"Our common wish is to make Europe a continent of democracy, freedom, peace and progress." So declared the conclusions of the European Union summit in Copenhagen last night. It is an ambitious statement on the day they reached agreement to enlarge the EU by 10 states and 100 million people - and by the same number again when Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey join over the next decade.
But there can be no denying it is nearer being achieved after this wide-ranging package deal. It combines historic dimensions and material interests in equal measure.
Two major successes, over Poland and Turkey, stand out from the day's bargaining, which brought over 10 years of complex talks to a conclusion. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta had more or less agreed terms before the Copenhagen meeting. That left Poland as the major dissatisfied applicant, looking for more financial help for its agriculture and industrial sectors and insisting it must not be put in a position where it would rapidly become a net contributor to the EU budget. An agreement was finally reached to satisfy these concerns, involving some creative manipulation of future financial flows, but without breaching fundamental EU commitments and procedures. It allowed the Polish prime minister, Mr Leszek Miller, to proclaim his nation has made a "great historic leap forward" - significantly on the nineteenth anniversary of the day General Jaruzelski mounted a military coup to put down the Solidarity revolt in 1982. Such symbolism is an essential part of this process.
On Turkey, the summit had an equally difficult task - to convince its new government of the EU's good faith in reaching an agreement to start accession negotiations without compromising the strict democratic, economic and human rights criteria laid down for membership at a previous summit in Copenhagen in 1993.
It looks as if they have succeeded in doing so by agreeing such talks may commence so long as sufficient practical progress has been reached on implementing these criteria by December 2004. A key factor was securing agreement by all the candidate states, including Cyprus, and of Greece, not to veto the process if the European Commission reports positively. That deal enabled Turkey's leaders to modify their initially hostile response, including releasing military assets for the EU's new Rapid Reaction Force in Macedonia and Bosnia. Cyprus stands as a relative failure from this eventful occasion, but the signs are that agreement on its future is now possible.