Remember the battle of the square root, Poland’s chaotic manoeuvre at June’s summit in Brussels to win more voting rights? Warsaw wanted votes weighted according to the square root of population and at least fought back the advance of reform for a few years.

Now brace yourself for the citizens’ war, this time led by Italy. The early skirmishes are being fought in the European parliament but the front could yet move to Lisbon, complicating EU leaders’ hopes of finally laying the reform treaty to rest.

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One industry doing well out of Belgium’s political crisis is flagmaking. The red, yellow and black tricolour is sprouting from homes across Brussels as people express their support for the continuance of the multilingual state.

The movement has even crept into Dutch-speaking Flanders, where around 40 per cent of people want independence. A tipping point has been reached in my street on the edge of Brussels. On Sunday afternoon one of the 40 houses was flying the flag. By nighttime there were 11.

Mind you, my neighbours have a vested interest. At last count there was only one native Flemish speaker in the street, the rest Francophone or expats like myself. And they don’t want to find themselves suddenly foreigners.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s  proposal for a "wise men’s committee " to meditate on the European Union’s long-term future, and to report back in the first half of 2009, is ruffling all sorts of feathers around the EU. As Margot Wallström, the European Commission vice-president responsible for communication strategy, put it the other day: "Wise men? What about the wise women? And since this group is expected to work out solutions for the future of Europe, should we not involve young people?"

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