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.

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.”

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.

Buried in this month’s “Annual Report on the Euro Area 2009″ from the European Commission is some absorbing material on competitiveness in the eurozone.  Some countries, above all Germany, Europe’s export champion, have consistently outshone others in terms of business competitiveness since the euro’s launch in 1999.  The result has been the accumulation of large current account deficits in countries such as Cyprus, Greece, Portugal and Spain - but also in Ireland, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia.

As the Commission says, in impeccably understated language: “The build-up of large external liabilities has increased exposure to financial shocks…  In the current downturn, financial markets have become more responsive to the net external financial asset position for the euro area countries.  Even if to a large extent the net external position is related to the private sector, the public sector can be affected by private sector debt in the form of potential bail-outs and other fiscal implications.”

Put simply, the Commission is warning that the gap between Germany and other strong performers - such as Austria, Finland and the Netherlands - and the group of laggards poses a bigger risk to the eurozone’s stability than it did before the financial crisis.  If you are one of the laggards in competitiveness and your financial sector is in trouble, then the financial markets will start taking a close look at how sustainable your public finances are.  And because you share a common currency with 15 other countries, your problem is unavoidably their problem, too.

There is some evidence that the laggards are cutting their current account deficits.  Spain’s, for example, is projected to fall to 5 per cent of gross domestic product next year from 9 per cent this year.  But in general the countries that need to improve competitiveness most urgently are also those with the worst rigidities in labour and product markets.  As a result, unit labour costs in the laggard countries have risen by 2.5 per cent or more every year since 1999, whereas Germany’s unit labour costs have stayed more or less unchanged.

This problem clearly needs addressing before the strains on European monetary union (EMU) become intolerable.  What is to be done?  The Commission’s report is masterfully vague, saying: “Competitiveness developments warrant broader surveillance…  Effective functioning of EMU calls for an early detection of these external imbalances in order to prompt an adequate and timely policy response.”

Germany’s response, I reckon, would be more blunt.  The Germans would tell the laggards: “Put your houses in order, like we did after being hit with the gigantic cost of our country’s reunification in 1990.  Regain competitiveness.  If it means your citizens have to put up with stagnant living standards for a number of years, so be it.  Eurozone membership is not a free ride.”

The only thing is, I’m not sure this is what the laggards want to hear.

Even before he was elected as president of France in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy made it crystal-clear that he didn’t want Turkey to join the European Union - ever.  Now concerns are growing in Brussels that Sarkozy is contemplating a formal Franco-German initiative next year to offer Turkey a “privileged partnership” instead of, as now, the long-term prospect of full EU membership.

The idea of a “privileged partnership” has been around for a good few years.  Sarkozy likes it, and so does Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic party.  It also appeals to Angela Merkel, the CDU chancellor.  However, Merkel has up to now taken a nuanced approach, recognising that Germany, along with other EU countries, recognised Turkey as an official candidate for membership in 1999.  A responsible country cannot just wriggle out of agreements made in good faith, Merkel believes. 

The difference now is that, after last month’s German election, the Social Democrats - more sympathetic to Turkey’s aspirations - are out of government and have been replaced by the Free Democrats, whose position on Turkey is more ambiguous.  The balance of opinion in Berlin is changing.  Sarkozy may try to seize the opportunity to line up the new German government behind the concept of the ”privileged partnership”, according to EU policymakers.

Needless to say, Turkey would dismiss an offer along these lines as an insult.  There is no legal foundation for a “privileged partnership”, says Egemen Bagis, Turkey’s chief negotiator on EU matters.   You are either in the EU or not in the EU.  You cannot be half-pregnant, Bagis once told me.

The US would undoubtedly dislike such an initiative, too.  Ignoring criticism that it’s none of their business, both Democratic and Republican administrations have always encouraged the EU to accept Turkey as a full member.

Alas, Turkey’s EU membership bid is in serious trouble, anyway.  The European Commission tried to put a brave face on matters this week in its annual report on Turkey.  But the inescapable truth is that out of the 35 negotiation chapters, or policy areas, that a country needs to complete in order to join the EU, Turkey has opened 11, of which only one has been provisionally closed.  Another 12 chapters have been either formally frozen by the EU, or informally blocked by France with support from others opposed to Turkey’s bid.  The entire process risks grinding to a halt.

