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.

My colleague Philippe Ricard wrote a fine piece in Monday’s Le Monde about the scarcity of women candidates for top positions in the European Union - not just the first full-time president and the new foreign policy high representative, but the next 27-member European Commission.

He made the point that if only a few women are nominated to the new Commission, the European Parliament is likely to cause real trouble when the nominees appear for their confirmation hearings, expected to start in December.  The legislature does not have the legal authority to reject individual nominees, but in 2004 it demonstrated that it had the political strength to force their withdrawal when it torpedoed the appointment of Rocco Buttiglione, an Italian conservative, as justice commissioner.  Moreover, the parliament does have the legal power to reject the Commission in its entirety - the so-called “nuclear option”.

Many MEPs show every sign of itching for a repeat performance of the Buttiglione affair, which is fondly recalled in the assembly as a defining moment in the parliament’s evolution.  A scarcity of women would provide the perfect cover because it would be widely seen across Europe as inherently indefensible.

Could these tensions be eased by the appointment of a woman as the full-time president or the foreign policy supremo?  In principle, yes.  But officials from several countries have told me in recent days that the need for “gender balance” in the appointments is not regarded as of the same weight as the need for political balance (one person of the left, one of the right) - or the need to pick the best qualified candidates.

That last point sticks in the throat a bit, but there we are.

I confess to a certain surprise at the way that Massimo D’Alema is climbing up the list of candidates for the post of European Union foreign policy chief.  At first sight the former Italian prime minister and foreign minister ticks far too few boxes to get the job.  But there are, in truth, some straightforward reasons for his ascent - none of which reflects well on the EU.

First, the unticked boxes.  1) His communist past.  This is usually condensed into: “He’s a former communist and therefore unacceptable to Poland and other EU countries, which suffered under Soviet domination while the Italian communist party was gorging itself on covert funds from Moscow.”  In fairness, D’Alema abandoned communism 20 years ago.  I spent five years in Rome covering Italian politics, and he never struck me as an extremist or a hardliner.  Quite the opposite: he was highly pragmatic, in a shifty kind of way.

2) His opinions of the US.  D’Alema isn’t foolishly anti-American, but he has more than a few traces in him of that quintessential European personality, the austere leftwing intellectual who drips with cultural disdain for the US.  This could be a real risk for the EU.  If as EU foreign policy supremo he were to make critical remarks about the US in public, European influence in Washington would be killed stone dead - and there would be bitter recriminations in the 27-nation EU, making a mockery of the entire idea of a common foreign policy.

3) His linguistic skills.  These days it would be crazy for the EU to have a foreign policy chief who doesn’t speak fluent English.  D’Alema has picked up some over the years, but not enough.  “He has Italian waiter’s French and not much English,” says one EU minister who has known him during his various spells in the Italian government.

4) The domestic Italian political factor.  You have to ask yourself, why is Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi so eager to promote the candidacy of D’Alema, his political adversary?  A little history is needed here.  Back in 1996-2001 Berlusconi completely outmanoeuvred D’Alema in a lengthy set of negotiations over Italian constitutional reform that ended up going nowhere - to Berlusconi’s benefit.  It must have crossed Berlusconi’s mind that D’Alema is quite capable of self-destructing in the EU foreign policy job, something that would damage his career and strengthen Berlusconi’s grip on the Italian political scene.

So why is D’Alema’s star on the rise?  One reason is that France and Germany have never shown much interest in getting the foreign policy job (they prefer powerful economic posts on the incoming European Commission).  Meanwhile, the UK persists in its stubborn support for Tony Blair as the EU’s first full-time president, thereby reducing the chances that David Miliband could become the foreign policy supremo.  The behaviour of France, Germany and the UK has left a vacuum that has been filled by Italy, the EU’s fourth-ranking power.

The other reason is that D’Alema has the backing of Europe’s socialist parties.  The key player in this game is Martin Schulz, the German who chairs the centre-left group in the European Parliament.  Schulz is exploiting D’Alema’s candidacy for his wider purposes, which include maximising the legislature’s power relative to the EU governments and the Commission, increasing the left’s voice in Europe and consolidating his personal authority over the European centre-left.

It’s all pretty unedifying.  Whatever happened to the idea that Europe’s top jobs should go to the best qualified candidates?

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.”

It’s striking that the Czech constitutional court announced its approval of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty on Tuesday morning just as the prospect of another Russian gas import crisis began to loom on the EU’s horizon.  For even though the news from Prague is welcome, a moment’s reflection is all you need to remind yourself that the Lisbon treaty will, in and of itself, do very little to help the EU address its most serious foreign and economic policy problems.

The sheer sense of relief at adopting a new EU treaty - it’s taken eight years, required two different texts, gone through three failed referendums and caused endless trouble in countries such as the Czech Republic, Ireland and the UK - risks fostering the delusion that everything will be better once Lisbon is in force.  But this is to fall into the trap of assuming that process can substitute for substance (see Monday’s blog on how the same fallacy affects the EU’s approach to relations with other big powers).

Last January witnessed the eruption of a Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute that deprived a number of eastern European countries of gas supplies for two weeks in the middle of winter.  It was, in many ways, a re-run of a similar episode in January 2006.  Like that crisis, it exposed the EU’s abysmal lack of progress in fashioning a common external energy policy.  The Lisbon treaty will not improve the situation - or, for that matter, make things worse.  What counts is political will, which treaties do not produce out of thin air.

