DEEP beneath the waters of the Bosphorus, engineers are bolting Europe and Asia together with a tunnel that will connect the distinct halves of Istanbul. When it is finished, this huge underwater passage will complete road and rail links from the Highlands of Scotland to the South Caucasus.

The tunnel is more than simply an ambitious engineering project; it is a symbol of Turkey’s determination to attach itself to Europe, permanently.

On Monday — provided that an emergency meeting of the European Union’s foreign ministers on Sunday night can agree the terms — Ankara formally begins negotiations that could one day culminate in Turkey’s membership of the EU.

Turkey faces serious hurdles along the way. But for many, the prospect of drawing it into Europe is economically sensible, politically astute and culturally just.

The extent to which Turkey has changed in the run-up to accession talks can be seen and heard on the streets of Istanbul. The great city on the cusp of two continents was always a fabulous potpourri of different worlds, starting as a Greek city seven centuries before Christ, then as Byzantium, then Roman Constantinople and finally Muslim Istanbul.

Today Istanbul is undergoing a fresh cultural renaissance, powered in large part by the impetus to join Europe. In the old Christian quarter of Beyoglu, now the chic centre of café culture and musical nightlife, on any night you might hear classical jazz, Greek rembetiko, or electro Sufi, the fusion of modern sounds with the whirling music of dervish ritual.

Two new museums, the Istanbul Modern and the Pera, have opened in the past year. Property prices are spiralling and the crumbling façades of Beyoglu, abandoned in the 1950s by Jews and Greeks fearful of persecution, are being restored to their 19th-century grandeur.

In the Nisantasi area, glitzy European and American boutiques mingle with bistros and velvet-roped clubs. The handbags are Vuitton, the scent is Chanel, but the atmosphere, to this observer, is Prague in the late 1990s, a city emerging from the dreary decades of political control into the sun of European internationalism.

On cobbled Fransisk Sokak — Little France — a miniature Paris has been constructed, complete with fresh croissants, the canned voice of Edith Piaf and red-checked tablecloths in cafés called the Ooh La La and Coup de Coeur. The effect is kitsch and bogus, but it demonstrates clearly Istanbul’s westward cultural vision. (The compliment is not necessarily returned: when Paris had the opportunity to host the “Turks” exhibition that was such a success in Britain, the offer was declined.) In other ways one can trace the upsurge of culture in Turkey, the product of new freedoms and new investment, elements of the new mixing swiftly with the ancient, as they have always done here.

In far eastern Anatolia, a Kurdish rug salesman was bent in concentration over what I assumed to be the Koran; it turned out to be a Su Doku puzzle. My Istanbul taxi driver drove with one hand on the horn, while using Bluetooth technology to transfer a ringtone of Turkish music from his mobile to mine. We arrived at an internet café in the backstreets, with a goat tethered outside; inside the men smoked water pipes, discussed Arsenal and surfed the web.

These are the small outward signs of a transformation in Turkish society, after the most ambitious political and economic reform programme since Kemal Atatürk forged modern, secular Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. It is 40 years since Turkey first indicated a desire to join what was then the European Economic Community, and nearly 20 since it formally applied; but only in the past few years has the pace of reform reached revolutionary speeds.

Where regime change is being attempted in Iraq with military backing, in Turkey it is being achieved bloodlessly, with the regulatory hoops through which Turkey must jump to join the EU. As in Greece, Portugal and Spain in the 1980s, and the states of Central and Eastern Europe more recently, desire to join has proved a powerful incentive for peaceful change, a tribute to the allure of European liberal democracy and pluralism.

In the past six years, the Turkish Government, under EU pressure, has tackled issues that were once taboo, helping to transform political and civic life. Under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister, nine reform packages have been introduced: there is tighter civilian control of the military, state security courts have been scrapped, police abuses have been reduced, the death penalty abolished and women’s rights strengthened (though insufficiently).

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