So it looks as if it is to be Herman Van Rompuy, Belgium’s prime minister, as the full-time president, and Catherine Ashton, Britain’s EU trade commissioner, as the foreign policy supremo.  This is the culmination of eight years of efforts, starting with the EU’s Laeken Declaration of 2001, to reform the bloc’s institutions and give the EU a more dynamic world profile.

Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, thinks the EU had a historic opportunity in its grasp and flunked it - at least as far as the full-time presidency is concerned.  The British government itself was saying more or less the same thing until tonight.  It was adamant that the EU needed a big-hitter as president to convince the rest of the world that the EU was going places.  Now it has participated in a classic EU trade-off that has produced exactly the result it said would be no use to anyone.

But the British are no more complicit in these decisions than the French, the Germans and everyone else.  Fernch President Nicolas Sarkozy switched his support to Van Rompuy from Tony Blair, the ex-premier of the UK.  Germany, conscious of its traditional role as an ally to the EU’s smallest countries, never really wanted Blair in the first place.  And in many ways, they were right about Blair - but for the wrong reasons.  He came with an awful lot of baggage - not just the Iraq war, but the way his actions too often failed to match his words when it came to Britain’s national neurosis over the EU.

So perhaps the real difficulty was that no other “big-hitter” put forward his or her candidacy for the presidency.  We had, as far as I recall, someone from Luxembourg, someone from Estonia, someone from Latvia, someone from Ireland, someone from Finland…  No Frenchman, German, Italian or Spaniard was ever mentioned for the EU presidency.

Wise EU heads always said that the presidency would be defined by the first person who held the job.  Well, now we know.  Intelligent, civilised, modest, with a calming sense of humour - a consensus-builder and an organiser.  Good qualities.  But has the EU been ambitious enough?

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.

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.

It’s less than a week since General Motors agreed to sell Opel, its European arm, to a group led by Magna International of Canada, but already a wave of anger at the implications of the deal is building up.  Nowhere is this more true than in Belgium and the UK, where workers at GM plants seem far more at risk than their colleagues in Germany of losing their jobs.

This episode is, however, about much more than potential job losses.  It’s about Europe’s reluctance to come to terms with huge overcapacity in its car industry.  It’s about how best to preserve a broad manufacturing base in an era when the other main recent driver of European economic growth - lightly regulated financial capitalism - is discredited.  Finally, it is a test of the European Commission’s ability to uphold its strict rules on competition and state aid during the worst recession in the European Union’s history.

Lord Mandelson, the British government minister responsible for business and innovation, told the BBC this morning that he hoped the Commission (of which he was a member until last year) “should not accept anything that looks like a political fix” in the Opel deal.  This remark came very close to accusing the German government of offering shedloads of financial aid to Opel - €4.5bn, to be precise - in return for a promise not to sack carworkers in Germany as the nation heads towards a general election on September 27.

This is, of course, exactly how matters are viewed in Belgium, where politicians fear that Opel’s plant in Antwerp has been earmarked for closure.  As Kris Peeters, who heads the government of the Flanders region, bluntly put it in July: “Those who put more money on the table win.”  The Flanders government had tried its best, offering up to €500m to Opel, but the Germans crushed them with a sum nine times bigger.

The Commission made clear last Friday that it intended to study very closely the terms of the Opel sale.  According to Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, some Commission experts think the Antwerp plant may be more efficient than the Opel factory in Bochum, one of four company plants in Germany.  But don’t hold your breath on this one.  In EU institutions as much as in German politics, the power of the German car industry lobby is something to behold.

The truth of the matter is that almost no one in the EU, whether in government or in the car industry, wants to face up to the chronic problem of overcapacity.  Fiat’s Sergio Marchionne is an honourable exception, but he lost out early in the scramble for GM’s European assets.

As surely as night follows day, there will be a loser in all this.  And at the moment, it looks like being the German taxpayer.

The last time that a dispute between Madrid and Brussels seized the international spotlight was in 1568 - and boy, was it big.  That was when the Spanish rulers of the Low Countries sparked the 80-year-long Dutch Revolt by executing Counts Egmont and Horne on the Grand’ Place of what is today the Belgian capital.

This month, another quarrel between Spain and Belgium broke out.  Admittedly, it’s less serious, and for the moment it’s stayed behind closed doors.  But in the interests of transparency, and because the squabble tells you rather a lot about the way the European Union operates, I shall share the details with you.

Karel De Gucht, Belgium’s foreign minister, has written an indignant letter to Miguel Angel Moratinos, his Spanish counterpart, complaining about a stitch-up at an EU operation known as the Union for the Mediterranean.  The UfM is a pet project of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, aimed at reinvigorating relations between the 27-nation EU and its North African and Middle Eastern neighbours.

When they launched the UfM last year, the EU and its neighbours agreed that it should have a co-presidency, with one EU country and one non-EU country sharing the post.  First up were France and Egypt.  No problem there.  But it was never officially spelled out who should represent the EU after France.  Belgium, which will hold the EU’s six-month rotating presidency in the second half of 2010, thought that under EU rules it would be a logical choice.

