There is a wonderful scene in “Monty Python’s Life of Brian”, the 1979 movie that satirizes religion, in which two bungling terrorist groups, the People’s Front of Judea and the Campaign for Free Galilee, conduct simultaneous raids on Pontius Pilate’s palace and end up fighting each other rather than the Romans, their common enemy. This is the scene that comes to mind when one looks at the European Union’s recent diplomatic interventions in the Middle East.

The trouble started in January with the embarrassing spectacle of two separate European missions - one led by the Czech Republic in its capacity as holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, and the other led by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France - touring the region in an attempt to calm down the Gaza conflict. One or two countries, notably the Czechs, appeared distinctly more sympathetic to the Israeli notion of justified self-defence against Hamas than did the majority of EU member-states.

This incoherence deepened after February’s Israeli election, which produced a government containing Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister and Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister. Neither has sounded enthusiastic about reconfirming Israel’s commitment to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, which the EU - like other international actors in the Middle East - regards as a cornerstone of an eventual peace settlement.

The Gaza strife and the ambiguity about a two-state solution caused the EU to put on ice its plan to upgrade ties with Israel to a privileged status short of actual EU membership. The decision was mentioned publicly in April by, among others, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the EU’s external relations commissioner.

And here the trouble really starts. No sooner had Ferrero-Waldner made known the EU’s position than the then Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek (yes, it’s him again) jumped in and totally contradicted her. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Topolanek described Ferrero-Waldner’s statement as “really hasty”. With a lofty flourish worthy of Sarkozy himself, the Czech leader added: “I would not really attribute to it more weight than just a statement by a commissioner.”

Predictably, the Austrian-born Ferrero-Waldner refused to take this lying down. At a EU foreign ministers’ meeting in Luxembourg on April 27, she hit back and sneered that Topolanek was clearly ignorant of policy decisions on the Middle East adopted by all 27 EU countries.

At this point the dispute began to look more like an early 20th century central European squabble between Czechs and Austrians than a serious contribution to crafting a Middle East peace deal. As the guards watching the fracas at Pontius Pilate’s palace knew only too well, there are moments when all you can do is roll your eyes in despair.

The Czech hosts of Thursday’s European Union summit with six ex-Soviet states are not happy bunnies. The list of the EU leaders who couldn’t be bothered to show up for the Eastern Partnership event in Prague, a highlight of the Czechs’ six-month EU presidency, was embarrassingly long.

Let’s take them one by one.

Neither José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s prime minister, nor Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s premier, went to Prague. Berlusconi sent an extraordinarily low-level representative - Welfare Minister Maurizo Sacconi. It was almost an insult.

The best explanation I’ve heard for Berlusconi’s absence is that, once he found out other bigwigs wouldn’t be at the summit, he decided it would be beneath his dignity to go. I suppose it was a sort of blessing in disguise - it spared us an embarrassing photo like the one at the April G20 summit in London, where Berlusconi squeezed his beaming face between Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France stayed away from Prague, sending Prime Minister François Fillon in his place. Some think this was a tit-for-tat gesture prompted by the fact that Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek didn’t go to Paris last July for the launch of Sarkozy’s pet EU project, the Union for the Mediterranean.

Also absent from the Eastern Partnership “summit” - actually, let’s be honest and call it a “meeting” - were the leaders of Austria, Cyprus, Lithuania, Malta and Portugal. On the other side of the fence, the presidents of Belarus and Moldova weren’t there.

But the most glaring no-show of all was Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the UK. Foreign Secretary David Miliband went to Prague instead. Brown’s absence really stuck in the throats of the Czechs. In private, one embittered minister in Topolanek’s outgoing government used truly unprintable language to condemn Brown. 

You see, the UK is supposed to be the big friend of the EU’s new member-states in central and eastern Europe. It is supposed to be the country most supportive of EU enlargement. Even if EU membership is a long way off or may never happen for countries such as Ukraine, the UK is supposed, at the very least, to favour closer relations with them.

You have to feel sorry for the Czechs. Perhaps someone should remind them that the UK’s attitude to eastern Europe and the EU has always been pretty cynical. The British have been consistent supporters of enlargement because a bigger EU, so they think, buries the nightmare of an ever more centralised EU ruled from Brussels.

