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?”

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.

As Tony Blair’s chances of becoming the European Union’s first full-time president fade, so the chances go up that David Miliband will be the EU’s next foreign policy supremo.  This is the picture emerging on the second day of the EU summit in Brussels.

The killer blow to Blair’s prospects was delivered by Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, who let it be known that she would prefer the EU’s first permanent president to come from one of the EU’s smaller states.  By definition, this rules out Blair.

German officials say she has nothing against Blair personally.  But in this matter Merkel’s voice is perhaps the most important among all the 27 leaders present.  Germany is not putting forward a candidate either for the presidency or for the foreign policy post.  It is, however, the EU’s biggest country and its paymaster.  Merkel is therefore the honest broker, the swing vote, the kingmaker - however you want to put it.

Meanwhile, Blair has lost the support of José Sócrates, Portugal’s prime minister, and of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s prime minister.  Both are socialists and both think Europe’s centre-left should focus not on getting the presidency but the foreign policy job.

That is why the summit chatter about Miliband is getting ever more excited.  Looking around Europe, one does not see too many foreign policy stars on the centre-left side of the political firmament.  And check out this editorial in Thursday’s Le Monde on Miliband.  It describes him as “the young and brilliant foreign secretary” and praises his commitment to the EU, contrasting it with the views of William Hague, the Tory shadow foreign secretary, whom it accuses of “an almost pathological europhobia”.

With Le Monde on your side, how can you lose?

As European Union leaders gather for their two-day summit in Brussels, the word is that the British government’s effort to have Tony Blair selected as the EU’s first full-time president is running into trouble.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just finished a round of afternoon discussions with other European socialist leaders, trying to persuade them that Blair deserves the job.  The talks did not go well.

Martin Schulz, chairman of the European Parliament’s socialist group, made it plain that he and many other Continental socialists didn’t want the EU presidency to go to a Briton.  The reason?  The UK is semi-detached from Europe, not in the euro area, not in the Schengen zone permitting border-free travel around the EU, etc, etc.

Moreover, the socialists think they have a better chance of getting in one of their own people as the EU’s next foreign policy high representative than as the first full-time president.  With 20 or so of the EU’s 27 governments controlled by the centre-right, they reason, national leaders are bound to pick someone from their own political family for the EU presidency.

Of course, you could argue that some centre-right leaders - Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi comes to mind - are perfectly happy to see Blair in the job.

But maybe not in France and Germany.  French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angel Merkel met for dinner in Paris on Wednesday night, and word is reaching reporters in Brussels that the two leaders were lukewarm about Blair’s candidacy.  If true, that would come close to polishing him off - or, rather, it would enable him to say he had never been a candidate in the first place.

The fuss over who will be the European Union’s first full-time president is obscuring the less sexy but potentially more important question of who will get the two or three most powerful jobs in the next European Commission.  A good many governments would prefer to see one of their nationals in a truly influential economic policymaking role in the Commission than occupying the EU presidency, which may turn out to be a more hollow job than once foreseen.

Commission president José Manuel Barroso says he will not nominate his new team until EU leaders have chosen their new head of foreign policy, a post that entitles its holder to a Commission seat.  Any country wanting a big economic portfolio at the Commission will therefore steer clear of putting forward a candidacy for the foreign policy job, because there is only one Commission seat for each nation.

Does this explain why the German government has proposed Günther Oettinger, prime minister of the state of Baden-Württemberg, as its next commissioner?  He doesn’t have obvious foreign policy credentials, so  the German idea is almost certainly to slot him into a top economic job.

Three portfolios in the outgoing Commission - competition commissioner, internal market commissioner and trade commissioner - stand out from the rest, because they bestow real power on their occupants.  They are the policy areas where Europe is most effective at speaking with one voice and exerting worldwide influence.  It would make sense for Germany, which was disappointed by the performance of its outgoing representative, Günter Verheugen, as industry commissioner, to want one of these jobs.

If the internal market portfolio is rejigged, perhaps in order to put a stronger focus on Europe’s response to the financial crisis, it is easy to imagine a scramble among the bigger EU countries to be put in charge of financial regulation.  France is said to be keen on getting something meaty like this (Michel Barnier, or perhaps Christine Lagarde?).  Of course, this would rule out the foreign policy position for a Frenchman - but Paris, better than most national capitals, knows which jobs in Brussels contain the beef and which the onions.

What about the UK?  The intriguing point here is that it would be extremely simple for Prime Minister Gordon Brown to quash the rumours that David Miliband, his foreign secretary, is manoeuvring to be the EU’s next foreign policy supremo.  All Brown would need to do is to announce that Catherine Ashton, the British EU trade commissioner, was being renominated to Barroso’s team.  Or Brown could name someone else.  Either way, it would instantly rule out Miliband as the head of EU foreign policy.

