The Economist focuses on what is, in many ways, the biggest single geopolitical question facing the world today – will Turkey be admitted to the EU. As The Economist notes:

the trickiest conundrum for Europe’s leaders when they meet next week in Copenhagen. That is the question of whether Turkey, a Muslim country of nearly 70m souls, which is already part of NATO, should be invited, with real intent provided that the applicant meets rigorous conditions, to join Europe’s top civilian club too. It is a massive question, because it raises the issue of where the geographical boundaries of the EU should end. Might Russia itself, one day, be included? Could Morocco ever make the grade? Indeed, if Turkey joined, why not, one day, its neighbour, Iraq?

I made almost exactly the same points in the Fin a little while ago:

The admission of Turkey, likely by 2010, would give the EU borders with Iraq, Iran and Syria, fundamentally changing the geopolitics of the Middle East. The entry of Turkey, along with a few European stragglers, would complete the process of European unification in traditional geographical terms, with the exception of European Russia. But traditional geographical terms are already being revised.
A string of North African and Middle Eastern countries, including Morocco, Egypt and Jordan, have signed association agreements with the EU. The entire region has now been renamed by the EU as the ‘South and East Mediterranean’. In the light of recent history, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and the Euro-Mediterranean Free Trade Area must be seen as the precursor to a Greater Europe encompassing the entire classical world.
The ideological implications are even more striking. The success or failure of Europe in integrating Muslim countries, beginning with Turkey, will do more to determine future relations between Islam and the West than any military expedition.

As an antidote to the kind of absurd declinism promoted by Karl Zinsmeister and endorsed by lots of American bloggers, it’s worth considering a triumphalist view of European expansion in which, within 25 years, the United States of Europe will extend from Cork to Kamchatka and from Stockholm to the Sahara, arbitrating disputes that the former imperial power had tried and failed to resolve. No doubt nothing as magnificent as this will happen – the new Europe is a land of messy democratic compromise rather than imperial grandeur. But success with Turkey would be a big step, including as a first course, resolution of the intractable Cyprus dispute and extending to a relationship with the Muslim world very different from that envisaged by the cultural warriors of the West.

Interestingly, the US is pushing hard for Turkish admission to the EU, and the hardest push is coming from advocates of war with Iraq. It’s unclear whether they are simply doing what’s convenient in the short term, are so confident of American supremacy that they have no concern about the rise of a European counterweight or are generously supporting a project which promises to make the world the better place.