If you search for information about Garwolin on the internet, you will find that it is a simple but attractive little town in eastern Poland, about 50km east of Warsaw.  Yet 25 years ago, when I lived in Poland, Garwolin was the scene of a nasty confrontation between the forces of communist secularism and Roman Catholicism that has echoes in a landmark judgement last week by the European Court of Human Rights.

The Strasbourg-based court ruled that the display of crucifixes in Italian state school classrooms unlawfully restricted the right of parents to educate their children in accordance with their beliefs.  The seven judges contended that the presence of crucifixes could be “disturbing for pupils who practised other religions or were atheists”.

Predictably, the Vatican poured scorn on the judgement.  The judges seemed to have forgotten about Christianity’s role in forming the identity of Europe, a Vatican spokesman argued.  Italian politicians - even some on the unapologetically secular left - were also indignant.  Pier Luigi Bersani, newly elected leader of the opposition centre-left Democratic party, suggested that common sense had fallen victim to the law.

If anyone in Garwolin bothered to read the court’s ruling, I can well imagine how they must have chuckled bitterly.  For the 1984 troubles in Garwolin erupted over precisely the same dispute: whether the local school could display crucifixes in its classrooms.  I saw how the communist authorities worked themselves into such a frenzy that they sent in the Zomo riot police to take care of the “troublemakers”.

Once that happened, the issue became thoroughly politicised.  It was the communists against not just the Roman Catholic Church, but against the Polish nation as a whole.  The Garwolin protesters did what many anti-communist Poles used to do back then.  They made their way to the Jasna Gora monastery in the city of Czestochowa, where they mixed nationalism with piety by singing hymns and waving the red-and-white banners of the outlawed Solidarity movement.

From the perspective of a Catholic believer, there isn’t necessarily much difference between the repressive actions in Garwolin of Poland’s communist authorities in 1984 and the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in 2009.  Personally, I do not go anything like that far: the court is a legitimate court, and it is not exactly ordering the use of water cannon or tear gas against unarmed religious believers.

But what the two episodes do tell us is how deep the currents of secularism and humanism run in European public life, in a way that some Americans find disturbing.  The Vatican is doubtless right to say that Christianity has shaped Europe’s identity.  But so, too, have social and intellectual forces opposed to organised religion, starting with the 18th-century Enlightenment and the French Revolution and going all the way to Marxism-Leninism and the liberalism of the European Court of Human Rights.

Related reading:

How to pick a new leader for Europe Wolfgang Munchau, FT
UK’s opposition party seeks low-key president Tony Barber, FT
EU jobs stakes to dominate Berlin gala Tony Barber and Ben Hall, FT

EU states given stark warning on debt levels (Tony Barber, FT)

Walesa: Collapse of Berlin Wall saved Solidarinosc (Elizabeth Pond, EurActiv)

Blair’s unbalancing act (Charlemagne, The Economist)

October 30 saw one of the most important moments so far of Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency in Russia.  On a video blog posted on the presidential website, he squarely addressed the issue of the mass repressions carried out under Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator from the mid-1920s to 1953.  I agree with Tomas Hirst, who wrote on the Prospect magazine blog that this was a brave step on Medvedev’s part.

Medvedev didn’t simply condemn Stalin’s crimes.  He criticised Russians - and, sad to say, there are an awful lot of them - who make excuses for Stalin by saying some supposed “supreme goals of the state” justified the arrest, deportation, imprisonment, execution and death by starvation of millions of people.  It is still quite common to hear Russians defend Stalin by saying that he led the Soviet Union to victory over Nazi Germany.  Significantly, however, Medvedev entitles his video blog “Memory of National Tragedies is as Sacred as the Memory of Victories”. 

Medvedev took matters still further by calling for the construction of new museums and memorial centres to make sure the Russian public, particularly the younger generation, does not lapse into ignorance about the appalling abuses of power in Russia’s 20th century past.  Nor was it the first time that he had tackled this most delicate of subjects.  In September he became the first Russian president to visit a memorial to labour camp victims at Magadan in Russia’s far east.

These are steps that distinguish Medvedev from Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister and ex-president, under whose rule as head of state official attitudes to Stalin were more ambiguous.  As in communist times, the way that a Russian leader interprets his country’s past can be a useful guide to his thinking on the present.