In December EU leaders will discuss Turkey’s failure to heed their calls to open its ports and airports to ships and aircraft from the Greek Cypriot-controlled government of Cyprus.  In theory they could take a harsh line and more or less abandon Turkey’s EU entry talks.

I doubt this will happen - Sweden, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency until December 31, is friendly towards Turkey, and many other countries think it would be crazy to adopt such a position just when negotiations on a Cyprus settlement are reaching a critical moment.

But towards the end of the first half of 2010, the picture may well look different.  April is the key month.  If the Cyprus talks are deadlocked by the time of next April’s Turkish Cypriot presidential election, and if he can get Germany on board, Sarkozy may be tempted to unveil his “privileged partnership” proposal.

Ask a minister in a European Union government what post their country hopes to get in the next European Commission, and the response is the same every time - something important to do with the economy.  Well, you can’t blame people for not hurrying to step into the shoes of Leonard Orban, the Romanian commissioner for multilingualism.

On the other hand, there aren’t enough top economic jobs for Commission president José Manuel Barroso to satisfy everyone.  Truth to tell, the Commission looks too big with 27 members.  But that’s the way it is, and that’s the way it will stay under the EU’s Lisbon treaty.  A guaranteed seat on the Commission seems a simple, visible way of making a country’s citizens feel connected to the EU.

The main four economic portfolios in Barroso’s outgoing Commission have been - in no particular order - competition, the internal market, trade, and economic and monetary affairs.  These have been occupied by the Netherlands, Ireland, Britain and Spain respectively.  By contrast, France has held two lesser posts (first transport, then justice, freedom and security), and Germany has dropped almost completely out of sight in the post of enterprise and industry.

As Barroso puts together his new team, France and Germany are in the hunt for really big jobs and feel no doubt that they deserve them because of their relatively diminished status in the outgoing Commission.  The French and Germans want to play a much more direct role in shaping the EU’s economic and financial policies as the EU struggles to emerge from recession, rewrites its rules on financial regulation and defends its industries in world markets.  France is said to desire the internal market job on the Commission, and Germany would like something equally prominent.

All this is causing some nervousness in Britain and a few like-minded countries that the next Commission will be less free market-oriented than its predecessor.  In response I would make two points.  First, this is the spirit of the age - you can expect nothing less after the recent near-meltdown of the western world’s financial system and the associated regulatory failures.

But secondly, it just does not follow that to give a top economic dossier to France or Germany means that the Commission will be wrenched in the direction of some manically illiberal étatisme and fiendishly pro-Volkswagen industrial policy.  To take one excellent example, Pascal Lamy, the Frenchman who served as trade commissioner from 1999 to 2004, was a robust defender of free trade and now is head of the World Trade Organisation.  The same would be true if the next French commissioner were someone like Christine Lagarde, who at present is President Nicolas Sarkozy’s finance minister (she is still a possible choice, some think, even though it looks as if Sarkozy is going for Michel Barnier).

EU commissioners, at their best, are like US Supreme Court justices.  When a president picks a judge to sit on America’s highest court, everyone’s first thought is, “Here we go, a blatant political appointment designed to push the Court in a certain ideological direction”.  Then, more often than not, the nominee causes a surprise by putting the court’s interests first and acting independently.  So it can be at the Commission, where the institutional culture of independence from political pressure is stronger than many on the outside assume.

With Czech President Vaclav Klaus the chief remaining obstacle to final ratification of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty, there has been a fair amount of loose talk about how the Czech Republic could - or should - be punished if Klaus refuses to sign it.  On the one hand, supporters of the treaty say it is intolerable that the EU’s eight-year effort at redesigning its institutions should be sabotaged at the finishing post.  If Klaus carries on his delaying tactics much longer, they warn, the Czechs should be denied a seat in the next European Commission.

On the other hand, opponents of the Lisbon treaty are painting the same scenario for quite different reasons.  Just you watch, they say.  The EU will reveal itself as an intolerant, anti-democratic machine, whipping the Czechs merely because they have the temerity to resist the imposition of a treaty they fear undermines their sovereignty.

