiders, how Henny’s sister, Miss Lola Caro, an elegant German (Jewish) girl, went from eating Stollen with her German (Christian) friends in 1931 to Birkenau in 1943, stripped, thrown into a room with perforated pillars filled with Zyklon-B, gassed, grapple-hooked and burned to ash. That’s 12 years of humiliation.

Imagine what the Palestinians feel. Imagine how a Turk, wanting to modernize Turkey, feels at being rejected for his race and religion for 40 years. Hitler would be giggling now. Think how much time Muslims have had to be humiliated by the Western world. Perhaps globalization speeded up the process.

When we seek an explanation for the existence of young, educated, middle-class suicide bombers, humiliation fits the bill. An Associated Press interview with a suicide bomber — he changed his mind when he saw a mother and two children in a café — suggests that bombers are driven “not by poverty or ignorance, but by a lethal mix of nationalism, zealotry and humiliation.”

Turkey had already declared that it would give up on Europe if it were rebuffed this time. The fact is, it would have been utterly humiliated. In Western eyes at least, the squalid objections of Austria, a country that unlike Germany has never truly faced its Nazi past, would have been plain evidence of racism. Austria wanted a wall around Europe, but the world doesn’t work that way, we hope.

Former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing was angry at the welcome extended to Turkey. The EU was risking replacing a “grand French project of political union” with “a large free-trade zone,” he said.

In fact, it is the opposite. It is a hand extended in hope.