On a leafy square wedged between the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers in the EU quarter of the city, several dozen young activists from the "Voice for Europe" campaign handed out leaflets against Turkish membership of the 25-member bloc to bemused motorists, tourists and passers-by.

They held up banners proclaiming "55 percent vs. 35 percent: can't you count" -- a reference to a recent European Commission opinion poll showing a majority of Europeans against Turkish membership, let off balloons with the slogan "Turkey is not in Europe," and set up a huge clock with the hand standing motionless at 5 minutes to noon.

The message? Even at this late stage -- accession talks with the predominantly Muslim state are due to begin in Brussels in one month -- the decision by EU leaders to open membership negotiations with Ankara can be reversed.

It is difficult to get worked up about draft directives and parliamentary amendments -- the usual Brussels fodder -- but the question of whether Turkey should be admitted into the EU in the latter half of the next decade unleashes powerful emotions.

When Boris Blauth, the German coordinator of the Voice for Europe campaign, tells United Press International that Turkish immigrants commit "far more crimes" than locals, a Belgian journalist of Turkish origin retorts: "Turks don't have a chance to integrate. They are put in a ghetto and left to their own devices." To illustrate his point, the photo-journalist tells the story of a date he once had in Brussels. "After two hours talking in a bar, I told the girl my name and she spat in my face and left."

A hot-headed Armenian demonstrator has little sympathy for the reporter's romantic woes or arguments in favor of Turkish entry. "You shouldn't be a journalist. You should be a clown," he says, to which the reporter replies: "Go forth and multiply" -- but not quite in those words.

It is easy to see why Turkish membership of the EU, which is the main topic on the table of a meeting of European foreign ministers in Wales Friday, sparks such violent reactions.

If Turkey joined the EU in 2015, it would become its most populous state within a decade due to strong population growth in the predominantly Muslim republic and low fertility rates in the Union. As population size largely determines voting power in the EU, it would leapfrog Germany to become the state with the greatest political clout.

Turkey is considerably poorer than EU states, with a per capita gross domestic product equal to a quarter the EU average.

"Unemployed manpower will stream into European territories, which will result in tensions both on the labor force market and on the level of society," says a pamphlet distributed by Voice for Europe.

Blauth's main concern is that Turkish values, which he describes as in the "Asian, Islamic tradition," are different from European secular values such as equality between men and women and freedom to practice one's religion. "Let them have their culture and let us have ours," says the German.

Opponents of Turkey's membership of the EU vigorously deny they are racist or xenophobic, but there is more than a hint of Islamophobia in some of the arguments they put forward.

"A Muslim state cannot join the European Union," says Mogens Camre, a Danish Euro-skeptic member of the European Parliament who took time out to meet the campaigners Monday. "You can believe in any God you like, but the Islamic religion is not about democracy. The Arab world rejects modern society and we don't want their fingers on our buttons in Europe. We've only been able to develop the way we have because we are a homogenized society. If the Muslims took over, Denmark would be a desert."

These arguments may be crude and pander to the public's basest fears about a clash of civilizations between Christian Europe and Muslim Turkey, but they are widely held in the EU. In a recent commission poll, three-quarters of Germans and 70 percent of French respondents came out against Turkish accession, with over half of those interviewed opposing Ankara's entry into the 25-member club.

Since it was founded in May, Voice for Europe has collected over 26,000 signatures for its petition against Turkish membership and has brought its message to Budapest, Copenhagen, Athens, Warsaw, Prague and other European capitals.

"We have had a very good response on the streets," says Blauth. "Even Turkish women in hijabs (headscarves) have signed our petition."

Despite the muscular campaigning against Turkey's membership bid by groups like Voice for Europe and the last-minute doubts expressed by senior members of the French, Austrian, Greek and Cypriot governments, membership talks with Ankara are still likely to kick off as planned on Oct. 3 -- over 40 years after Turkey first filed its application to join. But the public debate about whether to admit the large, powerful and populous nation on Europe's eastern fringes is likely to run and run.

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