A big and rather heavy parcel arrived in the Brussels office last week.

It contained three weighty tomes – including Norman Davies’ 1,365 page work ”Europe a History.” Also in the box were three discs, two large, glossy picture books and two brochures – all linked to the western Polish city of Wroclaw.

The package came from Poland and promotes the city, which is vying to host a new EU agency – the European Institute of Technology.

Evidently, national pride and political prestige is at stake when choosing the location of new EU bodies (countries are due to decide on the EIT this week).

If a country secures an EU agency, politicians can tell voters that they won something for them in Brussels. This is even though the EIT concept has been much watered down, under pressure from big, rich member states such as the UK, and the headquarters will employ just 60 people.

Brussels hopes that the institute will turn more high-tech discoveries into money-spinning products and help Europe close the innovation gap with rivals such as the US and Japan.

Poland is competing with Spain, Hungary and an Austrian-Slovak alliance to house the EIT. The chosen area will hope to gain fresh investment, as well as boost its high-tech industry credentials.

All the candidates have lobbied in Brussels ( you wonder how many of these Polish packages have been sent).  Barcelona’s bid gave ministers and diplomats an iPod with videos of its site.

The campaigning reminds me of a Finnish-Italian spat in late 2003 over the location of a new EU food safety agency. Here’s a teaser from the story that my colleagues wrote at the time…

Plans for the location of a dozen new European agencies have stalled, thanks to an epic tussle involving the merits of Parma ham.

Matti Vanhanen, Finnish prime minister, vowed this week to block a deal on the siting of the European Union bodies covering areas from satellites to police training – until he resolves a battle with Italy over a new food safety agency.

The dispute has become a question of national pride, with Mr Vanhanen insisting his country has the perfect facilities for the food agency.

But Silvio Berlusconi, Italian prime minister, has blocked the transfer of EU staff to Helsinki for almsot two years,  claiming the agency should be based in Parma.

“The Finns don’t even know what prosciutto is, “Mr Berlusconi famously stormed at a summit in 2001.

Read more here.

Italy won the agency, by the way…

The European Union’s leaders travel next month to Khanty-Mansiysk for a summit with Dmitry Medvedev, the new Russian president. Will they find time, I wonder, in this booming western Siberian oil town to stop off at the crossroads of Sverdlova and Pionerskaya streets? They should do. There, in front of School No. 5, they will find a recently erected memorial to the victims of Stalin’s repressions - at least, so the town’s government website says.

The existence of this memorial reminds us to think twice before rushing to judge today’s Russia. The country clearly moved to a more authoritarian, centralised form of rule under Vladimir Putin, and civil liberties were curtailed. But many Russians remain as determined as ever to expose the truth about their country’s bloodstained communist past. These days, Stalin cannot be airbrushed from Russia’s history as easily as he used to airbrush his opponents.

Putin’s reordering of Russia and his revival of its great power foreign policy ambitions contributed to a downturn in EU-Russian relations, but none of that makes Russia a monotonal society. As EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn said in a thoughtful speech last week: “The rise of the middle class and entrepreneurs in Russia should eventually mean growing demands for property rights and, by extension, legal certainty. This internal dynamic may lead Russia to reform its legal system and make its political system more accountable – but this is certainly not an automatic process by any means.”

Russia’s leaders at present can hardly be said to share the EU’s core values of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. But neither do other countries important to Europe, including, for example, most of its neighbours on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. As with these neighbours, so with Russia – there’s little choice but to try to improve relations. 

It would be wrong to kick Russia out of the G8, as John McCain suggested in March – even if that were possible. Rather, the EU and the US should be hard-headed but practical in its dealings with Russia and, above all, recognise that relations with Moscow tend to be at their most difficult when western countries themselves are disunited.

“Experience shows that Russia respects the EU when we are able to adopt united positions, and act accordingly. Conversely, Russia is adept at exploiting disunity among member-states,” David Milliband and Bernard Kouchner, the UK foreign secretary and French foreign minister, wrote in a joint letter in March to the EU’s Slovenian presidency.

All too true. But the Khanty-Mansiysk summit will show whether these wise words were just that - words.