Jacques Barrot must be a mean poker player. The European transport commissioner has often been dealt a weak hand in negotiations. Yet he has managed on many occasions to outwit, or outbluff, his opponents.To name just one, he has steered the Galileo satellite navigation system to the launch pad amid bickering among EU members over how to pay for it and who should build it. But now he faces his toughest test: convincing the US to yield control of its airlines to Europeans. Barrot had to drop this demand to get a transatlantic open skies deal that should boost traffic across the ocean and lower prices when it comes into force on March 30. The UK, which had previously blocked such a deal because it did not want to widen access to the lucrative Heathrow hub without US concessions, was forced into agreeing to the deal after the other EU governments backed it. But it added an important caveat. Unless the US lifted restrictions that limit foreign companies ownership of its airlines to 25 per cent in second stage negotiations the deal would be scrapped. While the US administration agrees with the change, Congress opposes it.

Talks on the second stage begin in May. Barrot says he will now employ his Gallic charm to sweet-talk the airline unions into accepting that European owners would not treat them worse than American ones.

“It is the American pilots we have to convince,” he told me in an interview this week. Congress is very attentive to their views. We have to explain that an EU airline would preserve their rights.”

However, it will be harder to convince congressmen and women obsessed with national security that a European-owned aircraft is as safe as a US-owned one.

Barrot is also talking tough on two other issues. He said that he wanted the US to consult Europe before taking new security measures and to agree to allow its airlines to join the EU’s emissions trading system, forcing them to buy permits to emit carbon dioxide. Washington has said such a move would be illegal.Neither is likely to happen but, appearing to give away his hand, Barrot said: “Investment is the priority, the other two are secondary. If we achieve investment [reciprocity] we will consider the negotiations well advanced.”

Mind you, with talks continuing until 2010 and the suspension of rights only possible from 2012 Barrot is probably not too worried. His mandate ends next year and he will be happy to be remembered as the man who brought us cheap transatlantic air travel.

Like the proverbial mad aunt, Turkey is a topic most European Union governments prefer these days to keep locked well out of sight. But if the EU isn’t careful, it will discover one day that the aunt, quite sanely, has decided she doesn’t want to be part of the family anyway.

I was reminded of this on Monday at a European Policy Centre think-tank discussion in Brussels. A questioner asked me and the other panellists if the EU’s newly proposed “Union for the Mediterranean” would harm Turkey’s EU membership bid.

I was tempted to reply that the only thing the Union for the Mediterranean - a brainchild of President Nicolas Sarkozy - had harmed so far was Franco-German relations and EU unity. But then I remembered that at last week’s EU summit in Brussels, I had been told something odd by European Commission President José Manuel Barroso.

He said that, when the EU’s leaders had discussed the Union for the Mediterranean over dinner on Thursday, the word “Turkey” had not crossed a single leader’s lips. I was surprised because it would seem obvious that Turkey, as an official candidate for EU entry and an important regional power, should figure prominently in the project. Moreover, one lurking suspicion all along had been that Sarkozy hoped to substitute the Mediterranean scheme for full EU membership for Turkey. Be that as it may, on Turkey there was silence at the summit.

The truth is that many EU leaders were lukewarm about Sarkozy’s project but none saw any political capital in making a public declaration of enthusiastic support for Turkey’s integration into the EU. Turkey is no longer a cause worth sticking your neck out for.

At a time when Turkey faces a potentially very serious test of its political stability and needs all the EU support it can get, this is little short of flabbergasting. I refer to the attempt by Turkey’s chief prosecutor to shut down the Justice and Development party (AKP), which just happens to be the democratically elected government. For good measure, the prosecutor also wants to ban Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan from politics for five years.

The prosecutor was acting on behalf of the secularist establishment that has dominated Turkish political life for the best part of a century. Backed by the military, the secularists abhor the AKP as an Islamist threat - which it is not. By challenging the AKP’s right to rule, the secularists damage not the party but themselves and their country.