But Brown hasn’t done that.   It is anyone’s guess why.  But one explanation is that, with Tony Blair’s undeclared EU presidential bid far from certain of success, Brown needs other cards to play.  If Blair is the British government’s queen of hearts, Miliband is, you might say, the knave of spades.

With a mere 27 members (all European heads of state or government, admittedly), the electorate that will pick the European Union’s first full-time president and new foreign policy high representative is even smaller than the conclave of Roman Catholic cardinals that chooses a new pope.  But this isn’t stopping other European busybodies from trying to muscle in on the decision.

Take the main political groups in the European Parliament, for example.  They have no formal say in the matter whatsoever.  Nonetheless, the parliament’s socialist group appears confident that it has an informal understanding with the centre-right European People’s Party that the full-time EU presidency should go to a EPP politician and the foreign policy post should go to a socialist.

Well, I’m glad that’s all clear, then.  Perhaps Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and the 24 other EU leaders who will actually make the choices shouldn’t bother to show up for tomorrow’s summit in Brussels - or for a follow-up summit in November, when the decisions are likely to be taken.

Still, for what it’s worth, here is the shortlist of six candidates that the socialists are proposing for the EU foreign policy job, currently held by Javier Solana of Spain:

a) Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s outgoing foreign minister, who suffered a crushing defeat in last month’s German elections at the hands of Chancellor Angela Merkel;

b) David Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary, who says he isn’t available for the job, not least because his government wants Tony Blair to be the EU’s first president;

c) Miguel Ángel Moratinos, Spain’s foreign minister since 2004, and a former EU special representative for the Middle East peace process;

d) Elisabeth Guigou, a member of the French parliament who served as France’s EU affairs minister from 1990 to 1993;

e) Alfred Gusenbauer, who was chancellor of Austria for less than two years in 2007-2008 before his term ended, in the words of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, “in fiasco amid infighting, tactical errors and his own over-estimation of himself”;

f) Adrian Severin, a former Romanian foreign minister who, as previously noted in this blog, is the winner of a mysterious “Man of the 20th Century Award”.

There are many reasons why the socialist list is not to to be taken seriously.  I shall mention just two.  First, the German government has already named its next member of the European Commission as Günther Oettinger, prime minister of the state of Baden-Württemberg.  Because the EU foreign policy chief will automatically be a Commission member, and because each country is entitled to only one Commission seat, it is impossible for Steinmeier to get the foreign policy job.

Secondly, why would a man who has been Man of the 20th Century stoop so low as to take on the menial task of running European foreign policy?

There can be few presidential campaigns that have kicked off with the declaration “I am not a dwarf”.  But this is what Le Monde quotes Jean-Claude Juncker today as saying in the interview in which Luxembourg’s prime minister reveals he would consider being a candidate for the European Union’s presidency “if the call came”.

I have interviewed Juncker and seen him in action more than a few times over the years, and I can confirm that he is not a dwarf - though I have heard other disparaging terms applied to him that need not concern us here.  What most interests me is the enormous gulf in perceptions of Juncker’s potential candidacy between the UK and certain mainland European countries.

In UK government circles, Juncker is seen as a non-starter for two reasons.  First, the president’s job will be to represent the EU on the world stage, especially - according to one view - when sudden crises flare up, such as the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia.  During that conflict, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France represented the EU as the holder of the bloc’s rotating presidency, and even he - one of the EU’s true big hitters - found his negotiations with the Russians extremely tough going.  Juncker, as the leader of the EU’s 26th biggest country (population 500,000 out of a EU total of 500m), would in the British view just not be taken seriously enough as the EU’s voice in such a crisis.

Secondly, Luxembourg represents a country with a profound commitment to deep European integration, something that is anathema to the British.  It is the same objection that caused the UK to reject the candidacy of Guy Verhoftstadt, the former Belgian premier, for the European Commission presidency in 2004.

On the Continent, especially in some of the EU’s western European member-states and in certain smaller countries, Juncker is seen as an entirely credible candidate.  Members of the German Bundestag and foreign policy establishment admire him, though it is open to question whether that view is shared by Chancellor Angela Merkel.  In the end, she is the only person in Berlin whose opinion matters, since she will make Germany’s choice.

As was pointed out by Le Monde’s interviewer, Juncker appears to have fallen in Sarkozy’s estimation over the past year because of the Luxembourger’s alleged inability to rise to the occasion when the global financial crisis struck Europe.  Accurate or not, this observation prompted a smooth reply from Juncker on Sarkozy’s brilliance as the EU’s president from July to December 2008: ”Europe has never been led with such perspicacity as under the French presidency.”

I feel pretty sure that such compliments won’t ever make Sarkozy support Juncker as the EU’s first full-time president, since the French head of state’s own six months in charge of the EU gave a good idea of the kind of dynamic leadership that he thinks Europe needs.

But that probably won’t upset Juncker, since he is a canny politician whose instincts surely told him long ago that he would never get the job and that the most he could hope for would be to sabotage Tony Blair’s candidacy.