Javier Solana, whose ponderous title of "high representative for common foreign and security policy" is meaningless except in south-eastern Europe, observed that it was a tragic irony that Trajkovski died on the very day his country was applying for EU membership. Solana, Chris Patten and the former Nato chief George Robertson, all regulars in Skopje, found him a moderate man they could do business with in the fragile former Yugoslav republic.

The Kosovo crisis led to the effort to broker agreement between Macedonia's Slav majority and ethnic Albanian minority. The EU felt guilty - and with good reason: the 1990s began in the Balkans with the pompous declaration that "Europe's hour had come", but it took years of ethnic cleansing, Sarajevo and Srebrenica - and American intervention - before a peace of sorts returned.

It is a measure of how far things have progressed that Slovenia, the first republic to secede from Tito's federation, becomes a fully-fledged member of the EU club in just a few weeks. Croatia, like Macedonia, has a "stabilisation and association" agreement with the EU, though it has yet to surrender a retired general wanted for war crimes.

Serbia is far more difficult. The prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, is forming a government which depends on the support of the socialists - led by the same warmongering Slobodan Milosevic he helped oust and send to The Hague in 2000. Its prospects for an agreement with Brussels are understandably bleak. Kosovo is still in a dangerous constitutional limbo.

Serious problems may abound, but this rough neighbourhood is still the one part of the world where the EU - which so often suffers from the gap between ambition and performance - has got its act together. Policies on trade, aid and security add up to a strategy that holds out the distant prospect of membership - a "European destination" - to encourage reform, democratisation and minority rights. Later this year, the Pentagon permitting, Eufor will take over from Nato in Bosnia. European peacekeepers, policemen, administrators and consultants are the flagbearers of a new "liberal imperialism".

The Balkans are also a reminder that the EU can truly have a magnetic appeal. Aspiring south-east Europeans only have to look to Poland, which is about to become one of the union's biggest players, and to Romania and Bulgaria, which are hoping to join in 2007, to see that enlargement is a real prize, as it was for newly democratic Spain and Portugal when they joined nearly 20 years ago. The contrast with the existing member states, where the shine has long worn off and "Brussels" is so often a term of abuse, is depressing.

In Britain, instinctive hostility to Europe has been reinforced by hysteria over the impending arrival of 10 "big bang" newcomers. Happily, tabloid scare-mongering about "sick migrants" and "benefits scroungers" has been rubbished by a survey showing that the likely problem is a brain drain from the new member states rather than hordes of penniless Slovaks or Lithuanians washing up in Dover.