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How much will it cost the European Union to fight global climate change? Clearly, the answer depends on what your target is, how you propose to get there, and the size of the EU’s contribution compared with those of the US, China and so on. But a new report from the Centre for European Policy Studies thinktank offers some useful estimates.

The report assesses six recent studies, ranging from the Stern Review and a World Bank analysis to research prepared by Vattenfall, the Swedish energy company. In these reports, the average annual global costs for mitigating and adapting to climate change are put at anything from €230bn to €614bn, based on 2006 data.

The EU is not, these days, one of the world’s great polluters. In 2004, the global economy emitted about 49bn tons of greenhouse gases (measured in CO2 equivalent). The share of the 27-nation bloc was only 5.2bn tons, or 10.6 per cent.

However, as western Europe is one of the world’s richest areas, and as Europe has historical responsibility for the CO2 emissions of its industrial heyday, the EU will surely have to pay more than 10.6 per cent of the global costs of fighting climate change.

According to the CEPS study, the smallest bill the EU could expect to pick up is €24.4bn a year, while the biggest is €194.3bn. The thinktank’s own estimate, based on what it calls “the limited likelihood of a global burden-sharing according to current emissions”, is that the EU will face annual costs of at least €60bn.

This figure is close to the forecast provided by the European Commission last January, when it published its all-encompassing proposals on energy and climate change policy. At the time, the Commission said €60bn - or about 0.5 per cent of the EU’s annual GDP - might seem a lot of money, but the cost of doing nothing would be even higher.

Has the message got through, I wonder, to Germany’s car manufacturers and their friends in the European Parliament? This week the legislature’s industry committee tried to weaken a Commission proposal for capping CO2 emissions from new cars.

Rather than imposing a target of 130 grams per kilometre on all new cars by 2012, the committee voted to apply it to only 60 per cent of new cars and to delay full introduction of the target until 2015. The vote was unmistakeably aimed at helping German carmakers, whose models are bigger and less “green” than those of France and Italy.

This is, of course, hardly the last word on the subject. The parliamentary committee’s vote isn’t binding. But when it comes to converting the EU’s high-sounding principles on climate change into concrete legislation, the devil is always in the detail.

In Cold War times it was a rule of thumb that, whenever the Soviet Union’s behaviour was particularly bullying, the US and western Europe would put aside their differences and close ranks in reaction. Conversely, when Moscow was less threatening, there was less pressure for complete unity in the western alliance. France (Charles de Gaulle), West Germany (Willy Brandt) and the US (Richard Nixon) each sought benefits for their own countries from closer contacts with the Soviet leadership.

For all the European Union’s show of unity on Monday at its emergency summit in Brussels, the crisis over Russia’s destruction of Georgia’s territorial integrity clearly hasn’t reached the point at which all the Europeans are with each other in heart and soul. The explanation isn’t hard to find.

Today’s 27-nation EU is a very different creature from the European Community of the 1970s and 1980s, which started with six members and still had only 12, all in western Europe, by the end of the Cold War. It is the inclusion of Austria, Finland and Sweden in the 1990s and, above all, of 10 former communist bloc countries since 2004 that has made the difference.

Take the remarks made at Monday’s summit by the leaders of Poland and Austria. In what was a clear reference to the Germans, Italians and others, Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, complained: “There are politicians, even in Europe, who would prefer empty conclusions because of their intensive bilateral relations with Russia.”

By contrast, Alfred Gusenbauer, Austria’s chancellor, was adamant: “I’m against any kind of escalation.” Russia and the EU, he said, have “strategic reasons for reasonable co-operation”.

The summit saw a gap between countries such as the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland - all former Soviet satellites - and France, Germany and Italy. The former group sympathises strongly with Georgia, whereas the latter trio is highly critical of Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian leader, and enjoy flourishing trade and investment relationships with Russia that they have no wish no jeopardise.

However, it would be wrong to assume that the eastern Europeans are hotheads pressing for some kind of showdown with Moscow. Not at all. Geographically, they are on the frontline. They are, for the most part, small states. Two are extremely small and have restive Russian minorities. Open confrontation is even less in their interests than it is in those of France or Germany.

Rather, the eastern Europeans are drawing on their experience of Soviet behaviour to alert their western European partners to the need to respond firmly when Russia crosses the line, as all EU countries say it has done in Georgia. Their alarm is understandable because Georgia is part of the same former sphere of Russian control to which they once belonged. “Who will be next?” they are thinking.