In fact, to bury this nightmare is to fight yesterday’s war. There isn’t going to be an ever more centralised EU ruled from Brussels. This became clear between 2004 and 2007, when the EU expanded from a 15-nation group of mainly western European countries to a 27-nation bloc stretching across the entire continent .

Brown should have gone to Prague. Politically, it would have cost him nothing. It might even have won him some friends in useful places.

Just two hours after the Czech upper house of parliament passed the European Union’s Lisbon treaty on Wednesday by a comfortable margin, I found myself in the Prague offices of Mirek Topolanek, the outgoing Czech prime minister. Tired but in good humour, he clearly wanted to hammer home the message that his turbulent four months running the Czech Republic’s EU presidency had been more successful than his critics allowed.

Like his country, which is a medium-sized EU member-state, Topolanek is a figure of medium-sized Shakespearean dimensions - a Coriolanus, not a Hamlet. He has done the noble thing by helping to get Lisbon passed. But he will be out of power on Friday, and he doesn’t want or expect praise from the plebeians elsewhere in the EU.

Topolanek took on the EU presidency knowing that some western European countries doubted the Czechs’ ability to do the job. He also knew that his minority coalition government was quite likely to crash in flames before its six-month term was over. This it did on March 24, thanks to the defection of a few turncoat members of his coalition, who sided with the opposition in a no-confidence vote.

Had that damaged the Czech EU presidency, I asked him? “Clearly. For God’s sake, definitely! What the opposition did, with the help of some others, was something that no one abroad or in the Czech Republic could understand. It’s as if you’re building a sandcastle and someone comes along and destroys it because he can’t stand the fact you’re building something beautiful.”

He used the word “shameful” more than once to describe this humiliation, and to explain why he had insisted on getting the Senate to approve Lisbon, even though he personally is lukewarm about the treaty. “The main reason why it went through the Senate is that the Czech Republic couldn’t afford to end up in a shameful situation twice in two months.”

I thought his most interesting observation - not easy to fit into a news story, but perfect for a blog - was his comparison of how the United States became a nation and how the European Union is going about its own self-construction. “The US was born of war and blood and forceful unification, and also of common values. The European Union, by contrast, is emerging in a peaceful way. Of course, I’m not saying I wish to go down the American way. But the European way is more complicated.”

He has a point. The War of Independence and the Civil War are, to this day, foundation stones of the American national myth. Europe once thought it had its own founding myth in the creation of a peaceful, prosperous community of countries that had cut each other to pieces in two world wars. But will it be enough to bind the EU together over the long term?

Here I am in Prague - a disappointingly wet Prague, for early May - as tensions mount ahead of a vote in the Czech Senate on the European Union’s Lisbon treaty. Officials in the government of Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, which collapsed in March but will not finally leave office until Friday, appear confident that the Senate, parliament’s upper house, will approve the treaty - probably by late afternoon today (Wednesday).

But if that’s what happens, it won’t be thanks to any stirring oratory from Topolanek. Speaking to the senators just now, he’s said that he isn’t a passionate enthusiast for the Lisbon treaty, but ”it’s the price for membership of the club”.

The Czech parliament’s lower house approved the treaty in February, and if the Senate follows suit it will be mighty difficult for President Vaclav Klaus, the Lisbon-hating head of state, to avoid completing the ratification procedure by adding his signature. Then it will be all down to the Irish and their second referendum on Lisbon, expected in October.

But perhaps we shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves. The Senate vote is in many ways unpredictable, with 81 seats in the chamber and the treaty needing the support of two-thirds of the senators present for the vote. Some Czechs say that enough senators are ashamed of the way the six-month Czech EU presidency disintegrated after the fall of Topolanek’s government that they will want to redeem themselves, and their country, by approving Lisbon.

However, behind the curtains, Klaus still exerts considerable influence on the Czech political stage, particularly on the centre-right. A Klaus-sprung surprise cannot be entirely ruled out.

After all, this is the man who on Monday chaired an EU-Japan summit in Prague at which the main theme was European and Japanese efforts to reach a world agreement on fighting climate change at a December conference in Copenhagen. After the summit, Klaus, who loves to ridicule the international scientific consensus on global warming, said of the EU-Japanese talks: “The discussion was at a level that I had no motivation to enter… The general level of the debate was quite acceptable for me, even if I’m convinced there’s no global warming and there’s almost no man-made global warming.”

