ft.com/brusselsblog

For those of you who missed Nicolas Sarkozy’s appearance last week at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, there are always YouTube and Dailymotion. In one revealing clip, the unforgettable 1968 student rebel Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a Green MEP, is shown berating the French president for his decision to attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

The tieless, slightly crumpled Cohn-Bendit waves his arms about, jabs his fingers and slices his hands through the air. Sarkozy, immaculate in a dark suit, remains seated, listening carefully, his fingers caressing a pen.

In response to Cohn-Bendit’s accusation that he has gone soft on China over human rights, Sarkozy starts by teasing his opponent: “Mr Cohn-Bendit, I know how generous you are. You’ve never been stingy with advice, especially advice for me.” Then the president makes the killer point: “You can’t boycott a quarter of humanity.”

It is a startling thought that Cohn-Bendit, at the age of 63, is 10 years older than Sarkozy and worse dressed. But the real lesson from last Thursday’s political theatre is that Sarkozy is capable of sheer brilliance under pressure.

He had just flown halfway round the world from the G8 summit in Japan, but in Strasbourg he delivered a long speech - having discarded his prepared text - and then answered questions from various MEPs for well over three hours. By the end, Hans-Gert Pöttering, the European Parliament president, wasn’t the only legislator eating out of Sarkozy’s hand.

One senior French official told Sarkozy it was his most impressive performance since he won the French presidency in May 2007. Of course, that was three days before he hosted more than 40 European, North African and Middle Eastern leaders in Paris at a summit that launched a new platform for co-operation in the Mediterranean region. 

That meeting, fraught with risks, went pretty well, too. After a wobble at the start of France’s six-month EU presidency, when he went too far in attacking the European Central Bank and the European Commission’s trade policies, Sarkozy is getting attention for the right reasons. 

Not long ago, I spent some time with a Romanian socialist member of the European Parliament called Adrian Severin. He is an impressive figure. He is not only a former Romanian foreign minister (1996-97) but also - according to his official CV - the proud recipient of the “Man of the 20th Century Award”. This, in case you didn’t know, is a distinction conferred by the International Biographical Centre, which is something based in the English university city of Cambridge.

Severin was talking to me just after Irish voters said No to the European Union’s Lisbon treaty in their June 12 referendum. What he said has stuck in my mind ever since. “There are countries without which the EU cannot function, and countries without which it can,” he pronounced.

For example, he went on, the EU could do without Ireland, but not without France and the Netherlands (which, you’ll remember, voted No to the EU’s now abandoned constitutional treaty in 2005).  And what was the difference between Ireland and the Netherlands? I asked. “Geography,” Severin replied.

I suppose he meant that Ireland is on the periphery of Europe and the Netherlands is, well, a bit closer to the centre. Anyway, he seemed very keen to teach the Irish a lesson or two about what it means to be a good European.

What about Romania itself, though? Is Romania, which joined the EU in January 2007, one of those countries the EU can do without, or cannot do without?

On July 23 we may get some answers to that question. That is the day when the European Commission is due to publish its long-awaited report into Romania’s efforts to meet EU standards on judicial reform and rooting out corruption in public life.

Last November Willem de Pauw, a Belgian prosecutor and adviser to the EU on Romanian affairs, wrote a report (dug up by the Economist magazine) that said: “Instead of progress in the fight against high-level corruption, Romania is presently regressing on all fronts in the fight against corruption.” De Pauw spoke of “the intense resistance of practically the whole political class of Romania against the anti-corruption effort”.

Next time Severin goes to Dublin and tells the Irish they’re a country the EU can do without, he might like to take along a copy of Willem de Pauw’s report.

Question: What do the European Central Bank, EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson, French army commanders, French public television broadcasters, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia and Snagglepuss the Mountain Lion have in common? Answer: they have all come under withering attack in the past week or two from President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.

Actually, Snagglepuss hasn’t, but Sarkozy has sprayed his ammunition so far and wide that it was probably a close-run thing. It would be easy to dismiss the presidential antics - imagine Silvio Berlusconi on speed and you are halfway there - as a huge embarrassment for France just as it started its six-month European Union presidency on July 1. But I reckon there is a great deal of method in Sarkozy’s madness.