So, not surprisingly, De Gucht was most unhappy to discover, from a letter that Moratinos had written to his French and Egyptian colleagues, that Spain and France appeared to have reached a private deal without telling anyone else in the EU (or, at least, without telling Belgium).  Under this arrangement, France was to hold the job for two years and then hand over the reins to Spain, which would hold it for the following two years.

No doubt Moratinos thinks Spain is entitled to have the UfM’s co-presidency because it will hold the EU presidency in the first half of 2010.  But for two years?  The polite language of European diplomacy can scarcely hide De Gucht’s displeasure.  “I confess that I was really amazed,” he writes in his letter to Moratinos, arguing that the Franco-Spanish deal violates fundamental EU rules that set out how the bloc must be represented on the world stage.

This incident reveals many things about the EU.  It reveals how trivial squabbles constantly interfere with the efficient conduct of a common EU foreign policy.  It reveals how big EU countries (France and Spain) think they have the right to push around small ones (Belgium).  It reveals an EU obsession with process rather than substance.

And, lastly, it reveals how, all too often, EU governments look like mice fighting over a piece of cheese, while outside Europe the world is full of large, fierce cats.

Back in November I drew attention to the path-breaking research of the genealogists who had discovered that Barack Obama was 1 per cent Belgian. Now it seems Belgium’s contribution to the good of the world goes even further than that.

Two academic researchers, one Australian and one German, claim that a 16th-century English poem proves that the game of cricket originated not in England but, you’ve got it, in Belgium - specifically, in the northern, Dutch-speaking region of Flanders. The poem, attributed (perhaps erroneously) to John Skelton, a humanist writer in Henry VIII’s reign, contains the lines:

“O, Lorde of Ipocrisie / Nowe shut up your wickettes / And clape to your clickettes! / Ah! Farewell, kings of crekettes!”

The researchers say these lines refer to Flemish weavers who settled in southern and eastern England in the 14th century. And they detect a linguistic connection between the word ‘cricket’ and the Flemish phrase ‘met de krik ketsen’ (to chase with a curved stick).

Well, it’s an interesting theory - not watertight, but enough to explain why the fellow who delivers my post in Brussels looks like Geoff Boycott.

Belgians are about to find out whether it’s easier to write a haiku than form a government.

King Albert II has asked Herman Van Rompuy, the 61-year-old head of Belgium’s lower house of parliament, to put together a government following the collapse of Yves Leterme’s coalition a mere nine months after it took office.

Herman Van Who? Few people outside the Benelux countries will have the slightest clue who Van Rompuy is. But let me tell you something. Beneath the cool exterior of this 61-year-old Flemish Christian Democrat beats the heart of a man of passion, honour and intellect.

Oh, yeah? I hear you say. Well, let me direct all you sceptics to the website on which Van Rompuy publishes poetry … in the form of haikus.

With apologies in advance to Van Rompuy and to the worldwide community of specialists in the Dutch-language variant of this Japanese poetical form, here is my translation of a haiku he put out on November 3:

ALL SOULS

A dead leaf hangs weak/ on a branch. A dead person/ lies still forever.

Great stuff. So, once again with apologies to Van Rompuy, here is my personal effort:

THE STATE OF BELGIUM

Governing Belgium is a thankless/ Task. Please, let’s have/ An election. 

For the politicians, diplomats, European Union officials, lawyers, lobbyists, journalists and other folk who have to fly in and out of Brussels a lot in their course of their duties, Brussels Airlines is a fairly popular choice.

Created in 2006 from the merger of Virgin Express and Sabena, the ill-fated Belgian national carrier, Brussels Airlines is a busy, friendly, no-frills company that in my experience does a good job getting you from A to B in Europe without a great deal of fuss.

With that thought in mind, let’s turn to the Brussels Airlines website and take a look at what the airline calls its ’Praise Form’. This states: ”Brussels Airlines will be delighted to hear from you if you are extremely satisfied with the service you have received. Did you have a great flight or enjoy being served by a comely stewardess? Please tell us about it …”

The Brussels-based traveller who pointed this out to me says he has trouble with the very concept of a ‘Praise Form’, since it is implicitly discouraging you from criticising the service you’ve received.

Be that as it may, the phrase that caught my eye was the one about the “comely stewardess”. It seemed so politically incorrect by today’s standards that I had a look at the French-language version of the same ‘Praise Form’. This reads: ”… or if you have been charmed by the professionalism of our employees …”  

So why are English-language customers prompted to sigh with extreme satisfaction and recall the services provided by comely stewardesses, whilst French-language customers are sternly reminded of the professionalism of Brussels Airlines staff?

I don’t know, but I imagine Lufthansa - which is in the process of buying 45 per cent of Brussels Airlines - will want to do something about it.