A quick quiz question. What links the following four top Eurocrats: the EU Commissioner for External Relations, the Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection, the Commissioner for Transport and the Environment Commissioner?
The answer: they have all led a charge, in recent days, to impose tough sanctions on Turkey for failing to open its ports to ships from Cyprus.
Confused? Unsure why the environment commissioner and the guy in charge of health are so worked up about Turkey?
Maybe this helps. The same four commissioners can also be described in the following way. They are, respectively, Austrian, Cypriot, French and Greek - ie they are from countries where the prospect of Turkish EU membership is the hottest of political hot potatoes.
Now some in Brussels get terrifically upset by this kind of thing, arguing that the 25 commissioners are supposed to be working as true Europeans, not as shills for their home states.
They point to the fact that Commissioners take a formal Oath of Independence when they take up office, swearing not to receive instructions from partisan lobbies (or national capitals).
There is even a wrinkle of Brussels protocol that Commissioners and officials are discouraged from talking about "my country". Instead, they are supposed to refer to "the country that I know best".
Building on that theme, there is a rather cloying Commission slogan that you see on bumper stickers round town, or stuck up on the pinboards of earnest EU functionaries, saying: "My country - Europe".
Try telling that to the Cypriot Commissioner, Markos Kyprianou, a nice enough chap, and pretty efficient when it came to handling bird flu the other day.
I'm told Mr K has solid enough hopes of being prime minister of his home island, sorry, the island he knows best.
So when it comes to keeping voters in Nicosia happy, it's a hardline on Turkey from the consumer protection commissioner.
I myself do not get upset by such blatant domestic politicking. But that's because I like nation states, or rather, I regard them as the least worst unit of government yet created: big enough to attract talented people into their civil services (unlike the ghastly drones who infest local and regional governments), but close enough to their electorates to be meaningfully democratic.
In my two years here, I have seen previous few signs that the EU is the superstate that the Eurosceptics back home insist.
Yes, there are federalist bureaucrats within the machine, some of them self-hating Brits who take a special pleasure in taking the UK to task, or doing down the Government in London.
But underneath, the real driving motor is made up of nation states, all using Europe to further their own ambitions and causes.
That is not always good for Britain - often the national interests of the majority run counter to our own view of the world.
But it is a form of transparency, nonetheless. Tell me this or that commissioner is trying to block Turkey, and it makes no sense.
Tell me it's the Greeks and the French, backed by the Austrians and Cyprus, and it all becomes clear.