Yet having definite criminals presupposes the existence of definite victims. In

1945, it was impossible to miss them; the zealous efficiency with which Jews were hunted and exterminated was, even by past European standards, mass destruction of a wholly new type. However, suffering as a mode of interpreting the past is not proprietary. History as tragedy holds an appeal that is of wide currency; it is far more seductive than history as epic or farce. To read the past in this light, concentrating on a certain story of victimhood and injustice, can be therapeutic; that is the point, in the United States, of the mania for public monuments to death which must, however else they are designed, provide space for listing, by name, those who have suffered. Sooner or later, though, someone will always point out that the list is incomplete. There were other victims, too, who should be remembered and mourned. A narrative of suffering thus gets transformed into a contest for who suffered most, and from there it is not a great distance to diminishing, even denying, the claims of the other side.

The real issue with victimhood is not that it stresses passivity and pain. That is merely the distasteful part. Instead, it is the fact that it closes off so many other avenues that ought to be open to serious inquiry: collaboration, misremembering and misforgetting, retribution, responsibility, the tension between community and individualism. Rather than probing the past, one is caught in a perpetual, wronged present, seeing what came before through the haze of atrocities, and the future through the lens of obligation to the lost.

The irony is that Europe itself emerged out of a particular kind of victim narrative (never again can we do this to ourselves) which has imparted to the European project a uniquely anxious relationship to history. One only need look at how its critics are portrayed -as threats to the entire postwar order, as populists intent on conjuring old demons -to understand that Europe's image of itself rests on a fear of becoming, once again, a victim. But that, as it turns out, is precisely the structure of the narratives that spawned the twentieth century's problems in the first place. A Europe that sees its own recent history as tragedy and invents an older, more civilized past to which it is now returning: can this Europe become something other than the insular, fearful, self-absorbed countries that it was meant to replace? The answer will lie in the future of enlargement.

It is deeply cynical to portray every person sceptical of any aspect of the European project as a closet nationalist, even though that became one of the central explanations after the French and Dutch rejections of the European Union constitution last May and June. Still, for the time being, the failure of the referendums applied the brakes not only to the deepening of European integration but, potentially, to its widening as well. The figure of the "Polish plumber" - the nightmare of hordes of cheap but skilled labourers sweeping westwards to steal jobs and fix leaking taps -became a symbol of the fears of old Europeans about the potential costs of having rather quickly welcomed the new Europeans of the East. For all the attempts to treat deepening and widening as two separate processes, the short-term failure of the constitutional project showed that they were intimately linked. The logic of creating an ever wider Europe demands thinking hard about making it a more integrated one.

If there is a stall in the enlargement process, Romania and Bulgaria have the most to lose in the short term. Both countries have made remarkable strides in recent years, despite continued political discord, the rise and fall of mercurial political parties, and the ever-present threat of extreme Rightist reaction lurking in the wings. Delaying their membership by even a year could create severe disruptions in domestic politics, bringing to the fore parties and political figures who will use Europe's rebuff for their own gain.

That point goes in spades for countries further to the east: Ukraine, Georgia, and especially Turkey. No one believes that the first two can join the Union at any point in the near future. Serious reform has barely begun in some sectors: publics are divided over whether Europe is even a good thing, and in Georgia's case the country itself is divided between a central government and two (for now) secessionist territories. Ukraine, depending on what happens in the next several years in Russia, could conceivably go the same way. No one in Brussels will be eager to repeat the Cypriot scenario, where a country is embraced by the Union even before it has settled the basic question of territorial sovereignty.

In the case of Turkey, the train is now moving -with the fitful start of EU accession talks on October 3 -but the timetable and the final destination remain unclear. So far, Europe has avoided the worst case: repeated rejections of Turkey's aspirations to membership, which then help spark a nationalist or Islamist reaction in Turkish domestic politics. The problem, however, has been that Turkey's aspirations are really the aspirations of some Turks. The mass of the Turkish public is still ambivalent about what European membership entails.