The EU must offer unequivocal support for Erdogan, the AKP government, Turkish democracy and Turkey’s status as a candidate for EU membership. To their credit, EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn as well as the German and Swedish governments have criticised the prosecutor’s move. But it’s not enough. The EU’s half-hearted response is limiting the space for Erdogan to manoeuvre between the hardline secularists and the AKP’s grassroots activists and supporters.

For the moment, Erdogan is trying to keep alive Turkey’s commitment to EU integration. But if he and his supporters don’t get robust backing from the EU, they will quite rightly feel let down and see the EU as an organisation whose promises to treat Turkey fairly and equally are a bitter joke. This would destroy the prospects for a healthy EU-Turkish partnership.

Turkish public opinion is already much less enthusiastic about the EU than when the membership talks started in 2005. It would not be difficult to imagine public support draining even further if the EU fails to give a firm response to the latest political threats in Turkey.

But perhaps that is exactly what some in the EU secretly want?

As European Union summits go, the March 13-14 event in Brussels is turning out to be short, sedate and - dare one say it - soporific. It’s Friday morning now - day two - and the 27 national leaders won’t even be sticking around for a group lunch. People are wandering around the venue, the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels, with summit badges, mobile phones and that look on their faces which says: “If 99 per cent of life is just being there, at an EU summit it’s 100 per cent.”

Even French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s performance at a midnight press conference was as thin as a crêpe dentelle. He claimed his fellow EU leaders had welcomed his call for a Mediterranean Union “with great enthusiasm” at a dinner on Thursday evening. But I have run into delegates from at least four countries who say the idea was approved in an “oh, well, let him have his toy if he wants it” sort of way.

The Mediterranean Union (MU, pronounced “Moo”)  is one of those EU schemes that you can tell is going nowhere right from the start because of a debate over what to call it. It appears that from now on it is to be known not as the MU but as the Union for the Mediterranean (UM, pronounced “Um”). For the hundreds of millions of people who live on the sea’s shores from Valencia to Tel Aviv, whether it’s Moo or Um cannot make the blindest bit of difference.

The idea behind Moo/Um is to strengthen co-operation between the EU’s 27 member-states and non-EU countries that have a Mediterranean coast, from Morocco and Algeria to Lebanon and Syria. It will reinforce and upgrade the EU’s Barcelona process, which started in 1995 and is generally regarded as, to put it kindly, an underperforming asset.

Why is that? The ever honest José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, provided an answer this morning to a few reporters over breakfast: “The Barcelona process has at times suffered from negative developments in the Middle East peace process.”

You can say that again, José. At a meeting in November 2005 marking the 10th anniversary of the Barcelona process, the only non-EU leaders who bothered to show up were Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Why Moo/Um should fare any better is hard to see. As things stand, Sarkozy is planning a one-day summit in Paris on July 13 that is supposed to bring together the EU 27 and the North African and Middle Eastern states of the Mediterranean. But it only takes one look at the recent violence in Israel and Gaza over recent weeks to suspect that a repeat of the November 2005 fiasco, with practically no Arab officials showing up, is all too possible.

There is a lesson in all this, if the EU chooses to take it. As Ayman el-Amir wrote two years, what matters are the root causes of conflict between cultures. Moos and Ums are all very well, but the real point is that it’s high time for the EU and its southern Mediterranean neighbours to put aside pious nonsenses about a “dialogue of civilisations” and tackle the hard political issues that divide them.

An even more surreal session of the European parliament than usual in Strasbourg this week. The “highlight” was what is known in euroland as a “solemn ceremony” to mark 5o years since the assembly was born.  It seems an odd title for a celebration. At least there was a birthday cake - and plenty of fizz, of course.

Solemnity there was, with the Ode to Joy, the EU’s putative anthem played by the European Youth Orchestra, marked by many members getting to their feet. But jollity, too, with much backslapping and some wonderful music. See more here.

