The sun is shining in Brussels and the sky has an unseasonably blue, cloudless, late-November-in-Rome quality as European Union leaders make their way here for the summit of summits - the event where they will choose the EU’s first full-time president and new foreign policy chief.  I wonder if the weather will be so fine when the leaders finally drag themselves away from the negotiating table after what is shaping up to be a night of relentless hard bargaining.

By general consent, the frontrunner is Herman Van Rompuy, the amiable, haiku-writing Belgian prime minister.  Even a speech he gave in 2004 that reveals him to be an implacable opponent of Turkey’s entry into the EU (Turkey has been an official candidate for the past four years) doesn’t seem to be doing Van Rompuy any harm.  Well, why should it?  It fits in perfectly with the views of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

It has been clear for the past week that Merkel and Sarkozy would be perfectly happy to put Van Rompuy in the presidency.  Yes, he is almost unknown outside Belgium.  Yes, it is hard to see President Barack Obama or President Hu Jintao taking him entirely seriously.  Yes, he is no Tony Blair.  But he will be good at building consensus among EU governments.  He will be good at organising the work of the European Council.  And that is what France, Germany and many small EU states want.

The question is whether the UK, seething with fury at Sarkozy’s betrayal of Blair and impatient with Germany and the rest for insisting on a president from a small country, will block Van Rompuy.  If the UK does, a third candidate will get the job - and, frankly, it is anyone’s guess who it will be (except that I cannot imagine it will be Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker, because the UK and France share a distaste for him).

What many countries, including Germany, hope is that Prime Minister Gordon Brown will chill, accept Blair has no chance, and then accept the job of foreign policy high representative for the UK.  It is there for the British if they want it - that seems to be the message from most of Europe.  The obvious choice is Foreign Secretary David Miliband, but lately he’s been ruling himself out. 

I’ll tell you what, though.  Miliband and other potential British candidates are all strong advocates of Turkish entry into the EU.  So we could end up with a EU president (Van Rompuy) and a EU foreign policy chief (a Brit) who disagree on a fundamental aspect of the EU’s foreign relations.

What an excellent recipe for a united Europe.

My colleague Philippe Ricard wrote a fine piece in Monday’s Le Monde about the scarcity of women candidates for top positions in the European Union - not just the first full-time president and the new foreign policy high representative, but the next 27-member European Commission.

He made the point that if only a few women are nominated to the new Commission, the European Parliament is likely to cause real trouble when the nominees appear for their confirmation hearings, expected to start in December.  The legislature does not have the legal authority to reject individual nominees, but in 2004 it demonstrated that it had the political strength to force their withdrawal when it torpedoed the appointment of Rocco Buttiglione, an Italian conservative, as justice commissioner.  Moreover, the parliament does have the legal power to reject the Commission in its entirety - the so-called “nuclear option”.

Many MEPs show every sign of itching for a repeat performance of the Buttiglione affair, which is fondly recalled in the assembly as a defining moment in the parliament’s evolution.  A scarcity of women would provide the perfect cover because it would be widely seen across Europe as inherently indefensible.

Could these tensions be eased by the appointment of a woman as the full-time president or the foreign policy supremo?  In principle, yes.  But officials from several countries have told me in recent days that the need for “gender balance” in the appointments is not regarded as of the same weight as the need for political balance (one person of the left, one of the right) - or the need to pick the best qualified candidates.

That last point sticks in the throat a bit, but there we are.

I confess to a certain surprise at the way that Massimo D’Alema is climbing up the list of candidates for the post of European Union foreign policy chief.  At first sight the former Italian prime minister and foreign minister ticks far too few boxes to get the job.  But there are, in truth, some straightforward reasons for his ascent - none of which reflects well on the EU.

First, the unticked boxes.  1) His communist past.  This is usually condensed into: “He’s a former communist and therefore unacceptable to Poland and other EU countries, which suffered under Soviet domination while the Italian communist party was gorging itself on covert funds from Moscow.”  In fairness, D’Alema abandoned communism 20 years ago.  I spent five years in Rome covering Italian politics, and he never struck me as an extremist or a hardliner.  Quite the opposite: he was highly pragmatic, in a shifty kind of way.

2) His opinions of the US.  D’Alema isn’t foolishly anti-American, but he has more than a few traces in him of that quintessential European personality, the austere leftwing intellectual who drips with cultural disdain for the US.  This could be a real risk for the EU.  If as EU foreign policy supremo he were to make critical remarks about the US in public, European influence in Washington would be killed stone dead - and there would be bitter recriminations in the 27-nation EU, making a mockery of the entire idea of a common foreign policy.

