It seems light years ago now, but I once had a delightful Swedish friend whose father, reflecting on his distinguished career in public service, told her that the proudest moment of his life was when Sweden switched from driving on the left side of the road to the right and there were no serious traffic accidents.

That was in 1967, and there’s no denying it - it’s damned impressive.  Imagine if they tried to introduce a change like that today in Britain, or in other countries that still drive on the left such as India, Japan, Pakistan or South Africa.  It would make the chaos on the opening day of Heathrow airport’s Terminal 5 look like a spot of trouble with the signalling on a model train set.

Walking around Stockholm in the extraordinarily warm weather that the Swedish capital is enjoying at the moment, I can see why a Swede would take such pleasure in his nation’s expertise in redirecting traffic flows.  The city functions so smoothly that it’s a matter of personal honour to help keep it that way.  Anything out of the ordinary, like a car going the wrong way up a street, would seem utterly subversive of the social order.

But you know, Europe’s diversity is something to celebrate.  I once had lunch in Rome with the chief executive of one of Italy’s leading state-owned companies.  He offered to give me a ride back to my office through the centro storico in his chauffeur-driven car.  The chauffeur decided to take a short cut and drove the wrong way up a one-way street.  At the end of the street were some concrete pillars blocking his way.  Before he could reverse the car, some delivery vans parked behind him.  He was totally and utterly stuck, and no one had the slightest intention of extracting him from his predicament.

Now, tell me, would that happen in Sweden?

The race for the presidency of the European Commission and for that of the Council - a job that will only come into existence if the Lisbon treaty comes into force - are in full swing.

José Manuel Barroso is still expected to snatch a second five-year term at the Commission, though a quick approval vote in the Parliament looks less likely after resistance from the Socialists, Greens and others. Regardless, the Wall Street Journal assumes he will get the nod and urges him to return to his free-market roots. “The Greens and Socialists oppose Mr. Barroso’s re-election on the grounds that he is too oriented toward free trade and free markets. If only.”

The race for the permanent Council presidency is more open. Sweden’s Fredrik Reinfeldt, leading the EU under the current rotating model, said smaller countries were open to a less powerful model than is sometimes discussed. That’s bad news for Tony Blair, often associated with the job. And it looks like Sarkozy might prefer Felipe Gonzalez, the former Spanish PM, anyway.

President of the council: “President Blair”

Say what you like about Nicolas Sarkozy, he certainly knows how to capture your attention.  At a meeting in the Elysée Palace last week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it appears that the French president recommended in no uncertain terms that Avigdor Lieberman, the hardline foreign minister, should be dropped from the Israeli cabinet and replaced with Tzipi Livni, the less abrasive opposition leader.

“Grave and unacceptable!” fumed Lieberman’s spokesman - how dare the leader of one democracy interfere in the internal affairs of another?

Here in Stockholm, where Sweden has just started its six-month European Union presidency, there are mixed views on Sarkozy.  On the one hand, Swedish government ministers are the first to recognise that, when France held the EU presidency at a critical moment in world affairs in the second half of 2008, Sarkozy - within the limits of the EU’s possibilities - provided vigorous and effective leadership.

On the other hand, the Swedes are more than a little suspicious that Sarkozy may be trying to delay José Manuel Barroso’s reappointment as European Commission president, in order to put pressure on him to appoint a French politician to a top portfolio in the next Commission, due to be picked in a few months’ time.  Whatever portfolio the French are after, goes the thinking, it is unlikely to be good news for Europe’s commitment to competition and free trade.

Well, the French aren’t the only ones playing this game.  I have spoken over recent weeks with representatives from most of the 27 EU countries, and I have yet to hear anyone say the job their country wants is that of commissioner for multilingualism (held at present by, er, Romania’s Leonard Orban).

