Jack Straw is entitled to congratulate himself this morning on a valuable 24 hours’ work. For the meetings that the Foreign Secretary has chaired in Luxembourg, starting on Sunday and ending late yesterday, have done more than rescue Britain’s EU presidency from oblivion; they have set in train a process with the potential to save “old” Europe from inward-looking sclerosis, and to pre-empt the very “clash of civilisations” that opponents of Turkish membership claim to fear.

To the last, this latest round of talks about talks, which last night produced an agreement to launch a formal Turkish accession process, was dominated by political brinkmanship fuelled by fundamentally different visions of Europe. Emboldened by polls showing that up to 80 per cent of Austrians oppose Turkish accession, and by private backing from other EU member states, Austria appeared determined to offer Ankara something less than full EU membership as the goal of the accession process. Turkey has long since made clear that it will discuss only full membership. As a result, the Union faced an identity crisis more acute, perhaps, than ever in its history, and certainly since Charles de Gaulle said “non” to Britain 42 years ago.

That identity crisis still exists, but Turkish accession talks offer a way out. Contrary to the impression given by the Austrians in Luxembourg, launching talks does not prejudge their outcome. Historically, all full applicants for EU membership have eventually won it. But there is a clear provision in the “draft mandate” presented to Ankara for the accession process to be shelved should Turkey fail to enact required reforms, and even if these reforms proceeded satisfactorily, the timetable is realistic: full membership could not come until 2015 at the earliest.

There is, in short, no reason for those who fear the “Islamification” of Europe, or a flood of low-wage Turkish labourers seeking work, to panic. But there is every reason to seize this opportunity for the EU to do in Turkey what it does best — transform once-repressive regimes with the incentive of a place in the European, and thus the global, economy. It scarcely needs repeating that the transformation required of Turkey is deep and unprecedented; nor that the EU would be changed by the simple fact of having a mainly-Muslim country as its most populous member.

But Europe is not the same as the bureaucracy that is the EU, and Turkish accession need not swamp either. On a logistical level, there are mechanisms for delaying the free flow of labour between Turkey and the rest of the Union without denying Ankara full membership. But cultural conformity was never an aim of the EU, which is why the supposedly Christian “club”, against which some voices in the Turkish press are already raised, is already far more diverse.

To deny Turkey the chance of EU membership would be a betrayal of its reformers. To grant it would prove to a sceptical Muslim world that when Europe talks about embracing diversity, it means exactly what it says.