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.

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.

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…)

Miroslav Lajcak of Slovakia is an amiable, gifted diplomat with the hardest job in town. As the international community’s high representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, he is tasked with turning this most unhappy and dysfunctional of states into a viable long-term entity. He is also supposed somehow to put Bosnia on an irreversible path to European Union membership. Neither goal looks remotely in sight.

When Lajcak met some reporters in Brussels this week, he was pressed to say what impact the Kosovo crisis would have on Bosnia. After all, the declaration of independence by Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority in the teeth of opposition from Serbia would seem to provide the perfect justification for the ever restive Bosnian Serbs to announce that they want to secede from the state that boxes them together with Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats.

Lajcak’s answer was rather disappointing. “Bosnia-Herzegovina is no hostage to Kosovo. It’s a country that knows exactly what are the tasks ahead and what it has to do to get on the European path… Kosovo does have an impact in terms of affecting the atmosphere in the region, but people shouldn’t use Kosovo as an excuse.”

The point is, of course, that “people” - that is, the Bosnian Serbs - do use Kosovo as an excuse. They refuse to accept the EU’s argument that Kosovo is a ’sui generis’ case that sets absolutely no precedent for other parts of the Balkans or the rest of the world. And in refusing to accept this argument, they are doing no more than the government of Lajcak’s own country, Slovakia, is doing when it refuses to recognise Kosovo’s independence. For Slovakia fears that independence for Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians sets a precedent for Slovakia’s ethnic Hungarian minority.

As it happens, the present Bosnian Serb leadership under Milorad Dodik seems disinclined to exploit the Kosovo crisis to cause trouble for Lajcak and cook up reckless secessionist plots. But neither he nor the majority of Bosnian Serbs feel any affection for the bizarre and unwieldy construction that is the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. A crisis is never far round the corner in Bosnia.

Lajcak is the sixth high representative appointed to supervise Bosnia since the Dayton accords that ended the 1992-95 civil war. Kosovo’s declaration of independence, and the recognition of Kosovo by various western governments, have made it likely that even another six high representatives won’t make a success of Bosnia.

Oh, the magic of democracy! Three European election results have lifted spirits in Brussels: Poland’s parliamentary vote of October 2007, the Serbian presidential ballot of February 3, and the first round of Cyprus’s presidential election last Sunday.

In each case, the winners stood for better relations with the European Union and a co-operative approach to solving European diplomatic problems. The losers were prickly, obstructive nationalists and the opposite of everything the EU likes to think it stands for.Whether these three results will be enough to wipe out the painful memory of the Dutch and French referendums of 2005 that killed off the EU’s experiment in constitution-building remains to be seen. But for many in Brussels, the message from Poland, Serbia and Cyprus is that democracy not only works, but strengthens the EU and the cause of European integration.

In other words, don’t be afraid of the voters - they can be trusted, in the end, to get it right. In Poland, the October election produced a whopping defeat for Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the prime minister who had achieved the reckless feat of simultaneously irritating Germany and Russia, Poland’s far more powerful neighbours. The winner was Donald Tusk and his pro-European, pro-business Civic Platform party.

In Serbia, the pro-European Boris Tadic scored a victory over the ultra-nationalist Tomislav Nikolic that was narrow but just enough to let the EU claim that Serb voters had chosen a European path over the road of darkness.

Most intriguing of all was Sunday’s result in Cyprus. (more…)

When it comes to EU security missions abroad, most eyes turn to Kosovo, where 2,000 law and order officials are about to be deployed over the next four months to stabilise the province after its secession from Serbia. But surely we ought to be paying just as much attention to events in the former French colony of Chad, where a 3,700-strong EU "peacekeeping" force is finally beginning to arrive after months of delay.

The ostensible purpose of the EU force is to help humanitarian aid workers and protect hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled violence spreading from Sudan’s Darfur region, east of Chad. But the question asked in some EU capitals is whether the EU’s mission is turning into something quite different - namely, a prop for French foreign policy in a former African colony.

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It is difficult to find anyone in Brussels who is enthusiastic about the likely return to power of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. When you mention his 2001-2006 premiership, and especially the way he ran Italy’s European Union presidency in July-December 2003, you sometimes see that rarest of sights - a Eurocrat shuddering in revulsion.

But if Berlusconi wins the elections forced by the collapse of Romano Prodi’s government, I predict interesting times ahead. Not because Berlusconi will once more make himself an outcast by comparing German members of the European parliament to Nazi concentration camp guards. Rather, because it is in Brussels that his massive conflict of interest, between his political role and his position as Italy’s pre-eminent media tycoon, may at long last be challenged.

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At a conference on Europe’s future held last October in Brussels, Robert Cooper, a high-level European Union foreign policy strategist, made an interesting observation. "I like the idea of 27 countries struggling to agree with each other. It is rather undignified, but it is a powerful message," he said.

Well, when it comes to the EU’s policy on Serbia and Kosovo, one can certainly agree with the "undignified" bit. Something of a low point was reached this week at the regular monthly meeting of EU foreign ministers. It produced an offer to Serbia of an "interim political agreement", dangling the carrots of freer trade, visa liberalisation and educational exchanges in the vague hope that this would cause Serb voters to back Boris Tadic, the moderate incumbent, in this weekend’s presidential election run-off.

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It is time to sort out the mess in Afghanistan - and where better to start than by talking with the enemy?

For six years, Nato has been fighting Taliban insurgents in what has turned into the biggest military operation in the alliance’s almost 60-year history. But in terms of results there is not a great deal to show for it - and the European public senses it. Support for Nato’s operations in Afghanistan was fairly broad-based to begin with. But now it is fracturing - and not just in Germany and Italy, where the enthusiasm for sending troops to a war in Asia was not exactly robust in the first place.

Yet if the EU and the Americans, Canadians and others were to pull out, it would deal a damaging blow to Nato, to western security more generally, and to the EU’s hopes of running a successful common foreign and security policy. What is needed isn’t a disorderly withdrawal, but an imaginative rethinking of the whole operation.

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When I lived in Vienna in 1983, my apartment was next to a gay bar with scrubbed-out windows and an English-language name: Why Not.

I find myself asking the same question as the 10th anniversary of the euro approaches and a cosy atmosphere of self-congratulation in Brussels warms up. Why not? Why shouldn’t the European Union pat itself on the back?

After all, the euro is at present the strongest of the world’s major currencies. It underpins steady economic growth and a very high average standard of living for 318m people in 15 countries.

And if you live in Spain, I hear those purple 500-euro banknotes come in very handy.

But a new report by the Bruegel think-tank, a Brussels-based institute that specialises in economic issues, dispels any complacency about the longer-term future of Europe’s monetary union.

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