Surely the truth is that what Sarkozy said to Netanyahu about Lieberman is what most EU leaders think - but don’t have the guts to say even privately to their Israeli counterparts.  Der Spiegel, the German magazine, calls Lieberman a “pragmatic thug” - and that is one of the kinder descriptions one comes across in Europe.

It strikes me as infantile to complain that Sarkozy is “interfering” in the internal affairs of another country, when every public posture the EU has struck since Lieberman’s appointment as foreign minister makes it perfectly plain that the EU thinks Livni would be infinitely preferable to Lieberman.  The EU may be right or may be wrong about that - but at least with Sarkozy you know where you are.

It’s the first of the month, meaning policy-implementation time. Among the big ones today: mobile phone data roaming is now cheaper thanks to the EU, wonky vegetables are back on supermarket shelves, the Greeks are facing a smoking ban and French diners will hope to save a few pennies on their bills now that VAT on eating out is lower.

July 1st is also Sweden day here in Brussels, as the presidency baton is finally handed over. Fredrik Reinfeldt warns of further pain in the financial sector in today’s FT, but the list of challenges facing the presidency looks daunting.

I was in Stockholm this morning when the happy news arrived that Germany’s constitutional court had given the green light in principle to the European Union’s Lisbon treaty.  I call the news “happy” not because I am biased in favour of Lisbon, but because it meant that for once the task of writing about the treaty fell to someone else at the Financial Times (on this occasion, my Berlin-based colleague Bertrand Benoit).

The EU’s masochistic efforts at institutional reform, encapsulated in the Lisbon treaty, were one of the first things I wrote about when I arrived in Brussels in 2007.  Two years later, I find that the subject refuses to go away, seeping into my daily work like a sewage leak in a cellar (a domestic problem familiar to house-dwellers in low-lying Brussels).  All the more maddening is the knowledge that almost no one in the outside world cares one stale fig about the treaty.

Still, like a junkie, I sometimes find the temptation to take one more sniff of the Lisbon glue irresistible.  Today is one of those days, and I blame Charlie McCreevy, Ireland’s EU commissioner.  After an EU summit on June 18-19, the Irish government announced that it would go ahead with a second referendum on the Lisbon treaty (Irish voters rejected it in a referendum in June 2008).  With impeccable timing, McCreevy proceeded to offer his opinion that “95 per cent” of the EU’s member-states would have voted No if they’d been given the chance in referendums of their own.

McCreevy was, of course, the hero who boldly stated before Ireland’s first referendum that he hadn’t read the Lisbon treaty and, what’s more, he doubted that any sane person would do so.  Anti-Lisbon campaigners exploited his remarks to the full.  Now McCreevy seems to be saying that EU leaders are forcing the Lisbon treaty into law against the will of the overwhelming majority of the EU’s 27 countries.

On the face of it, this is a pretty astonishing statement.  But will it make the slightest difference to the outcome of the second Irish referendum?  I haven’t yet tested the views of my fellow-sufferers in the Lisbon junkie network, but if I did, I reckon 95 per cent would say it won’t.

Sweden takes over the six-month rotating EU presidency tomorrow, but already its Prime minister is tending to official business, asking for a swift end to the Barroso re-appointment parlour game. “If there is not another candidate, what are we waiting for?”, European Voice reports Frederik Reinfeldt as saying.

No last-minute announcements from the outgoing Czechs, meaning a hodge-podge of news today. Wonky fruit and veg is set to reappear on supermarket shelves from July 1st after years of being banished for cosmetic reasons, says the Telegraph. And the days of travelling with a tangled mess of different mobile phone chargers could be over by next year after the EU pushed equipment makers towards a single model.

The last time that a dispute between Madrid and Brussels seized the international spotlight was in 1568 - and boy, was it big.  That was when the Spanish rulers of the Low Countries sparked the 80-year-long Dutch Revolt by executing Counts Egmont and Horne on the Grand’ Place of what is today the Belgian capital.