However, economic or even tough diplomatic sanctions against Russia were never going to be announced at the summit. The EU is not a military alliance or even a regional policeman for Europe. Its common foreign and security policy is a work in progress, not a solid fact. Negotiation, partnership and a knack for fashioning ingenious compromises out of nothing are the EU’s very spirit and life force.

The only problem is that Russia, in its present mood, may not be especially susceptible to this type of approach.

The demographic forecasts contained in a new report from Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical agency, are worth a good look. Everyone knows the EU’s rapidly ageing population and shrinking workforce are making its task of promoting prosperity and job growth ever more difficult. But we don’t often see the hard numbers behind the general trend.

What I found most striking were the predictions for the big EU-6. In terms of their current populations, these are Germany (82.2m people), France (61.9m), the UK (61.3m), Italy (59.5m), Spain (45.3m) and Poland (38.1m).

By 2060, the order will have dramatically changed. In first place, says Eurostat, will be the UK (76.7m people), followed by France (71.8m), Germany (70.8m), Italy (59.4m), Spain (51.9m) and Poland (31.1m).

In other words, Germany and Poland are forecast to suffer catastrophic population falls of 13.9 per cent and 18.3 per cent respectively over the next 50 years. From being the EU’s largest country with more than 20m people than second-ranked France, Germany will tumble into third place. Poland, not far behind Spain today, will fall way back, with 20m fewer people than Spain in 2060.

It is hard to believe that such massive changes, which Eurostat says will take place in spite of immigration into the EU, would not have a big impact on the distribution of power in the EU. For example, the Lisbon treaty - which, of course, may never come into force - recognises Germany’s present pre-eminence by allocating Germany more European Parliament members than any other country. But that arrangement surely could not last if Eurostat’s forecast were to prove accurate.

As for Poland, its leaders cited its population size last year as an argument for more weight in the EU’s institutions. But if its population were to shrink as much as Eurostat predicts, it would be difficult to make the case that Poland deserves the same influence as, say, Spain.

Meanwhile, the UK would find itself in the remarkable position of being the largest country in an organisation that it has never seemed entirely sure it wants to be part of. Of course, the secession of Scotland (with just over 5m people now) from the UK would make a difference.

One glaring omission from the Eurostat report is Turkey, an official candidate for EU membership. Hostility to Turkey’s bid in countries such as Austria and France stems partly from the objection that Turkey is already so big (more than 70m people) that its admission would fundamentally change the EU’s nature. But I see that, according to a recent United Nations Population Fund forecast, Turkey will keep on growing and have over 100m people by 2050.

Given what Eurostat is saying about population trends in existing EU member-states, it would seem that opposition to Turkey’s admission will just get stronger and stronger.

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.

Compared with their US equivalents, Europe’s places of higher education are truly the poor relations. The European Union spends 1.3 per cent of its gross domestic product on higher education, against 3.3 per cent of GDP in the US. That translates into an average €8,700 per student in the EU (minus Bulgaria and Romania), versus €36,500 in the US. It also explains why so few European universities match their US peers in terms of high-quality research output.

These and many other sobering details are contained in a new report, “Higher aspirations: An agenda for reforming European universities”, published this month by Bruegel, a Brussels-based think-tank. As the report says: “European growth has been disappointing for the past 30 years, remaining persistently lower than in the United States. There is now much evidence that this situation is closely linked to the state of innovation and higher education in Europe.”

Europe’s performance varies greatly, however, from country to country. Denmark, Sweden, the UK and Switzerland (which is outside the EU) are among the best. Some of the worst are in Italy and Spain, where universities tend to be poorly funded and packed with an average 40,000 students each.

What does the Bruegel report recommend? In a nutshell, more money, more autonomy and more competition. As far as money goes, the report professes to be neutral about whether the extra funding should be public or private or a mix of the two.

But it does point out that a lot more could be done in the area of donations and endowments: “Unleashing the generosity of private donors (individuals, firms or foundations) would constitute a dramatic change for the funding underpinnings of European higher education and research.”

On autonomy, the report says every university in Europe should have legal status, own assets, and have the freedom to hire staff, set their pay and decide their budgets. Excessive government involvement in these processes tends to be correlated with below-average uniiversity performance.

Finally, on competition, the report recommends that significant research funds - for individuals as well as departments - should be allocated competitively at regional, national and EU level.