3) His linguistic skills.  These days it would be crazy for the EU to have a foreign policy chief who doesn’t speak fluent English.  D’Alema has picked up some over the years, but not enough.  “He has Italian waiter’s French and not much English,” says one EU minister who has known him during his various spells in the Italian government.

4) The domestic Italian political factor.  You have to ask yourself, why is Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi so eager to promote the candidacy of D’Alema, his political adversary?  A little history is needed here.  Back in 1996-2001 Berlusconi completely outmanoeuvred D’Alema in a lengthy set of negotiations over Italian constitutional reform that ended up going nowhere - to Berlusconi’s benefit.  It must have crossed Berlusconi’s mind that D’Alema is quite capable of self-destructing in the EU foreign policy job, something that would damage his career and strengthen Berlusconi’s grip on the Italian political scene.

So why is D’Alema’s star on the rise?  One reason is that France and Germany have never shown much interest in getting the foreign policy job (they prefer powerful economic posts on the incoming European Commission).  Meanwhile, the UK persists in its stubborn support for Tony Blair as the EU’s first full-time president, thereby reducing the chances that David Miliband could become the foreign policy supremo.  The behaviour of France, Germany and the UK has left a vacuum that has been filled by Italy, the EU’s fourth-ranking power.

The other reason is that D’Alema has the backing of Europe’s socialist parties.  The key player in this game is Martin Schulz, the German who chairs the centre-left group in the European Parliament.  Schulz is exploiting D’Alema’s candidacy for his wider purposes, which include maximising the legislature’s power relative to the EU governments and the Commission, increasing the left’s voice in Europe and consolidating his personal authority over the European centre-left.

It’s all pretty unedifying.  Whatever happened to the idea that Europe’s top jobs should go to the best qualified candidates?

Enlargement of the European Union is, almost imperceptibly, moving forward once more.  EU foreign ministers are expected next week to forward Albania’s membership application to the European Commission for an opinion.  This is a necessary technical step on the path to entry - small, but important.

The Commission is already preparing opinions on the applications of Iceland and Montenegro.  The opinions will take quite some time to deliver - longer for Albania and Montenegro than for Iceland - but the machinery is now in motion.

There are signs of progress elsewhere, too.  For a long time Serbia’s efforts to draw closer to the EU have been held back by the refusal of the Netherlands to permit implementation of Serbia’s EU stabilisation and association agreement.  The Dutch insist that Serge Brammertz, the chief United Nations war crimes prosecutor, must first of all declare that Serbia is fully complying with its efforts to capture war crimes suspects - principally, Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military commander.

Brammertz is due to hand his latest report to the UN Security Council in early December, and the Serbian government appears confident that it will be positive.  That would remove the Dutch veto and allow Serbia to make a formal application for EU membership.

Meanwhile, Croatia’s bid to join the EU is back on track after a compromise over a maritime border dispute with Slovenia.  One possible complication here is that Slovenia may hold a referendum to approve the deal.

Nor will it be plain sailing for Albania.  As Olli Rehn, the EU enlargement commissioner, pointed out this week, the Albanian socialist opposition has been boycotting parliament since the national election of June 28.  The boycott “does not respect European democratic standards”, Rehn said, and could damage Albania’s chances of being granted the formal status of an EU membership candidate.

Of all the countries with EU aspirations, there remain serious problems over Bosnia-Herzegovina and Turkey and a frustrating deadlock over Macedonia.  But the recent movement on enlargement is encouraging, nonetheless.  Enlargement has been one of the EU’s great foreign policy success stories.  With the Lisbon treaty finally in place, it’s time to step up the pace.

There are all sorts of threats to the European Union’s unity, but something tells me that the biggest threat isn’t the Visegrad group.  This appears to be a view not shared by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.

Speaking after the October 29-30 EU summit in Brussels, Sarkozy criticised the fact that the leaders of the four Visegrad countries - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia - had held a pre-summit meeting to co-ordinate their positions.  “If they were to meet regularly before each Council, that would raise some questions,” Sarkozy said.

Would it, really?  When I put this question the other day to a high-ranking official from a Visegrad country, he replied with a Sarkozy-like grimace on his face.  The Visegrad group was, he said, as harmless as other EU regional subgroups, such as the Nordic trio (Denmark, Finland and Sweden), the Benelux countries (Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands), the Iberians (Portugal and Spain) and Club Aristotle (Cyprus and Greece).