Of course, the Russian human rights group Memorial is correct to say that everyone must wait and see if Medvedev really carries out his promises.  But now at least Russians have a yardstick by which to measure their president.

The distance separating Britain’s perceptions of the European Union from those of its Continental partners is so vast that the English Channel might as well be the Pacific Ocean.  This was my first thought when I read not just David Cameron’s speech on what steps a future Conservative government would take to limit EU involvement in British affairs, but also the way the speech was reported and the reactions on each side of the Channel.

The Financial Times story, for instance, said Cameron’s speech set out “a very limited programme for European reform” - an interpretation which would raise howls of laughter across much of Europe, where the Conservative leader’s proposals are not viewed as “very limited” and are most definitely not seen as an effort at “reform”.

The view in Conservative circles seems to be that the rest of Europe should thank Cameron for not backing calls from his party’s anti-European fundamentalist elements for a referendum on the EU’s Lisbon treaty (which will be in force if and when the Tories take office), and for swearing that he is not itching for a “Euro-bust-up” if he becomes prime minister.  All this, we are asked to believe, amounts to level-headed, practical statesmanship in the grand Tory tradition.

In mainland Europe it is seen as nothing of the sort.  Elmar Brok, the German Christian Democrat and foreign affairs expert, pointed out that the changes Cameron wants to the UK’s status in the EU could not just be granted with the wave of a wand.  All other 26 member-states would have to agree, and if there were the slightest risk that this might mean reopening the Lisbon treaty, the reaction in France, Germany and many other countries would be negative in the extreme.  But even if it didn’t mean that, the general view would be that the Tories were dragging the EU back into institutional arguments that have inflicted tremendous damage over the past decade on the bloc’s reputation, self-confidence and ability to focus on the policy issues that matter.

Part of the problem arises, of course, from the ease with which Czech President Vaclav Klaus got his exemption from the Lisbon treaty’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.  Less than a month after he made his demand, putting forward the ridiculous argument that Czech property owners would otherwise be under threat from revanchist Sudeten Germans, the other EU leaders rolled over and gave him everything he asked for.  No wonder Cameron and company think they can extract concessions from the rest of Europe.

Ireland, too, negotiated an elaborate text defining specific, untouchable areas of national sovereignty between its two referendums on the Lisbon treaty.  “Why not us?” think the Tories.

In the end, the Tories may get much of they want - but there will be one potential “nuclear option” at play in the future that has been absent during previous such European dramas.  This is the Lisbon treaty’s “exit clause”, under which a country can negotiate its withdrawal from the EU for good.  Let’s be clear: a country cannot be kicked out, and the EU’s emphasis on consensus and its family atmospherics make this a rather unlikely outcome.

But if Cameron - or, more likely, William Hague, his Rottweiler foreign secretary - causes the relationship to deteriorate too much, then it is certain that calls will mount in mainland Europe for the UK’s departure from the EU.  And, of course, there will be many in the Tory party - and the UK Independence party and elsewhere - who will say, “You know what? Why not?”

Anger of GM’s Opel U-turn (Daniel Schäfer, FT)

Oracle braced for EU objections on Sun deal (Nikki Tait, FT)

The end is nigh, we plan to do nothing about it (Charlemagne blog, The Economist)

I admired Thatcher, says Chirac in memoirs (Charles Bremner, The Times)

Even EU having trouble on climate agreement (Paul Taylor, IHT)

Where did Vaclav Havel’s anti-communist dream take us? (Adrian Bridge, Daily Telegraph)

It’s striking that the Czech constitutional court announced its approval of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty on Tuesday morning just as the prospect of another Russian gas import crisis began to loom on the EU’s horizon.  For even though the news from Prague is welcome, a moment’s reflection is all you need to remind yourself that the Lisbon treaty will, in and of itself, do very little to help the EU address its most serious foreign and economic policy problems.

The sheer sense of relief at adopting a new EU treaty - it’s taken eight years, required two different texts, gone through three failed referendums and caused endless trouble in countries such as the Czech Republic, Ireland and the UK - risks fostering the delusion that everything will be better once Lisbon is in force.  But this is to fall into the trap of assuming that process can substitute for substance (see Monday’s blog on how the same fallacy affects the EU’s approach to relations with other big powers).