A similar consideration applies to the co-ordination of EU economic and fiscal policy.  It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that, with the huge increase in budget deficits and public debts since the start of the financial crisis, the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact - its fiscal rulebook - has become close to irrelevant.  Yet the EU, and the 16-nation eurozone in particular, badly needs a credible system of fiscal controls.  The Lisbon treaty will not provide it.  It can only come from governments acting with a strong sense of responsibility towards each other because they share the same currency.

The truth is, I think, that supporters of the Lisbon treaty have overstated its benefits since it was signed in December 2007, and critics have overstated its defects.  The EU has not ground to a halt because of the lack of a new treaty since it acquired 12 new member-states in 2004 and 2007.  Nor will it be transformed into the world’s most dynamic power once the treaty takes effect.  The best thing you can say about the treaty is that, now it is certain to come into force, there will be no need to say much about it ever again.

On Tuesday a numerically impressive delegation of Europeans will be in Washington for the first formal US-European Union summit since Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration last January.  Fredrik Reinfeldt, Sweden’s prime minister, will be there in his capacity as leader of the country that holds the EU’s rotating presidency.  So will Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister.  So will Javier Solana, the EU’s head of foreign policy.  So will Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the EU’s external affairs commissioner.  So will José Manuel Barroso, the Commission president - and from what I hear, a few other bigwigs are going along for the ride as well.

This is quite a turnout.  It would be nice to think it reflects an exceptionally warm and constructive relationship between the Obama administration and its EU allies.  But as a timely new report by the European Council on Foreign Relations points out, the real picture is less rosy.  “To Americans, these summits are all too typical of the European love of process over substance, and a European compulsion for everyone to crowd into the room regardless of efficiency,” write the authors, Nick Witney and Jeremy Shapiro.

In 2001 President George W. Bush was so taken aback by his first experience of EU-style summitry that he halved the frequency of the US-European meetings to once a year.  Last April, however, the Europeans managed to entice Obama into visiting Prague for a session with all 27 EU heads of state and government.  “Administration sources are frank that Obama’s encounter… left him incredulous,” say Witney and Shapiro.

One sympathises.  Even Europeans know that their inability or reluctance to put a sensible limit on the number of people who represent them is a weakness.  How much worse it must be for a practical, results-oriented kind of guy like Obama.  He would surely like nothing better than a summit where the Europeans speak with one voice and don’t need a dozen limousines to get them to the White House.

But it’s a problem that shows no sign of going away.  Take the G20.  This increasingly important group, which brings together the world’s leading industrialised and developing countries, does not in fact have 20 faces around the table but 24, of which eight are European.  It’s much the same at the International Monetary Fund.  And when the EU started formal consultations on exchange rates and other issues with China’s leaders two years ago, they sent three people to Beijing - Jean-Claude Trichet, the European Central Bank president; Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime minister and the head of the 16-strong group of eurozone finance ministers; and Joaquín Almunia, the EU monetary affairs commissioner.  That might just have been acceptable, except that a separate European delegation was in Beijing at the same time for a EU-China summit, and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France was also flying around China doing his own thing.

Will the situation improve once the EU has its first full-time president, one of whose tasks will be to represent the EU in external relations?  Unlikely.  At times I have the impression that the regular bilateral summits with the US, China, Russia, India, Japan and so on don’t even mean a great deal to EU leaders.

I well remember a EU-South Africa summit held in Bordeaux in July 2008.  Sarkozy, who represented the EU because France held the bloc’s rotating presidency, hosted Thabo Mbeki, the former South African president.  But Sarkozy left the summit early because he had a more pressing engagement in Paris on the same day.  With whom?  Barack Obama… then a mere presidential candidate.

As Tony Blair’s chances of becoming the European Union’s first full-time president fade, so the chances go up that David Miliband will be the EU’s next foreign policy supremo.  This is the picture emerging on the second day of the EU summit in Brussels.

The killer blow to Blair’s prospects was delivered by Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, who let it be known that she would prefer the EU’s first permanent president to come from one of the EU’s smaller states.  By definition, this rules out Blair.

German officials say she has nothing against Blair personally.  But in this matter Merkel’s voice is perhaps the most important among all the 27 leaders present.  Germany is not putting forward a candidate either for the presidency or for the foreign policy post.  It is, however, the EU’s biggest country and its paymaster.  Merkel is therefore the honest broker, the swing vote, the kingmaker - however you want to put it.

Meanwhile, Blair has lost the support of José Sócrates, Portugal’s prime minister, and of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s prime minister.  Both are socialists and both think Europe’s centre-left should focus not on getting the presidency but the foreign policy job.

That is why the summit chatter about Miliband is getting ever more excited.  Looking around Europe, one does not see too many foreign policy stars on the centre-left side of the political firmament.  And check out this editorial in Thursday’s Le Monde on Miliband.  It describes him as “the young and brilliant foreign secretary” and praises his commitment to the EU, contrasting it with the views of William Hague, the Tory shadow foreign secretary, whom it accuses of “an almost pathological europhobia”.

With Le Monde on your side, how can you lose?