You could almost feel the pain of José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, as he stood in stoical silence next to Klaus. As for Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, he could have been forgiven for wondering: What was the point of my trip from Tokyo, if the guy chairing this summit disagrees with everything we’ve been talking about?

Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, sounds like a man who intends to enjoy the next two months. In an interview last week with the Czech newspaper Mlada fronta Dnes, he merrily poured scorn on US and European Union measures to fight the world financial crisis and recession by suggesting that they drew on the spirit of 20th-century eastern European and Soviet communism.

Last month, he grabbed the headlines by engineering the downfall of Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek’s government right in the middle of the Czech Republic’s six-month EU presidency. In February, he prompted a walk-out by angry members of the European Parliament when he told them in a speech that their assembly did not encourage freedom of thought. As for his opinions on  climate change (misplaced alarmism), they are quite simply unrepeatable in polite European society.

Like a naughty child who leaves the fridge door open, kicks a football around the house, feeds the cat orange peel and questions every instruction he receives, Klaus just never gives up. Now his sights are set on the EU’s showpiece summit of heads of state and government on June 19-20 in Brussels. With Topolanek out of the way and the new interim government to be led by Jan Fischer, the worthy but politically faceless head of the Czech national statistical office, Klaus fancies the idea of chairing the EU summit.

The prospect of the super-eurosceptic Klaus taking charge of such an important event is causing sweat to break out on the brow of many a Eurocrat. For the summit must address two crucial issues: the guarantees to be promised to Ireland in return for another Irish referendum on the EU’s Lisbon reform treaty, and the question of whether to reappoint José Manuel Barroso as the European Commission president for a second five-year term.

Klaus is such a vociferous opponent of the Lisbon treaty that some in Brussels are wondering whether he is cooking up a plan to derail the summit by obstructing approval of the guarantees Ireland is seeking (the right to an Irish EU commissioner, pledges of non-interference in matters concerning taxation, neutrality and family law). Perhaps he also plans to disrupt the process by which EU leaders pick the next Commission president?

In reality, Klaus is nothing like as strong as the turbulent state of Czech politics and the EU’s frequent institutional paralysis make him appear. For one thing, the upper house of the Czech parliament is due to hold a vote in early May on ratifying the Lisbon treaty. It looks close, but the odds are that it will go through. If it does, Klaus will be powerless to stop the Irish getting their guarantees. Indeed, he will sooner or later have to add his presidential signature to the treaty, completing the process of Czech ratification.

In the second place, if there were even a hint that Klaus was planning to disrupt the June summit, other EU leaders could simply postpone the meeting until Sweden replaces the Czech Republic in the EU presidency on July 1. The same applies to the issue of Barroso’s renomination (though the real problem here may come from other leaders, not Klaus).

Klaus has had plenty of fun at the EU’s expense over the past four months, and he may yet have some more. Some of his ideas about puncturing the pomposity and self-delusion of the EU are on target. But in EU terms he is the naughty boy who will never grow up. The EU itself will move on and pretty quickly forget all about him.

Just as sunny weather has come to Brussels for the first time this year, so have the first signs that the European Union is weaning itself off its addiction to ever more frequent summits. True, today’s G20 event in London is the mother of all summits, and there are plenty of Europeans at it (too many, some non-Europeans might say).

But other planned summits are being downgraded or won’t be particularly grand occasions. Back in February Mirek Topolanek, the recently deposed Czech premier, announced he intended to hold two emergency anti-recession summits - one to uphold the EU’s free trade and single market principles against the threats of protectionism and economic nationalism, and the other on employment. The first meeting took place in Brussels on March 1 and didn’t get good reviews from summit critics in the European media.

Perhaps that’s why the employment summit, which is due to be held in Prague next month, will be a much scaled-down event - heads of state and government won’t attend. Topolanek’s status as a lame-duck leader who lashes out undiplomatically at US economic policies doesn’t help, either.

Meanwhile, there are doubts about another summit pencilled in for Prague on May 7 to launch the Eastern Partnership, an EU project to build closer ties with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Senior Czech officials have told their EU partners that the event may be held in Brussels rather than Prague. Why? No clear explanation has emerged, but again it’s probably connected to the brittle political situation in the Czech Republic since the eurosceptic President Vaclav Klaus engineered the collapse of Topolanek’s government.

