The European Parliament, perhaps twisting in the wind of doubt over other issues, last week demanded that Turkey acknowledge the 1915 Armenian massacres as "genocide".
Why should Turkey do that? Turkey did not exist as a state when the massacres occurred. The Turkish people, as a people, are innocent of the bloodshed.
Moreover, the massacres occurred as part of a series of ethnic slaughters reaching from the Balkan Wars before the Great War until several years afterwards: why should the Turks alone be expected to accept blame for events in which all the great powers were to a greater or lesser degree involved?
One of the great disasters of world history was the failure of the Western democracies to cherish the enormous virtues of the Ottoman Empire. Instead, that wretched Gladstonian cliché about it being "the sick man of Europe" became the myth that governed policy. Churchill promulgated this with all the foolish and deceitful energy at his command as he drove us (and I mean us) into the catastrophic Gallipoli campaign. But even before that calamity, the Tsar's armies, especially his Armenians, had fallen ruthlessly on Ottoman Muslim communities during the winter 1914-15, massacring thousands.
The allies were simultaneously conniving with Ottoman Armenian separatists, and the UK-French invasion of Turkey in April 1915 triggered a convulsion of insanity through an already neurotically insecure Anatolia. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were rounded up by their Kurdish and Turkish neighbours for translocation. Vast numbers were killed. But so too were vast numbers of ethnic Turks killed by Russian armies, by Greek armies and by Franco-British armies in the coming years.
So it is morally and historically absurd to identify one part of that human catastrophe as demanding modern political culpability, but no other. So let non-political, academic fingers sift through the melancholy ashes of history, looking for bones. Modern politics is not about disinterring the past but transmuting its legacy into the future through the prism of the present.
And it is in the present that we judge things, not on some glorious past, be it in Alhambra 50 years ago, as some letter-writers to this newspaper have been rather fatuously doing, or in the extinct Ottoman Caliphate. We must decide upon the future of Turkey within the European Union because of what Turkey is today. Once I was ardently in favour of full Turkish membership of the EU, but now I am sceptical, primarily for the reason which is shared by much of Europe: concern about the mass movement of Turks from eastern Anatolia into our cities.
Western Europe has experienced two post-war examples of large-scale Turkish immigration: one to Sweden, the other to Germany. The former was open and generous about civil and electoral rights; the latter was not. The outcome has been much the same: both countries now have enclosed, inward-looking Turkish communities, whose young people marry out, back into Anatolia, and who often have little personal contact with the indigenous peoples. And whereas Turks at home, under the stern eye of their army, have for decades been secular in their expression of Islam, many Turks in non-martial, democratic exile have embraced more fundamentalist strains.
No doubt such concerns will be called "racist". But it has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with culture. Are the cultures of eastern Turkey and Western Europe mutually assimilable? Could Erzurum take 10,000 Swedish immigrants? Could Dundalk take 10,000 Anatolian Turks? Moreover, almost every report we hear from Turkey speaks of the rise of a dynamic and conservative Islam. When I was first there 20 years ago, headscarves and burkas were non-existent; now they are common even in Istanbul. Can secular, post-Christian Europe cope with large numbers of Muslim immigrants from those economically backward Turkish regions alongside Iran and Iraq, who believe that peace and freedom exist only in domains ruled by Islamic law?
On the other hand, there remains one sound reason to admit Turkey. The old EU now really is the sick man of Europe. Sclerotic, over-taxed, over-regulated, over-pensioned, it lies uncomfortably in bed with its boisterous new companions from Eastern Europe. What will it make of the vast energies and vaster population of Turkey? How will it inflict its ludicrous health and safety regulations, and 80,000 pages of fatuous Euro-law, on a vibrant Middle-Eastern culture of enterprise and individualism? It can't. The Titanic of Brussels would merely need to skim its hull against the cheery anarchy of the bazaar of Istanbul, and the wretched vessel would founder.
Moreover, as matters stand, the EU is a criminal conspiracy against Turkey, our friend and neighbour. I say friend, because for decades, Turkey held the southern flank of Nato against totalitarian Soviet communism. And that the EU still has tariff barriers against Turkish produce, while it has admitted former enemies of the Warsaw Pact, is a bloody disgrace.
And though it is ludicrous to suppose that the megalomaniac madmen in Brussels are actually capable of creating a superstate reaching from the Arctic almost to Arabia, this doesn't mean they won't continue to try. So we should welcome both Austria's frank concerns about Turkey and the Franco-Dutch rejection of the European Constitution - which anyway was more like a detailed manual for running a nuclear power station than a political document.
What the EU needs now is a little more sceptical honesty, a lot more of the rigours of a Turkish marketplace, and a great deal less of the flabby and sclerotic Franco-German welfare dependency. In other words, it is time to re-invent the dear old Common Market, with controlled population movements the key