Opinion

Wilder Europe, meet milder Europe. If Ljubljana was any easier to spell, we might all want to live there. The capital of Slovenia, it blends the primness of Austria to the north with the zest of Italy to the south.

As I think about packing my bags for next week’s Bush-Putin summit in Slovakia, I am grateful to the Prague Post for an article pinning down the distinction between the Czech and Slovak languages, which has long puzzled me. Sometimes I see them claimed as a single language, sometimes as two separate ones.

When Britain stationed immigration officers at Prague airport in 2001 to keep poor Roma away from Britain, I urged the Czechs to station immigration officers at Heathrow to stop drunken British stag parties getting on planes to Prague. The British louts were a far bigger danger to innocent bystanders.

Yes I did go to the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, and yes I did come back with lots of other people’s ideas that I can pass off as my own, albeit most of them irrelevant to my usual line of work.

Good. A date for the diary. Elections in Bulgaria, 25 June. I know the Bulgarians will be signing their accession treaty in three months and joining the European Union in less than two years, but there is still a whiff of adventure about going down to Sofia and lounging around in the lobby of the Balkan Sheraton.

IF she were a character from fiction, then Latvia’s president, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, would be the heroine of an early-19th-century romantic novel. Which is to say, clever and well-meaning, but also headstrong and a touch clumsy, moved more by instinct than by calculation.

WHEN you say “that’s history” in a western European country, you are usually dismissing something as old hat, no longer of importance.

I live in Latvia, which means that I approach the holiday season there with the caution of any sober pedestrian. Last Friday, with Christmas still two weeks away, the police stopped 200 cars in 12 hours for breaking traffic rules at a road junction in the centre of Riga. They found that 25 drivers — one in eight — were drunk, two were on drugs, nine were driving without a licence, while 41 were merely speeding. Small wonder that road deaths in Latvia are twice the EU average per head of population, with only half as many cars. In other words, that approaching car is four times as likely to kill you.

The recent turmoil in Ukraine notwithstanding, I suspect that Sergei Yastrzhembsky must be enjoying his job as President Vladimir Putin’s special representative to the European Union more than anything he has done since he ended his term as Russia’s ambassador to Slovakia eight years ago.

THE partitioners are right. The best solution for Ukraine would be a peaceful and orderly division into two new states, allowing the Donetsk and Lugansk regions to go east under President Yanukovych while the rest of the country went west under President Yushchenko.