Last January witnessed the eruption of a Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute that deprived a number of eastern European countries of gas supplies for two weeks in the middle of winter.  It was, in many ways, a re-run of a similar episode in January 2006.  Like that crisis, it exposed the EU’s abysmal lack of progress in fashioning a common external energy policy.  The Lisbon treaty will not improve the situation - or, for that matter, make things worse.  What counts is political will, which treaties do not produce out of thin air.

A similar consideration applies to the co-ordination of EU economic and fiscal policy.  It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that, with the huge increase in budget deficits and public debts since the start of the financial crisis, the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact - its fiscal rulebook - has become close to irrelevant.  Yet the EU, and the 16-nation eurozone in particular, badly needs a credible system of fiscal controls.  The Lisbon treaty will not provide it.  It can only come from governments acting with a strong sense of responsibility towards each other because they share the same currency.

The truth is, I think, that supporters of the Lisbon treaty have overstated its benefits since it was signed in December 2007, and critics have overstated its defects.  The EU has not ground to a halt because of the lack of a new treaty since it acquired 12 new member-states in 2004 and 2007.  Nor will it be transformed into the world’s most dynamic power once the treaty takes effect.  The best thing you can say about the treaty is that, now it is certain to come into force, there will be no need to say much about it ever again.

On Tuesday a numerically impressive delegation of Europeans will be in Washington for the first formal US-European Union summit since Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration last January.  Fredrik Reinfeldt, Sweden’s prime minister, will be there in his capacity as leader of the country that holds the EU’s rotating presidency.  So will Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister.  So will Javier Solana, the EU’s head of foreign policy.  So will Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the EU’s external affairs commissioner.  So will José Manuel Barroso, the Commission president - and from what I hear, a few other bigwigs are going along for the ride as well.

This is quite a turnout.  It would be nice to think it reflects an exceptionally warm and constructive relationship between the Obama administration and its EU allies.  But as a timely new report by the European Council on Foreign Relations points out, the real picture is less rosy.  “To Americans, these summits are all too typical of the European love of process over substance, and a European compulsion for everyone to crowd into the room regardless of efficiency,” write the authors, Nick Witney and Jeremy Shapiro.

In 2001 President George W. Bush was so taken aback by his first experience of EU-style summitry that he halved the frequency of the US-European meetings to once a year.  Last April, however, the Europeans managed to entice Obama into visiting Prague for a session with all 27 EU heads of state and government.  “Administration sources are frank that Obama’s encounter… left him incredulous,” say Witney and Shapiro.

One sympathises.  Even Europeans know that their inability or reluctance to put a sensible limit on the number of people who represent them is a weakness.  How much worse it must be for a practical, results-oriented kind of guy like Obama.  He would surely like nothing better than a summit where the Europeans speak with one voice and don’t need a dozen limousines to get them to the White House.

But it’s a problem that shows no sign of going away.  Take the G20.  This increasingly important group, which brings together the world’s leading industrialised and developing countries, does not in fact have 20 faces around the table but 24, of which eight are European.  It’s much the same at the International Monetary Fund.  And when the EU started formal consultations on exchange rates and other issues with China’s leaders two years ago, they sent three people to Beijing - Jean-Claude Trichet, the European Central Bank president; Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime minister and the head of the 16-strong group of eurozone finance ministers; and Joaquín Almunia, the EU monetary affairs commissioner.  That might just have been acceptable, except that a separate European delegation was in Beijing at the same time for a EU-China summit, and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France was also flying around China doing his own thing.

Will the situation improve once the EU has its first full-time president, one of whose tasks will be to represent the EU in external relations?  Unlikely.  At times I have the impression that the regular bilateral summits with the US, China, Russia, India, Japan and so on don’t even mean a great deal to EU leaders.

I well remember a EU-South Africa summit held in Bordeaux in July 2008.  Sarkozy, who represented the EU because France held the bloc’s rotating presidency, hosted Thabo Mbeki, the former South African president.  But Sarkozy left the summit early because he had a more pressing engagement in Paris on the same day.  With whom?  Barack Obama… then a mere presidential candidate.