There was also the small matter of nine MEPs being formally docked up to five days’ worth of allowances for their noisy protests at the signing of the charter of fundamental rights in December.

This is not the allowances story everyone is interested in, of course. The confidential internal audit report that showed widespread pocket-lining is still the talk of the town. By parliament’s standards, things have moved fast. The bureau of senior MEPs who run the place have agreed to review the system for employing assistants and hopefully change it before the 2009 elections. At the moment members are given 16,500 euro a month each to hire people. They often use intermediaries and the audit report revealed that some of these are controlled by the members themselves, along with other scams.

The new system will probably see assistants employed by the parliament. That would clean things up but may not save the taxpayer much - officials think they will probably have to take on 20 staff to run the operation.

Then there is the question of other expenses. The European ombudsman Last week the bureau agreed to publish for the first time in a simple form everything an MEP can claim, but not what they actually do. This is not good enough for Malta Today, the paper that filed the complaint. It sould go to court.

They are not the only ones pressing. Paul van Buitenen, the whistleblower whose revelations brought down the commission in 1999, now says he needs to do a similar clean-up of parliament, where he is now a member. He told me that if there is no reform he will start publishing cases of abuse of other allowances. He has already posted a summary of the audit report on his website. “We cannot let the pressure off,” he said.

Members moving house after the election to benefit from generous commuting allowances and those buying property to rent out at parliament’s expense are just some of the examples he has up his sleeve. This one should run and run.

According to a joke doing the rounds in Brussels, two Eurocrats are discussing the EU’s Russia policy. “ I wonder what are things going to be like after President Putin,” says one. “Hard to say,” replies the other. “A lot will depend on the new prime minister.”The new prime minister will, of course, be none other than Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president for the past eight years.

To some, that suggests little immediate change in the truculent tone of Russia’s dealings with the EU over recent years. Putin himself told German chancellor Angela Merkel last Saturday that Dmitry Medvedev, his hand-picked successor, would defend Russia’s interests just as strongly as he has done.

For many in Brussels and other EU capitals, trained as they are to think of nationalism as a Bad Thing, shudders surely went up their spines when they heard Putin describe Medvedev as “no less a nationalist – in the good sense of the word – than I am”.Still, Medvedev is no more a Putin clone than Putin was a clone of Boris Yeltsin. It is my belief that, after a certain spell of time, we will see a difference in Russian policies – starting with domestic matters such as state administration, economic innovation and social policy, and gradually extending to Russia’s role on the world stage.

It should come as no surprise that Putin played up Medvedev’s tough qualities. I vividly recall being in Moscow in 1985 when Andrei Gromyko, the long-serving Soviet foreign minister, recommended Mikhail Gorbachev for the Communist Party leadership after Konstantin Chernenko’s death. “Comrades,” Gromyko said of Gorbachev, “this man has a nice smile but he has teeth of iron.”This is not to say that Medvedev is a closet liberal whose heartfelt wish is to emulate Gorbachev.

Do not forget that, for many Russians, the Gorbachev era is remembered as a time not only of new and exciting freedoms and the end of the Cold War, but of economic chaos, food shortages, a totally misconceived anti-alcohol campaign, rising nationalism, violent separatism, public disorder and, in the end, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Medvedev will take lessons from that experience just as much as from the corruption and continuing economic upheavals of the Yeltsin era. As chairman of Gazprom, he can hardly be unaware that Russia’s economic revival under Putin owes almost everything to a bonanza in oil and gas revenues, and little to modernisation and innovation in Russia’s industrial and service sectors.

All this supports the argument that Medvedev will introduce changes – to the Russian economy, to the Russian state’s treatment of its citizens, and in time perhaps to Russian foreign policy. But he will do it in his own, very personal, very Russian way.

In many ways, continental Europe is increasingly an area without borders (viz the euro single currency, cheaper cross-border mobile phone calls, the enlarged passport-free travel zone).

But not everything works seamlessly.

