Macedonia's exports to Yugoslavia, its next door neighbor, amount to merely half its exports to the unwelcoming European Union - and are declining. Countries from Bulgaria to Russia have shifted 50-75 percent of their trade from their traditional COMECON partners to the European Union and, to a lesser degree, the Middle East, the Far East and the United States. Nor do the advanced members of the club fancy a common label. Slovenia abhors its Balkan pedigree. Croatia megalomaniacally considers itself German. The Czechs and the Slovaks regard their communist elopement a sad aberration as do the Hungarians. The Macedonians are not sure whether they are Serbs, Bulgarians, or Macedonians. The Moldovans wish they were Romanians. The Romanians secretly wish they were Hungarians. The Austrians are sometimes Germans and sometimes Balkanians. Many Ukrainians and all Belarusians would like to resurrect the evil empire, the USSR. This identity crisis affects the European Union. Never has Europe been more fractured. It is now a continent of four speeds. The rich core of the European Union, notably Germany and France, constitutes its engine. The mendicant members - from Greece to Portugal - enjoy inane dollops of cash from Brussels but have next to no say in Union matters. The shoo-in candidates - Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and, maybe, Slovakia, if it keeps ignoring the outcomes of its elections - are frantically distancing themselves from the queue of beggars, migrants and criminals that awaits at the pearly gates of Brussels. The Belgian Curtain -between central European candidates and east European aspirants - is falling fast and may prove to be far more divisive and effective than anything dreamt up by Stalin. The fourth group comprises real candidates - such as Bulgaria - and would be applicants, such as Romania, Macedonia, Albania, Yugoslavia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and even Croatia. Some of them are tainted by war crimes. Others are addicted to donor conferences. Yet others are travesties of the modern nation state having been hijacked and subverted by tribal crime gangs. Most of them combine all these unpalatable features. Many of these countries possess the dubious distinction of having once been misruled by the sick man of Europe, the Ottoman Empire. In a moment of faux-pas honesty, Valerie Giscard D'Estaing, the chairman of the European Union's much-touted constitutional convention, admitted last week that a European Union with Turkey will no longer be either European or United. Imagine how they perceive the likes of Macedonia, or Albania.