What I suspect he is up to is seeking to exploit a weakness in the human brain known to specialists as “source amnesia”. As Professor Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt explained in a recent article, we store facts first in the hippocampus, a finger-shaped structure deep in the brain and then, after much re-storing and reprocessing, transfer them to the cerebral cortex. But after a while, facts are separated from the context in which we learned them. It becomes hard for us to remember whether certain statements are true. Even things we once knew to be lies can be erroneously recalled, months later, as truths.

I am not saying Sarkozy is deliberately feeding lies to the European public. But if you consider his spirited attacks this week on the ECB’s monetary policy and Mandelson’s tactics in the Doha world trade talks, he is surely calculating that if you repeat something long enough and loudly enough, a good number of people will start believing you, even if at first they disagreed.

Whether this will improve Sarkozy’s chances of stopping a rise in ECB interest rates or getting a better deal for French farmers in the Doha round remains to be seen. Not for the moment, it would seem.

Pierre-Luc Séguillon, the veteran French political journalist, puts it neatly. He says “President Bling-Bling”, the Sarkozy of celebrity friendships, large wristwatches, fancy sunglasses and Carla Bruni, has morphed into “President Biff-Baff”, Sarkozy the confrontational politician unafraid to say the unsayable. As for the rest of Europe’s leaders, some are no doubt praying that German chancellor Angela Merkel will have a quiet word in his ear to calm him down.

For a good chuckle, check out the Wikipedia entry of Hans-Gert Pöttering, the European Parliament’s president. Point No.3, headlined “Commission Speculation”, says there are rumours that Pöttering will be Germany’s next member of the European Commission, succeeding Günter Verheugen.

The entry states: “It is widely known that Angela Merkel wants to nominate a Christian Democrat as Commissioner designate for the next Commission mandate 2009-2014 and Pöttering is seen by many as a strong and properly qualificated contestant for the job.”

Hmm. Let’s have another look at that. “Properly qualificated”? If I were a betting man, I’d say that boo-boo represented a German-speaker’s attempt at translating “qualifiziert” (”qualified”). Which raises the fascinating question of who wrote or edited the Wikipedia entry.

Editing your Wikipedia profile, or the profile of your boss, your company, your friend or your political hero, is not unknown. Changes to Richard Nixon’s profile have been traced to the computers of CIA staff. Changes to entries about Roman Catholic saints have been traced to Vatican computers.

But the European Parliament, majestic and terrifying though it no doubt is, isn’t the CIA or the Vatican. And naturally, I have no idea who wrote or edited Pöttering’s Wikipedia profile.

But two things are clear. First, Pöttering will be out of his present job after the next European Parliament elections in June 2009. Second, no one close to Merkel seriously thinks she wants to make Pöttering Germany’s next EU commissioner.

All of which makes me wonder who is promoting Pöttering’s candidacy on the Wikipedia website. But the truth is I’m not properly qualificated to judge.

With the European Union’s Lisbon treaty in deep trouble, some of the finest minds in Brussels are at work devising solutions to problems of which the general European public is wholly unaware. For example, the size and composition of the European Commission.

If the Lisbon treaty doesn’t come into force next year, the next Commission will have to be selected according to rules set out in the EU’s 2003 treaty of Nice. These state that when the EU has grown to include 27 countries (which it now has), the number of commissioners should be “less than the number of member-states”.

But Nice does not say how EU governments are to achieve the reduction. In the light of Ireland’s No to Lisbon, this gives ample scope for political and bureaucratic deal-making over coming months.

Fear of losing their commissioner played a part in the Irish voters’ rejection of Lisbon, but few seemed to understand that Ireland would be worse off under Nice. Lisbon contained a provision stating that, if all member-states agreed, they could abandon the commitment to reducing the Commission’s size and keep one commissioner per member-state. Before the Irish vote, many in Brussels had quietly assumed this was exactly what would happen after Lisbon took effect. By contrast, Nice has no such provision.

So if the Nice treaty remains in force next year, what can be done? One member-state has already proposed an answer. Cut the Commission in size, as Nice stipulates, but only from 27 to 26 members. Let the country which loses its commissioner take the job of High Representative for foreign policy (at present, Javier Solana of Spain). Let him or her attend Commission meetings. Hey presto! Everyone’s still in the room.

