Among the lessons to be drawn from the Russian-Georgian war is that the next flashpoint between the European Union and Russia may turn out to be Ukraine. There is a particular risk of trouble over Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula where ethnic Russians are in the majority and where Russia’s Black Sea fleet has a 20-year lease on bases that is due to expire in 2017.

To help avert a crisis in Ukraine, the EU badly needs to come up with a convincing strategy for rescuing the country from the geopolitical no man’s land in which it has languished since the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991. Russia’s military intervention in Georgia underscores the Kremlin’s determination to rebuild its influence in former Soviet republics on its western and southern borders. Ukraine – with 46m people and a culture and history intimately connected to that of Russia – is the biggest prize of them all.

Unfortunately, the EU’s plans for Ukraine are at present anything but convincing. At an EU foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels last month, the 27-nation bloc even found itself debating whether to state the obvious and call Ukraine a European country. The snag is that to do so would imply that Ukraine has the right to eventual EU membership, a prospect that some EU member-states can’t stomach.

EU and Ukrainian leaders are due to meet in the French town of Evian on September 9 and sign an association agreement on closer relations. But this accord will be deliberately ambiguous about whether or not it puts Ukraine on a track leading one day to EU accession.

A new report by the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank argues that the EU cannot afford any more delays in defining and deepening its ties with Ukraine. It proposes giving Ukraine access to the EU’s four freedoms (freedom of movement of goods, people, services and capital) and a roadmap for visa-free travel. It advises the EU to commit itself to consulting and assisting Ukraine in the event of a challenge to the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. It recommends support for Ukraine’s efforts to secure the peaceful withdrawal of the Russian Black Sea fleet from Crimea.

Above all, the report advocates that the Ukraine should be offered a “clearer perspective” towards a Nato membership action plan, and states that the EU should recognise Ukraine’s right to join the EU. None of these steps would be intended as a provocation to Russia, whose sheer size and regional weight leave the EU with no choice but to pursue a policy of long-term diplomatic and commercial engagement with Moscow.

The report’s recommendations make a lot of sense. However, they may overstate the EU’s ability to apply its famed “soft power” in a country that is right on Russia’s doorstep and permeated with Russian influence. Equally, they may underestimate Russia’s probable response to any hint that Ukraine is drawing close to Nato.

All in all, one has to fear that a crisis in Ukraine, like this month’s fighting in Georgia, will flare up long before the EU’s member-states have forged a consensus on what they want to do.

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.

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.

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.

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.