The overwhelming majority -73 per cent in a recent survey by the German Marshall Fund -think joining the EU would help Turkey's economy, but less than two-thirds believe joining would, overall, be desirable.

(The latter figure is down ten percentage points from 2004.)

Even the educated elites in Ankara and Istanbul become less enthusiastic when certain issues are put on the table, such as European monitoring of human rights, the treatment of minorities, and recognition of the Armenian genocide.

As Tony Judt points out, one of the desiderata of Europeanness in the 1990s became facing up to the legacies of the Second World War, especially the Holocaust. For Turkey, the issue of the Armenians could play a similar role.

But the real question is not whether Turks, or even Muslims, can join Europe.

Plenty of both already have -in Bradford, Toulouse and Berlin. It is whether an entire culture against which Europe has so long defined itself can now become a part of the European project. Can one stand Suleyman the Magnificent alongside Charlemagne and believe that one is looking at representatives of a single civilization? This would have been tough half a century ago, but it now looks rather more plausible.

Fifty years hence, someone will no doubt write of Postwar that it, like all histories, was fundamentally a product of its time. Whether that turns out to be a criticism or a compliment will depend on what happens across the continent, from Dublin to Bucharest, perhaps even to Kiev and Tbilisi. To conceive of Europe as a place that does not stop at the Oder-Neisse line or even the Bosporus became possible once Europe refashioned itself as a set of values, not as a self evident set of boundaries. Seeing things in that way has required a gargantuan effort at forgetting, pushing into the dark corners of the past those values which have most often defined Europeanness -and which still, rather frequently, step out into the light. It requires, in other words, that today's Europeans and those who wish to join them continue to do what they have done since 1945. But a collective rethinking of the past that enables a creative, liberating and humane imagination of the future may not be such a bad thing.