I thought about this because of a fascinating story (warning - this is quite a large PDF file, but it has great pics) in the Bulletin, an English-language magazine in Brussels, on the subject of joined towns on the Belgo-Dutch border.

The story on Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau highlights the quirks of residents’ lives as they constantly flit across two countries.

It details how the frontier runs through houses, shops and restaurants. People also have to grapple with varying tax systems, closing times and speed limits.

Apparently, women are able to choose the nationality of their child depending on the location of the room in which they give birth.

The story highlights this sad case: a body was discovered in a house on the border. Police from both sides had to cooperate to be certain that they didn’t encroach on the other’s territory, leading to evidence becoming invalid.

If you want to know more about the towns’ unusual situation, read this lively story, written in 2004 when the EU undertook its “big bang” enlargement.

The most fun stories to cover from Brussels are usually those about big, messy fights. And such scraps are all the juicier when Viviane Reding, pugnacious EU telecoms chief, is involved.

For a start, she sparks robust and outspoken responses from the industry.

“Belarus is better for business than Brussels,”a top telecoms executive claimed last week in connection with Reding’s most recent efforts to cut mobile phone fees.

This reminded me of an attack on Reding in 2006, when she revealed legislation to cap lucrative roaming charges: one operator likened the proposal to central planning in the ex-USSR.

Here was Brussels bringing a law that not only commanded popular support but also, rarely, won rave headlines in Europe’s most eurosceptic media. The Luxembourger took on the industry (companies such as Telefonica, Vodafone and more), and won, forcing them to slash the price of overseas mobile calls.

Evidently, the success emboldened her. Victory seems to be everything for Reding, a journalist-turned-politician who outfoxed heavyweight colleagues in the European Commission to pass the legislation.

But now she is fighting on multiple fronts in the fast-moving telecoms sector. With only a year or so left on the legislative timetable before the European parliament’s elections, her battle plan is hard to predict.

At the top of her to-do list is a drive to force operators to cut the fees they charge customers to send text messages and use mobile internet while abroad.

This seems a politically irresistible quest, especially when you see stories like this: “A couple have been hit with a bill of £11,000 after downloading four episodes of the sitcom Friends via a mobile phone.” Some operators have already reduced charges as a result of Reding’s call for action.

At the same time, Reding also seeks to re-write the telcoms rulebook, bigtime. She wants to establish an EU telecoms authority who wants a new EU uber-agency, (but what exactly would it do?) liberalise radio spectrum and boost Brussels’ powers over the telecoms sector. Oh yes, she’s also trying to give national authorities the right to break up some of Europe’s biggest telecoms companies.

Reding wants everything: no wonder the telcoms industry is bridling in response. It’s too early to know what she will win, and what she’ll lose in her quest to leave her mark. But there’ll be fights galore along the way.

Some breaking news to add to my post of yesterday about MEPs’ allowances and excesses, sorry expenses. The wall of silence surrounding the confidential internal audit report into employment of assistants is breaking down. Paul van Buitenen, the whistleblower who brought down the Commission of Jacques Santer in 1999, is responsible. Now a Green MEP, he read the report and has just published a summary of it.

Having said that, Jens-Peter Bonde, a veteran eurosceptic from Denmark, is now claiming that there is a second, even more top-secret report. That one contains names and has not been read by any MEPs or sent over to Olaf, the anti-fraud agency, he says.

Here are some brief highlights. Remember the report examined just 167 of more than 4,000 payments between 2004 and 2006 and mentions no names. Given the extent of the irregularities and there is 135m euros - around 15,500 per member per month, at stake, it seems like the tip of the iceberg.

To avoid administrative most MEPs channel the money through “service providers” who handle the paperwork. Some of them seem to have little direct expertise in this. According to van Buitenen, in one case the provider involved was a child care company, in another a timber trader. In two cases money was paid to service providers even though the MEP had no staff.

