Those who say Turkey must never be allowed to join the European Union should meet Mehmet Simsek, the Turkish economy minister. His family and career background may surprise some people. But it is a story that serves as a reminder not to lock modern Turkey in a box of tired old stereotypes.

Simsek was in Brussels this week for a meeting of the European Policy Centre think-tank. After bombarding his lunchtime audience with fiscal and trade data, he turned to the attacks being launched on Turkish targets by the PKK, the Kurdish separatist movement.

"The PKK is not representative of Kurds," he said. "I am a Turkish citizen but my ethnic origin is Kurdish."

Quite so. Simsek was born in 1967 in Batman, a poor province of southeastern Turkey. Kurdish, not Turkish, was his first language - and this in a country where Kurdish identity and the Kurdish language have often struggled to win official recognition from the authorities.

Yet here is Simsek, at the age of 40, running Turkey’s economy. On the way he has picked up an economics degree from Ankara University, collected another degree from the UK’s University of Exeter, worked for the US embassy in Ankara, spent time at the equity analysis department of UBS bank in New York, and then moved up at the ranks at Merrill Lynch in London.

In Turkey’s general election last July, Simsek was elected to parliament for the Justice and Development party, the one that scares so many Europeans because of its Islamic roots.

It’s worth pausing a moment to think about this. An ethnic Kurd, born into poverty, rises first to become an international investment banker and then to take office as a government minister for a party which, though wedded to Turkey’s secular system, clearly has conservative Islamic religious tendencies.

It is an extraordinary tale that tests the limits of the European imagination by confounding its sense of what constitutes progress and backwardness, east and west, tolerance and intolerance. Turkey truly is unique. And that is one good reason not to rush to judgement on where its long process of self-transformation may finish up.

The last time Serbian and European leaders really got together, they seethed at each other. So why is the EU dusting off its plans to cuddle up to Belgrade? And why do I think it is a good idea?

I remember that last meeting in October, when, bunkered down in a conference centre in Luxembourg, Vojislav Kostunica, Serbia’s prime minister, proclaimed his country’s heartfelt desire to hang on to the province of Kosovo – whatever the wishes of the EU or US.

Olli Rehn, the EU’s enlargement Commissioner, said Serbia had done nowhere near enough to track down Gen Ratko Mladic, the man blamed for Europe’s worst massacre since the second world war – the killing of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.

The air was thick with recrimination. Rehn made clear that unless Serbia did much more on handing over Mladic, there was no chance that talks would resume on deepening Belgrade’s ties with Brussels,  negotiations supposed to open the way for Serbia to join the EU.

Now, however, Rehn is giving off much more positive signals, making clear that, if Serbia’s parliamentary elections on Sunday go well, the talks could pick up where they left off and make up for lost time.

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Britain has been traumatised in recent months by stories about a tidal wave of Polish and Lithuanian workers coming to the UK. Given the tone of much of the media reporting of the issue, it is hardly surprising that British support for the EU enlargement process has fallen by eight points to 36 per cent in just six months.
Such a response would seem bizarre in the United States, where it is far more common for workers to cross state lines in search of jobs. In fact, such labour mobility is a vital part of the US economy’s success.

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Apart from the spanking new flagpoles their national ensigns will occupy in Brussels after January 1, Romania and Bulgaria are seeking to make their mark as the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh members of the European Union.
In the run-up to accession, each has dispatched an eminent citizen as a candidate for the post at the European Commission that is the entitlement of each member state.
On Tuesday the committees of the European Parliament that oversee the policy areas to which the new commissioners will be assigned gave their blessing to Meglena Kuneva, Bulgaria’s minister for Europe, and Leonard Orban, who led Romania’s membership negotiations. The approval will come as a particular relief to Bucharest, which hastily selected Mr Orban after its initial nominee withdrew in a flurry of corruption allegations.

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Diana Wallis, a British MEP, had it right when she denounced the entirely unacceptable way in which the EU handled membership negotiations with Bulgaria and Romania.
She said the EU was simply "going through the motions" in negotiating with the two countries, since both already had firm guarantees they could join the club in 2007 or 2008 at the latest.
"EU membership is an attractive proposition and a sought after goal," she said. "It should not be some sort of freebie to be handed out with cornflake packets."
Bulgaria and Romania will join the EU on January 1 and we should rejoice at the fact: both countries suffered grievously under communism and their accession to the club will be of benefit both to them and to the Union as a whole.
But the conduct of the membership process has done nobody any favours.

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