This month, another quarrel between Spain and Belgium broke out.  Admittedly, it’s less serious, and for the moment it’s stayed behind closed doors.  But in the interests of transparency, and because the squabble tells you rather a lot about the way the European Union operates, I shall share the details with you.

Karel De Gucht, Belgium’s foreign minister, has written an indignant letter to Miguel Angel Moratinos, his Spanish counterpart, complaining about a stitch-up at an EU operation known as the Union for the Mediterranean.  The UfM is a pet project of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, aimed at reinvigorating relations between the 27-nation EU and its North African and Middle Eastern neighbours.

When they launched the UfM last year, the EU and its neighbours agreed that it should have a co-presidency, with one EU country and one non-EU country sharing the post.  First up were France and Egypt.  No problem there.  But it was never officially spelled out who should represent the EU after France.  Belgium, which will hold the EU’s six-month rotating presidency in the second half of 2010, thought that under EU rules it would be a logical choice.

So, not surprisingly, De Gucht was most unhappy to discover, from a letter that Moratinos had written to his French and Egyptian colleagues, that Spain and France appeared to have reached a private deal without telling anyone else in the EU (or, at least, without telling Belgium).  Under this arrangement, France was to hold the job for two years and then hand over the reins to Spain, which would hold it for the following two years.

No doubt Moratinos thinks Spain is entitled to have the UfM’s co-presidency because it will hold the EU presidency in the first half of 2010.  But for two years?  The polite language of European diplomacy can scarcely hide De Gucht’s displeasure.  “I confess that I was really amazed,” he writes in his letter to Moratinos, arguing that the Franco-Spanish deal violates fundamental EU rules that set out how the bloc must be represented on the world stage.

This incident reveals many things about the EU.  It reveals how trivial squabbles constantly interfere with the efficient conduct of a common EU foreign policy.  It reveals how big EU countries (France and Spain) think they have the right to push around small ones (Belgium).  It reveals an EU obsession with process rather than substance.

And, lastly, it reveals how, all too often, EU governments look like mice fighting over a piece of cheese, while outside Europe the world is full of large, fierce cats.

Next Tuesday, Turkey’s bid to join the European Union will creep forward one more inch.  The EU and Turkey will open formal talks on taxation, one of the 35 “chapters”, or policy areas, that a candidate for EU membership must complete before joining the bloc.

Egemen Bagis, Turkey’s chief EU negotiator, is pleased but, unsurprisingly, not overwhelmed.  After the taxation talks start, only 11 of Turkey’s 35 chapters will be open.  The EU froze another eight chapters in December 2006 in retaliation for Turkey’s refusal to open its ports and airports to vessels and aircraft from the Greek Cypriot-controlled government of Cyprus.

Visiting Brussels on Thursday, Bagis made it plain that he strongly favoured EU membership.  “I believe that the European Union is the grandest peace project in human history, and the crown of this peace project will be Turkey’s accession,” he told me and some other Brussels-based reporters over lunch.

But entry into the EU is indisputably a long way off.  Bagis recognised that Turkey would not complete all 35 chapters by 2014.  Even then, there would be huge question marks over the readiness of countries such as France, Germany and the Netherlands to approve Turkish membership.  Western European political parties opposed to Turkey’s accession performed strongly in the recent European Parliament elections.

Bagis made one particularly interesting point.  He said he foresaw three possible scenarios in the event that Turkey were to close all 35 chapters: a) Turkey immediately joins the EU; b) Turkey, like Spain and the UK in the 1960s, is vetoed but perseveres with its application and eventually succeeds in joining; or c) Turks, like Norwegians in 1972 and 1994, turn down the chance of EU membership in a referendum, even though their country meets all the entry criteria.

Bagis says that EU membership is a goal that can unite all Turks - civilian leaders and the military, northern Turks and southern Turks, Turks and ethnic Kurds, and so on.  But what if, thanks to western European opposition, Turkish society’s faith in the possibility of EU membership diminishes to the point where the goal itself no longer seems to matter?