Summit fever seized the EU during France’s six-month presidency from July to December last year. More summits were held in those six months than in any equivalent period of the EU’s history. Arguably, French President Nicolas Sarkozy was right to convene these summits, because the matters at issue - the Russia-Georgia war, the global financial crisis - were momentous indeed. But with the Czech EU presidency, one gets the impression that they felt a need to emulate Sarkozy’s hyperactivity rather than appraise the need for extra summits with a cool head.

In any event, Sweden, which will take over the EU presidency on July 1, has already made its intentions clear: there’ll be no emergency summits while Stockholm is in charge unless there is a truly compelling need.

When he’s not busy lashing out at American economic policies, the free-falling Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek can always give free rein to the other side of his personality - mordant central European humour. Here’s an example from a press conference last week at a European Union summit in Brussels.

A reporter asked Topolanek, whose government collapsed on Monday and whose country’s EU presidency is turning into a long bad dream, why the six summit participants represented at the press conference were all men, with not a woman in sight. ‘Why, were you expecting Martians?’ the prime minister replied.

This did not go down at all well with women politicians in the European Parliament.

As Zita Gurmai, a Hungarian socialist who sits on the legislature’s committee on women’s rights and gender equality, put it: ‘If Mr Topolanek thinks it is a joke to describe half of Europe’s citizens as Martians, he should give up trying to be funny. It is bad enough that Europe, under his presidency, is not taking any extra actions to help women and men threatened by the recession, but to insult women as well is too much. I hope Mr Topolanek is embarrassed.’

Not much chance of that, one suspects.

The knives were well and truly out for Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek at the European Parliament this morning. Topolanek, blaming the fall of his government on Tuesday on his domestic Social Democrat opponents, blithely assured legislators in Strasbourg that there would be no impact on the Czech Republic’s presidency of the European Union.

Not surprisingly, this prompted a stern lecture from Martin Schulz, the German head of the parliament’s socialist group. “You are a fighter, but so far you haven’t understood what the task of the EU presidency is,” Schulz told the hapless Czech premier.

Obviously, the Czech government’s collapse won’t cause the EU machinery to grind to a halt, any more than the bureaucracy in an individual EU country stops working when a government loses office. But the Czech crisis will have consequences for the EU, nonetheless.

First, it will shred to pieces the Czech Republic’s ability to project a strong image when representing the EU in foreign policy. Fear not, this will soon become visible in the EU’s relations with Russia, which delights in exposing the EU’s internal contradictions. It will also affect EU policy in the Middle East, where France - the previous holder of the EU’s rotating presidency - made it clear as early as January that it had little regard for Czech diplomatic skills in the region.

Secondly, the Czech crisis will raise yet more questions about the fate of the EU’s Lisbon treaty. Because of domestic political differences, and also because the issue became tied up with the fundamentally separate matter of whether to deploy parts of a US anti-missile defence system, the Czech Republic has repeatedly delayed ratifying the Lisbon treaty. The question now is whether even Irish approval of the treaty in a referendum expected in October will help the prospects of ratification in the Czech Republic. Don’t forget, Czech President Vaclav Klaus, whose signature is needed to pass the treaty, is a vociferous opponent.

Thirdly, the crisis in Prague may disrupt the Czech handling of EU policy issues such as the drive for tighter financial market regulation. In the EU, progress on such matters depends on ministers from the country that holds the EU presidency. They need to be well-organised and capable of leadership. They also need a good instinct for when to strike a compromise among the 27 member-states. It really doesn’t help if they fall from office halfway through their country’s six-month presidency.

Possibly, the damage will be limited if Topolanek and key colleagues such as Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek are able to continue in office, even on a temporary basis. And one should remember that not everything about the Czech EU presidency has been bad: they have done a good job in speaking out in defence of the single market and against economic nationalism à la française.

But memories of the weak and sometimes gaffe-prone Czech EU presidency (remember the art display put up at the EU’s headquarters, with Bulgaria portrayed as a toilet?) will last for a long time in Brussels and in Europe’s national capitals. These memories will surely reinforce pressure for a stronger, more stable, permanent EU presidency - as foreseen in the Lisbon treaty.