These ideas aren’t necessarily new, but they still add up to a pretty convincing argument. One wonders if 10 years from now the picture in Europe will be any better.

José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president who wants to be reappointed next year to a second five-year term, has in recent days received two important but somewhat curious endorsements. The first was from Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, who has been sharply and publicly at odds with Barroso over the European Central Bank’s policies and over the European Commission’s handling of world trade negotiations.

The second was from Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister. The areas of potential or actual conflict between Italy and the EU are numerous to list here. But among them are Italian state aid to the near-bankrupt airline Alitalia, a rubbish collection crisis in Naples, and the treatment - or mistreatment - of Italy’s gypsy population.

To these one might add a warning from Berlusconi, issued on the eve of a summit of EU leaders in Brussels last month, about the European Commission. “We must no longer see public remarks by commissioners who create a lot of trouble for ministers [at national level],” he declared.

Barroso puts up with this needling from the likes of Berlusconi and Sarkozy because, if he wants the EU’s 27 government leaders to re-select him next year, he really has no choice. At the European Parliament there have been mutterings, even among the centre-right political forces to which Barroso belongs, that the former Portuguese prime minister should not be a shoo-in for reappointment.

Some legislators hold Barroso partly responsible for the two treaty crises that have dominated his term of office - the collapse of the EU constitutional treaty after the French and Dutch referendums of 2005, and the debacle of Ireland’s rejection last month of the Lisbon treaty.

Such accusations seem wildly unfair, but that’s politics for you. Barroso’s unofficial re-election campaign began to wobble after the Irish vote, but with the timely expressions of support from Sarkozy and Berlusconi it’s back on track - though at a political price we cannot yet know or calculate.

The European Union can hardly contain its pleasure at the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the murderous Bosnian Serb leader who was picked up in Serbia on Monday after 11 years on the run. For all those who believe the best way to ensure long-term stability in former Yugoslavia is to accelerate Serbia’s path to EU membership, Karadzic’s arrest was cause for celebration. 

The arrest appears to vindicate the EU’s strategy over the past year of overtly supporting pro-EU political forces in Belgrade. The aim is twofold: to neutralise the militant nationalists who have poisoned Serbian public life for the past 20 years, and to persuade Serbian voters that their best hope of a decent future lies in aligning their country with the EU.

This strategy, so it is argued, helped secure victory in last February’s Serbian presidential election for Boris Tadic, the pro-EU incumbent. Likewise, the signing of an EU-Serbia pre-accession agreement in late April is said to have tipped the balance in favour of the pro-EU camp in Serbia’s parliamentary elections two weeks later.

The implementation of the pre-accession accord requires Serbia to be certified as being in full co-operation with the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Two war crimes suspects - Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb wartime general, and Goran Hadzic, the Krajina Serb leader - are still fugitives. But Karadzic’s arrest is an undeniable breakthrough and deserves a reward. It is not impossible that Serbia will be declared an official candidate for EU membership before the end of this year or in 2009.

Before the celebrations get out of hand, however, we need to recall that Serbia faces formidable obstacles on its road to the EU. One is its readiness in terms of economic performance, the rule of law and its ability to meet a vast range of EU technical standards.

Another concerns Kosovo, whose secession from Serbia and declaration of independence in February has been recognised by most EU countries but is rejected even by the most pro-EU politicians in Belgrade. The Serbia-Kosovo dispute is very far from settled. The EU will think twice before repeating the mistake it made with Cyprus in 2004 and admitting a country in advance of a solution to its internal political and territorial quarrels.

Lastly, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have stated flatly that further expansion of the EU is out of the question until the Lisbon treaty on institutional reform comes into effect. In other words, the door will be blocked to Serbia until Ireland reverses its rejection of the Lisbon treaty in last month’s referendum.

Putting pressure on an island in north-western Europe seems a curious way to go about promoting stability in south-eastern Europe. But perhaps for now we should just be happy that Karadzic is behind bars.

For those of you who missed Nicolas Sarkozy’s appearance last week at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, there are always YouTube and Dailymotion. In one revealing clip, the unforgettable 1968 student rebel Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a Green MEP, is shown berating the French president for his decision to attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

The tieless, slightly crumpled Cohn-Bendit waves his arms about, jabs his fingers and slices his hands through the air. Sarkozy, immaculate in a dark suit, remains seated, listening carefully, his fingers caressing a pen.

