Advocates of a conditioned accession are thus under extraordinary pressure to be nice, even as Turkish officials stage provocations, like the recent suit against the noted author Orhan Pamuk for “public denigration of Turkish identity” because he dared to question the official position on the Armenian genocide. As a result, a general lack of clarity about what kind of Turkey should be accepted characterizes the accession debate, which focuses – much as in the recent referenda on the EU constitution in France and the Netherlands – on rather meaningless generalities.