You have to admit, it’s an ingenious proposal. In fact, it’s so ingenious that it almost makes you ask, “Why bother with Lisbon, after all?” Which, of course, cannot possibly have been the question at the back of the mind of the country which floated the proposal … the UK!  

According to participants at the EU’s post-Irish referendum summit in Brussels, the atmosphere among the 27 national leaders is not one of crisis or despair, but resignation and a sense of having been there and done all this before - i.e., after the French and Dutch threw out the old constitutional treaty in 2005.

However, it’s also clear there are more than a few mutual recriminations going on in the corridors of the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels. “It’s what I’d call the ‘day after effect’,” says one top-level EU official, referring to last week’s Irish rejection of the Lisbon treaty.

If Ireland is a problem, what does that make the Czech Republic? The Czechs have been resisting efforts to include a line in the final summit communiqué that would emphasise the EU’s efforts to go ahead with national ratifications of the treaty in spite of the Irish No. This is irritating some delegations, who think the Czechs are riding on the coat-tails of the Irish rather than doing the decent thing - or the courageous thing - and joining the rest of the EU in defending the Lisbon treaty.

The situation at present is that the Czech Senate (upper house of parliament) has sent the Lisbon treaty to the nation’s constitutional court for scrutiny. President Vaclav Klaus has declared the treaty dead - the only EU head of state to go so far. The Irish No, meanwhile, has emboldened critics of the treaty in the ruling Civic Democrat party, whose hold on power is not particularly strong. All of which makes Czech ratification of Lisbon far from a done deal.

Mirek Topolanek, the Czech prime minister, is giving private assurances that his government will ratify Lisbon. But when Czech officials appear in front of TV cameras at the summit, they are saying something subtly different. For example, Alexandr Vondra, the Czech minister for European affairs, says the Lisbon treaty is “in the parking lot” and a jolly good thing, too. ”Don’t press us. Any pressure could be counter-productive,” Vondra warns.

In the end, the Czechs may have to buckle. They are due to take over the EU’s rotating presidency next January, and it would create a disastrous impression if, when they move into the hot seat, they were seen as bad team players.

But if I were a betting man, I would not expect the Czechs to have ratified Lisbon by the EU’s next summit on October 15-16.

According to the memorable aphorism of Robert Kagan, the conservative US scholar, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus. But when President George W. Bush was in Europe last week and heard about Ireland’s rejection of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty in a referendum, it must have seemed to the outgoing president that Europeans are so incapable of getting their act together that they’re really from Pluto - which astronomers no longer classify as a planet.

The same thought may cross the mind of President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia when EU leaders arrive next week in the western Siberian city of Khanty-Mansiysk for an EU-Russia summit. Of course, it’s possible Medvedev will be rather more exercised about the revelation that the US has been thinking about putting part of its proposed missile defence system in Lithuania - which is precisely the sort of things that Martians, rather than Plutonians, do. 

Today the leaders of the EU’s 27 member-states are rolling into Brussels for a summit whose main theme, before the crisis erupted over the Lisbon treaty, was supposed to be a robust European response to soaring fuel and food prices. Of course, there isn’t much the EU can do on that front, either, because in the end it’s mostly a question of world demand and supply.

Still, I don’t buy the oft-heard argument that EU leaders are totally out of touch with public opinion. Take last Monday’s meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg. Much breast-beating went on there about whether the Irish referendum result showed that the EU was too technocratic and too elitist. According to two people who attended the discussions, one foreign minister - Radek Sikorski of Poland - even burst out: “Why don’t we write treaties that even we in this room can understand?”

A question to shake up any solar system!  

Its 3pm on a cloudy Dublin Friday, and, as the results of the Irish referendum come flooding in, it could hardly be more clear what a kick in the teeth - and possibly to another part of the political establishment’s anatomy -  the Irish electorate has delivered by rejecting the European Union’s Lisbon treaty.

Tipperary North: 50.2 per cent No to 49.8 per cent Yes, on a turn-out of 58.5 per cent… Tipperary South: 53.2 per cent No to 46.8 per cent Yes, on a turn-out of 55 per cent… Waterford: 54.3 per cent No to 45.6 per cent Yes, on a turn-out of 53 per cent…Limerick East: 53.9 per cent No to 46.1 per cent Yes on a turn-out of 51 per cent.

The Limerick East result was especially significant, because its voting patterns often reflect trends at a national level.