In truth, the most curious thing about the Visegrad group is that it still exists.  No sooner had it been set up in 1991 after the fall of communism than, like some mysterious mitteleuropäisch cell, it mutated from three members into four with the break-up of Czechoslovakia.  It held together largely because of the belief that strength in solidarity would accelerate the integration of the four into western security and economic structures - the EU and Nato.

But the strains inside the group have never entirely gone away.  Poland, the biggest member, tends to see itself as a kind of big brother, with a wider view on the world than the rest.  The Poles no longer want to be treated in the EU as a mere regional player, a country defined by its proximity to places like Belarus and Ukraine.  They want to be at the top table, next to France, Germany and the UK.

The Czech Republic tends to be regarded as the smarty-pants of the four, a perception reinforced by the Czech EU presidency in the first half of this year.  The Czechs spent an awful lot of time telling everyone how they were superior to their neighbours, because their far-sighted policies had enabled them to escape the worst of the financial crisis.  This know-all attitude didn’t exactly endear them to their EU partners.

Slovakia had a bad reputation in the 1990s because of the misrule of Vladimir Meciar, the former prime minister.  But it then transformed itself so fast that it is now the only Visegrad country in the eurozone.  However, there are continuing tensions over Slovakia’s ethnic Hungarian minority.

Hungary was hit hardest by the financial crisis.  Its neighbours gave Hungary the cold shoulder in February when the government in Budapest proposed a €180bn emergency aid programme to recapitalise the banking systems of central and eastern Europe and reschedule foreign currency debt.

This in itself is proof, if any were needed, that Sarkozy’s suspicions are exaggerated.  But then again, French opinions about the EU’s former communist countries have a rich history.  After all, who was it who told the central and eastern Europeans at the start of the Iraq war that they had “missed a good opportunity to shut up”?

Step forward, ex-president Jacques Chirac.

I was fortunate enough to speak with Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt on Tuesday about how the European Union is going about the task of choosing its first full-time president and its next foreign policy high representative.

The longer our conversation progressed, the more I realised how damaging to editorial standards, not to mention the people’s understanding of politics and government, are the competitive pressures on modern news organisations to be ahead of the rest of the pack.  For this particular EU story has, over the past few weeks, produced a cornucopia of nonsense as every broadcaster and newspaper has fallen over its rivals in a fruitless and fundamentally misguided attempt to show that it, and it alone, has got the lowdown.

Reinfeldt is co-ordinating the process of picking the president and foreign policy supremo, because Sweden holds the EU’s rotating presidency.  He told me that, although he had spoken informally with “a few leaders of large countries in the middle of last week”, he had not even started his formal consultations with his 26 fellow EU leaders until Monday.  So much for all the gossip before then.

Reinfeldt said he had managed to speak with 25 of the other leaders in the course of Monday and Tuesday, and he planned to speak with the 26th on Wednesday morning (it wasn’t entirely clear to me when he had consulted himself).  During this whole time, he had not once asked anyone if he or she was available as a candidate.

After he had completed his first round of consulations, he planned to start a second round on Thursday, with the aim of crafting the multiple political compromises needed to ensure that the choices can be formalised at a meeting of EU leaders over dinner in Brussels on November 19.

All of this illustrates that the selection process is much more delicate, and rather less advanced, than has been presented in the media up to now.  In particular, Reinfeldt made the important point to me that picking the foreign policy high representative and picking the first full-time president are not the same thing.  The presidency is a job wholly in the gift of the EU’s 27 national leaders, but the foreign policy position is not.

On the contrary, because its holder will serve as a European Commission vice-president, he or she must be acceptable to Commission president José Manuel Barroso and to the European Parliament.  Indeed, the parliament will conduct hearings soon into Barroso’s new Commission team, and it could in theory cause enough trouble to force the withdrawal of the foreign policy nominee.

At this point I can hear newsrooms around Europe echoing to the sound of editors asserting the media’s right to pointless speculation as a pillar of a free society, to be defended to the death - or at least as far as one’s lawsuit budget stretches.  But the more I listen to them, the more empty and self-righteous such arguments seem.

It would be better to show a little humility and paraphrase Winston Churchill:  “No one pretends that the modern media are perfect or all-wise.  Indeed, it has been said that the modern media are the worst form of all, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

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.

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.