Most, if not all, of this is not serious.  Some leaders, especially French President Nicolas Sarkozy, are impatient with Klaus.  But EU governments as a whole are not threatening to punish the Czechs.  After all, the Czech parliament has approved the treaty and the Czech government is in favour of it.  Klaus is more and more isolated.

More importantly, the EU is an organisation whose first instinct is to do things by forging a consensus, not by crushing dissent.  Pace Klaus, it is not the Soviet Union reinvented.  The EU’s culture of consensus is both its weakness and, at times like this, its strength.

The EU learnt a sobering lesson in 2000, when Austria formed a coalition government including the far-right Freedom Party of the late Jörg Haider.  The EU’s other 14 member-states punished Austria by downgrading relations and freezing contacts with Austrian ministers.  It seemed a clever idea at the time.  But it ended up producing the opposite effect to that intended, by making a martyr of the Austrian government and by stiffening the patriotic pride of the Austrian people (not just Austrians on the right, either).

Moreover, the EU contains an awful lot of small and medium-sized countries, especially in central and eastern Europe, which suspect that, if ever the Czech Republic were punished for stepping out of line, their turn would come, sooner or later, over some other issue.

One final point.  Many intemperate calls to punish the Czechs have come from the European Parliament.  And it is indeed true that, if Klaus is still holding out when the parliament conducts hearings for the new European Commission, some MEPs may give the Czech nominee a particularly hard grilling.  In extremis, they could even refuse to give the entire Commission the green light because of the Klaus problem.

If they do, someone should remind them that their legislature just got elected on the smallest and most dismal turnout - 43 per cent - of any European Parliament election in history.

A couple of months ago, some European Union policymakers talked despairingly of how 2009 risked turning out to be “a wasted year”.  Now the EU is on a roll.  The impasse over José Manuel Barroso’s reappointment as European Commission president was removed last month when the European parliament stopped playing games and renewed his term of office.

And all of a sudden, it looks as if “a decade of deadening debate over the European Union’s institutional shape” - as British foreign secretary David Miliband puts it in today’s FT - will soon come to an end, after Ireland’s referendum on the Lisbon treaty produced a massive majority in favour.  It may not be long before the EU has its first full-time president, a new head of foreign policy and a new Commission with a five-year mandate serving under Barroso.

So is all rosy in the European garden?  Not quite.  The principal problem, as it has been for the past two years, is the financial crisis.  Time and time again, as I peek into the future, I find myself disturbed by the terrible condition of Europe’s public finances and the strains that this will put on the eurozone’s unity.

In a newly published report, economists at Barclays Capital look at the evolution of the eurozone’s public debt-to-gross domestic product ratio up to the middle of the next decade.  In one scenario, which assumes an annual fiscal adjustment of 2 per cent of GDP, 4 per cent inflation and 3 per cent economic growth, the eurozone’s average debt would be 65 per cent in 2016.  That is not bad (though it’s above the 60 per cent threshold set for new entrants into the eurozone).

But just look at the differences between the area’s member-states.  The German debt would be 40 per cent of GDP, the Dutch debt 37 per cent, the Finnish debt 12 per cent.  But the Greek debt would be 150 per cent, the Irish debt 126 per cent and the Portuguese debt 89 per cent.  In footballing terms, this would be like Barcelona and Chelsea playing in the same league as Atromitos Athens and the Tralee Dynamos.

This scenario, by the way, is not Barclays Capital’s “base case”, which is more pessimistic, estimating average eurozone debt at 90 per cent of GDP in 2016.  But the same enormous divergence between, say, Germany and Greece is evident: German debt would be 64 per cent, Greek debt 171 per cent.

With such bleak forecasts, it is entirely understandable that German policymakers dislike proposals for issuing common eurozone bonds.  But the financial crisis is testing to the limit the eurozone’s ability to conduct a properly co-ordinated fiscal policy.  When interest rates start going up again, as they will, this will present a far bigger challenge for the EU than getting Barroso reappointed or passing the Lisbon treaty.