In three cases MEPs paid money to their own bank accounts. Other companies used appeared to be fictitious. There was widespread paying of bonuses to assistants, often adding up the amount of allowance unspent at the end of the year. One case of a former member who paid a company he controlled has been referred to the anti-fraud authorities but if anyone is to get in trouble over this it could be van Buitenen, for breaching parliamentary procedure by revealing details of the report.

Remember the European Union’s “Lisbon Agenda“? Adopted by EU leaders almost exactly eight years ago, it was a programme that promised to turn the 27-nation bloc into “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world” by 2010. 

Such was the lack of progress towards this laudable goal that by November 2004 an expert group led by former Dutch premier Wim Kok concluded that the Lisbon Agenda risked becoming “a synonym for missed objectives and failed promises”.

Today, the picture looks a whole lot rosier - at least if you believe the latest analysis prepared for the Lisbon Council think-tank by Michael Heise, chief economist of the Allianz Dresdner group in Germany. ”Despite the decade-long defeatism of the cynics, Lisbon is working,” says his report. (more…)

There seem to be as many opinions on what the European parliament should do about the fuss over abuse of the expenses regime as there are MEPs. That is part of the charm of the place. But if there is one thing all 785 should be able to agree on it is that the scandal is not going to die down. And with elections next year, that should give them an incentive to do something about it.

It began, you may recall, with Liberal MEP Chris Davies publicising some of the contents of an internal audit into the arrangements for paying staff. Members get around 16,000 euros a month for employing staff and there are only as many checks as they themselves institute.

The debate then moved on to whether the report should now be published.

The big centre-right and centre-left groups, the European People’s party and the Socialists, put paid to that.

There have been scandals like this before. But one reason this won’t go away is that the  European ombudsman, the administrative watchdog of the union, is also on the case. He has yet to find a convincing argument why the parliament should not force members to account for their allowances and expenses and how much they pay their staff.

Parliament sees it differently and has said it would merely collate for the first time and make available on the internet all the various stipends to which members are entitled. Diana Wallis, the British Liberal Democrat who drafted the reply, said this was a “step change” because many MEPs had once opposed even that. She also has the parliament’s legal team onside.

She commissioned research into how many national assemblies published expenditure and found there were few more transparent than Strasbourg.

“It would not be proper for this parliament to to do something that is out of step with [members] cultural and legal traditions at home,” she told me. “There should be nothing to stop individual members or national delegations from going further.”

She also added that it would be unfair to change the rules halfway through a mandate. Hence new procedures for employing staff will not come into effect before 2009.

Publishing assistants’ salaries, even without names, could give enough clues for them to be identified, breaching their privacy, she said. We shall see if this is enough for the ombudsman and the Maltese journalist who first filed a complaint. 

Some British members already give greater detail. Members of the Labour and Conservative parties must get their accounts audited, though they do not publish the results. They have recently pledged to reveal who employs their spouse, after the Derek Conway affair at Westminster.

The Liberals, the third biggest force, have so far been most vocal in pressing for reform. They voted for publication of the internal report. It was a Liberal president, Pat Cox, who forced debate on the issue during his time in office in 2004.

Group leader Graham Watson has been thinking radically about the issue. He believes that the comparatively low salaries []  means many see their allowances as an extra top-up - and they are allowed to get away with it. Members earn between 800 and 12,000 euros a month depending on where they are from though that will be replace  by a flat rate 7,412 euros in 2009, pegged at 38.5 per cent of the earnings of a European Court of Justice judge.

“We all know MEP’s salaries are low compared with what we could earn outside. Society has chosen to put a cap on salaries and given generous allowances.” That should be reversed, he said. Pay should be increased but all allowances paid out only on the basis of receipts. ”The public wants to know what MEPs are paid and they have a right to know.” 

“There are a number of people in this house who think they have very comfortable terms and conditions and do not wish to have them changed.”

Watson himself took a 50 per cent pay cut when he left HSBC bank to become an MEP though he says he did it for love, not money. As an underpaid hack, I can only agree with him but doubt there will be much sympathy for the likes of us as the chill wind of a US recession hits Europe’s voters.