In response to Cohn-Bendit’s accusation that he has gone soft on China over human rights, Sarkozy starts by teasing his opponent: “Mr Cohn-Bendit, I know how generous you are. You’ve never been stingy with advice, especially advice for me.” Then the president makes the killer point: “You can’t boycott a quarter of humanity.”

It is a startling thought that Cohn-Bendit, at the age of 63, is 10 years older than Sarkozy and worse dressed. But the real lesson from last Thursday’s political theatre is that Sarkozy is capable of sheer brilliance under pressure.

He had just flown halfway round the world from the G8 summit in Japan, but in Strasbourg he delivered a long speech - having discarded his prepared text - and then answered questions from various MEPs for well over three hours. By the end, Hans-Gert Pöttering, the European Parliament president, wasn’t the only legislator eating out of Sarkozy’s hand.

One senior French official told Sarkozy it was his most impressive performance since he won the French presidency in May 2007. Of course, that was three days before he hosted more than 40 European, North African and Middle Eastern leaders in Paris at a summit that launched a new platform for co-operation in the Mediterranean region. 

That meeting, fraught with risks, went pretty well, too. After a wobble at the start of France’s six-month EU presidency, when he went too far in attacking the European Central Bank and the European Commission’s trade policies, Sarkozy is getting attention for the right reasons. 

Not long ago, I spent some time with a Romanian socialist member of the European Parliament called Adrian Severin. He is an impressive figure. He is not only a former Romanian foreign minister (1996-97) but also - according to his official CV - the proud recipient of the “Man of the 20th Century Award”. This, in case you didn’t know, is a distinction conferred by the International Biographical Centre, which is something based in the English university city of Cambridge.

Severin was talking to me just after Irish voters said No to the European Union’s Lisbon treaty in their June 12 referendum. What he said has stuck in my mind ever since. “There are countries without which the EU cannot function, and countries without which it can,” he pronounced.

For example, he went on, the EU could do without Ireland, but not without France and the Netherlands (which, you’ll remember, voted No to the EU’s now abandoned constitutional treaty in 2005).  And what was the difference between Ireland and the Netherlands? I asked. “Geography,” Severin replied.

I suppose he meant that Ireland is on the periphery of Europe and the Netherlands is, well, a bit closer to the centre. Anyway, he seemed very keen to teach the Irish a lesson or two about what it means to be a good European.

What about Romania itself, though? Is Romania, which joined the EU in January 2007, one of those countries the EU can do without, or cannot do without?

On July 23 we may get some answers to that question. That is the day when the European Commission is due to publish its long-awaited report into Romania’s efforts to meet EU standards on judicial reform and rooting out corruption in public life.

Last November Willem de Pauw, a Belgian prosecutor and adviser to the EU on Romanian affairs, wrote a report (dug up by the Economist magazine) that said: “Instead of progress in the fight against high-level corruption, Romania is presently regressing on all fronts in the fight against corruption.” De Pauw spoke of “the intense resistance of practically the whole political class of Romania against the anti-corruption effort”.

Next time Severin goes to Dublin and tells the Irish they’re a country the EU can do without, he might like to take along a copy of Willem de Pauw’s report.

Just read the latest version of Sarko’s “European pact on immigration“.

To recap, this is his plan for European countries to bring their immigration policies closer together. EU interior ministers broadly backed the measure at their meeting in Cannes on Monday.

But it’s hard to see how the pact - which has already been watered down - will actually change things.

At heart, the plan (which isn’t legally binding)  calls for improved frontier controls, effective removal of illegal entrants and better organisation of legal immigration. Sure - but the EU has said this sort of stuff on multiple occasions.

Yes, the union has made strides on common rules, for example abandoning internal border controls across much of Europe and agreeing to harmonise asylum standards.

Yet progress on unified immigration policies is often slow and becomes mired in spats between member states. 

Immigration is one of the most nebulous topics here in Europeville, with differences in countries’ geographic, demographic and economic situations making agreement on common rules tricky, to say the least.

These factors, and varying traditions and political stances towards immigration, complicate matters yet further.  For example, the EU has tried for ages to agree on a “bluecard” scheme to attract skilled workers, but has yet to succeed.

Sarko owes his election victory last year in part to his tough stance on immigration. However, France’s own domestic proposal to establish immigration quotas is in disarray after an independent commission set up to look at the question concluded that they were unworkable.

And the French president may yet find that progress on his goals for Europe is slower and more cloudy than hoped.