What then has been achieved in 2007? Well, first the accession of Bulgaria and Romania at the start of the year, something that was not guaranteed, so far at any rate as the date was concerned, until almost the last moment. During the year we have also seen gradual public acceptance of the notion that the Western Balkans have a future in the European partnership of nations.

The first steps - Stabilisation and Association Agreements - have now been initialled (if not actually signed) with all current states in the region and, of course, Croatia and Macedonia are already candidates. The Western Balkan train has therefore left the station; it is only a question of time before it arrives.

This was not something that could be realistically have been said a year ago, when the feeling was that the EU's then unresolved constitutional problems would impede much further progress in the short term. Public opinion, has also, I sense, become more settled and more favourable towards the accession of the Western Balkans than it was at that time.

This in itself is a major advance. Admittedly without any real democratic debate, the EU's evolution from a rich west European club into a pan-Continental Union has been accomplished. Only the details and the periphery remain to be settled. And while many people have reservations about how such an enlarged Union may work in practice, and the depth of its integration, they perceive that the change is now effectively irreversible and are prepared to give the new European reality a fair wind.

A year or eighteen months ago it was also difficult to imagine that we should be looking forward to ratifying, for the most part without referenda, a new set of constitutional arrangements closely modelled on the proposals that had caused so much difficulty in 2005. Credit for that must be largely down to the German Presidency.

The task of modernising the EU's institutional arrangements may not have been done well - there is already reported unease over what several of the Reform Treaty's provisions may actually mean in practice - but at least they have been carried through. Now the administrative energy invested in securing a resolution of the constitution can be switched into more profitable avenues.

Almost unnoticed outside the financial world the past year has seen a massive appreciation of the euro against the dollar. This may not be altogether beneficial for European exporters but it does underline the extent to which the fledgling euro - still a month short of its ninth birthday - is now perceived as a pivotal world currency, rather than a brave experiment.

When the euro was created people who should have known better talked a lot of nonsense about its likely early demise. I remember a conversation over dinner with a currency trader who believed the markets would smash the euro within a few weeks, making a great deal of profit for speculators like himself in the process. Even a year ago people were talking about countries leaving the euro. Well, 2007 has shown how unrealistic that is.

And now at the end of the year comes the agreement to extend the Schengen space - the passport free area of the European Union - to those central European countries that acceded in 2004. This is both historic and symbolic and a considerable achievement by the folk whose job it has been to put in place the required systems to safeguard our security. Again, this is something that could have been scarcely imagined a few short years ago. The last fragments of the iron curtain have been erased.

When you consider what was involved, when the Erasmus student mobility programme started twenty years and a million and a half students ago, in the relatively short journey overland from Amsterdam, let's say, to Warsaw, and compare that to how free of restriction that journey has now become, you get an idea of the tsunami of change that has swept through the European Continent.

The frontiers were always an anomaly of history, an invention of comparatively modern times - and now they are gone, or are shortly going, over wide swathes of the European hinterland.

Of course there are potential problems of illegal immigration - a very real threat to the stability and prosperity of European society if they become widespread. That is just one factor that could upset the future European apple cart. But then the Reform Treaty may not survive 27 processes of ratification; energy insecurity may dangle us in the wind or leave us at the beck and call of President Putin's increasingly frightening United Russia party.

The reform processes in the Balkans and in Bulgaria and Romania may stall; there is still the real prospect of new violence in the Balkans following a likely unilateral and illegal declaration of independence by the Kosovo authorities, as well as the rather shameful likelihood of the EU putting expediency before legality and recognising the illegal act rather than facing up to its own divisions.

These are all bogeys in the shadows, trolls to leap out at us from beneath the bridges of 2008 - a year in which public opinion, or even the European Parliament, may insist on greater democratic control over Europe's future. Nevertheless, in this anniversary year, I think we can approach Christmas with more optimism and quiet satisfaction than has been the case for many a Christmas past.

The author is editor of EuropaWorld