And of course, the No campaigners are ecstatic. But they are not depicting their victory as a defeat for the EU - far from it. “this is not a eurosceptic message at all, ” Declan Ganley, the self made businessman and promient No campaigner, told Irish radio. “We want to be at the heart of Europe, but it’s got to be accountable to the will of its citizens.”

Ganley reckons that Irish premier Brian Cowen can go to the EU summit of heads of state and government in Brussels next Thursday and Friday “and look for a better deal for the Irish people” than is contained in the Lisbon treaty.

But what exactly can Ireland ask for? For one thing, Ganley proposes that Ireland be allowed to keep its European commissioner - Lisbon foresees abolishing the automatic right of all 27 member-states to their own commissioner. For another, Ganley suggests changing the new weighted EU voting rules, based partly on the size of a country’s population, that are contained in Lisbon.

Eeek! The voting rules are impossible for average Europeans to understand, but some may recall that when the Polish government was complaining about them last year it marched into a summit battle under the slogan: “The square root or death!”

What will it be this time? “The distance formula in Cartesian co-ordinates, or we’re off”?

At 12 O’clock on Friday, after three hours of counting in the Irish referendum, it is starting to look as if Irish voters have rejected the European Union’s Lisbon treaty - and, to borrow a phrase from the late Saddam Hussein, touched off the mother of all political crises in Europe.

“We’re not calling it, but it looks like it’s going to be No,” one senior government official told the Financial Times.

“It looks like a majority have voted No,” confirmed Lucinda Creighton, director of the referendum campaign for Fine Gael, the main opposition party, which supports the Lisbon treaty.

And this is also pretty much the view of the reporters for the state broadcasting network RTE who have fanned out across Ireland and who are watching the local counts. They are saying that the No vote on Thursday was especially strong in urban working-class districts and in rural areas.

If it really is No, Ireland’s three main political parties - the ruling Fianna Fáil and the opposition Fine Gael and Labour - will have a lot to answer for. Despite agreeing on the need for a Yes vote, they often sniped among themselves about how effective each party’s pro Lisbon campaign was.

It did not help that Bertie Ahern, the former Fianna Fáil leader, was forced to resign last month because of the negative effect of continuing public inquires into his personal financial affairs. Brian Cowen took over as premier but it may have been too late to make a difference.

As for the rest of Europe, it looks as if even if Ireland has voted No, the French, Germans and everyone else will say; “The ratification of Lisbon must go ahead.”

The question that will really need looking at, though, will be: “Why does the EU find is so difficult to sell itself to the voters?”

Today’s referendum is for Irish voters and the question is about Europe. But one of the paradoxes of modern Ireland and the confident role it plays in European affairs is that America’s presence is felt - and celebrated - everywhere in the country. Take O’Dea’s Hotel, a family-run establishment is the town of Loughrea, County Galway.

As I walked into the lobby at 8 o’clock this morning , having spent three hours driving west from Dublin and talking to bleary-eyed voters in Loughrea as they emerged from their polling station, whose face should I spot beaming at me from a photo on the reception desk but that of Bill Clinton.

The ex-president was a frequent visitor to Ireland during this eight years in office, as was, according to local accounts - his daughter Chelsea. Both were made exceptionally welcome, as US presidents and their families always have been in Ireland.

But it so happens that some years ago Loughrea was designated Ireland’s “Eurotown”, in a project that saw several dozen local small businesses switch to the euro from the old Irish pound on an accelerated basis. Their experiences were then used to help small businesses elsewhere in Ireland get used to the single European currency.

There’s not a lot in Loughrea these days to remind you that it was once Eurotown. But in the surrounding countryside you see quite a a few No campaign posters, put up by those who want Ireland to reject the European Union’s Lisbon treaty.

Though I have nothing against Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, one of the most eye-catching No posters is the one that displays a huge pitchfork and the words : “Tell Mandelson where to stick it.”

Be that as it may, the fact is that American culture, American business practices, American investment and American people are a big part of what makes modern Ireland tick and feel proud of itself. The Irish have achieved the clever and admirable feat of making themselves liked in Europe without sacrificing their close connections with the US.

In some countries on the Continent, a European identity is treated as something that almost by definition must be in opposition to America. Not so in Ireland.

There is a lesson there for another island on the north-west coast of Europe, that’s for sure.