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.

Among the various headaches keeping European Union leaders awake at night is the prospect of a thumping Conservative victory in the UK’s next general election, which must be held by June 2010. The fear is that the new Tory government would be so anti-EU that it would make the 1979-1997 governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major look like Jacques Delors’s European Commission in its heyday.

The nightmare inched one step closer on Wednesday when the Conservatives confirmed their intention of leaving the European People’s Party (EPP), the European Parliament’s main centre-right political group. This is a club with members from all over the 27-nation bloc. It is the largest group in the parliament, with about 37 per cent of the seats, and it will probably retain that position after June’s European Parliament elections.

But the Tories, fed up with the EPP’s enthusiasm for closer EU integration and its support for the EU’s Lisbon reform treaty, say they plan to establish a separate group in the legislature after the elections.

Predictably, the Conservatives’ opponents in the UK say the Tories, if they went ahead, would be putting themselves on the “lunatic fringe” of European politics. Is this true? Let’s have a look and see who might be the Tories’ bedfellows in a new right-of-centre, pan-European political family.

The most likely candidates are the Czech Civic Democrats (who have a helpful English-language website) and Poland’s Law and Justice party (Polish only, as far as I can tell, but here’s what the party slogan translates as: “Patriotism, solidarity, modernity”). Neither fits neatly into mainstream western European definitions of moderate centre-right politics. Both have earned a reputation for being “difficult” on the EU stage. Like the Tories, however, they are not afraid to challenge conventional wisdom. They should be taken seriously.

Other possible companions for the Conservatives are Italy’s Northern League, which is distinctly more right-wing. The League, I fear, could embarrass the Tories with its hostility to foreigners and rather peculiar version of northern Italian ethnic politics. Then there is the Danish People’s Party, which has a similar brand of conservative, anti-immigrant populism. Finally, there are some minor parties in Belgium, Latvia and Lithuania.

All in all, leaving the EPP does not look like the best way for the Tories to maximise their influence in the European Parliament. But I doubt that bothers them much. If it goes down well with party activists and supporters in the UK, why think twice?

Anyone remember the Lisbon Strategy? This was a grand European Union programme, adopted almost exactly nine years ago, to turn the EU into “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy” in the world by 2010. It set a number of specific targets, such as average annual economic growth of 3 per cent and an overall employment participation rate of 70 per cent.

Given the crisis the world economy now faces, it would be cruel and gratuitous to mock the EU’s lofty ambitions of March 2000. Suffice it to say that a new report prepared by Allianz, the German insurer, and the Lisbon Council, a Brussels-based think-tank, says that Europe’s recession “is so severe that none of the countries surveyed can presently come up to the Lisbon goals”.

Assessing how far each country falls short is by no means a futile exercise, however. Michael Heise, the report’s principal author and Allianz’s chief economist, ranks the EU’s 14 largest economies according to six criteria - economic growth, productivity growth, jobs, human capital, future-oriented investment and sustainable public finances.

His conclusion is that Finland comes top, with strong results in human capital (that famous Finnish education system), public finances, and research and development (allocated an impressive 3.45 per cent of gross domestic product a year). Second comes Poland, which scores well on economic growth and productivity growth but badly on jobs.

Heise estimates that if the recession had not intervened, six countries would have been on track to meet their Lisbon targets by 2010 - Finland, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden. The Spanish performance is a bit of an optical illusion: Spain improved its labour productivity, but only by shedding jobs on a massive scale.

Who’s been doing worst? Very striking is the fall from grace of Ireland, which crashed to 13th in this year’s rankings from fourth in 2008. The Irish performance in economic growth, productivity and public finances makes grim reading.

And bottom of the pack, like last year, is Italy. Italy’s persistent lack of business competitiveness compared to Germany, and its tendency to be the first eurozone country to fall into recession whenever the economic outlook darkens, are an extremely serious long-term concern for Europe’s monetary union.

So this is it! The adventure begins. Hillary Clinton has just arrived in Brussels on her first trip to Europe as US Secretary of State, and as of a few minutes ago I’ve become officially “embedded” as a blogger with the State Department press corps that’s travelling with her. I’m pretty self-conscious about this. These guys have just flown in with Clinton from Ramallah after several days’ hard going in Egypt, Israel and the West Bank. I, by contrast, have simply hopped on the Brussels Metro, strolled off after three stops and made my way to …

Whoops, I almost broke the rules. You see, for perfectly understandable security reasons, I’m not allowed to say where I am. I am, for practical purposes, nowhere. Nor can I identify the person who is at present briefing us on tomorrow’s agenda, except to refer to this person as a “senior US official”. This official is, for practical purposes, nobody.

Now, when Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State in the 1970s and briefed the travelling press, they had to begin their sentences with phrases such as “A senior US official travelling on Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s plane told reporters that …” But you shouldn’t take that as a hint that the “senior US official” of March 2009 is the new Secretary of State. Not at all. Believe me, there’s more than one senior official in the US foreign policy machinery. 

So what are we learning from the senior US official? For one thing, that Nato’s foreign ministers will agree tomorrow that it’s time to resume high-level ministerial contacts with Russia, which were suspended after the Russian invasion and de facto dismemberment of Georgia last August. “We want a constructive relationship with Russia where we have common interests, such as on arms control, fighting terrorism, piracy or counter-narcotics,” the senior US official said, while pointing out that Nato still had “fundamental disagreements” with Moscow over its recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the breakaway pro-Russian regions of Georgia.

This new approach to Russia is all part of what is turning out to be a pretty far-reaching adjustment of US foreign policy under President Barack Obama. But before I get into that, I’m going to morph back into someone who really is somewhere and get some sleep.

The European Union’s much-touted €200bn fiscal stimulus package is looking more and more like one of those trick cigars I remember from years ago. A trick cigar looks like a cigar. It even feels like a cigar. But when you try to smoke it, nothing happens.

In the case of the EU’s fiscal stimulus - an initiative designed to pull Europe out of its deep recession, and approved by EU leaders at last week’s summit in Brussels - one gets the distinct feeling that someone somewhere is trying to pull wool over the general public’s eyes. The €200bn is there on paper, but there is not much evidence of it in the real world.

This is explained very clearly by David Saha and Jakob von Weizsäcker in a freshly published study for the Bruegel think-tank, “Estimating the Size of the European Stimulus Packages for 2009″. They say only one country in the 15-nation eurozone is genuinely applying the classic Keynesian recipe of increased deficit spending to counter a downturn. That country is Spain.

Particularly startling is their analysis of the measures recently unveiled in Italy by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government. Officials in Rome portrayed this as an €80bn stimulus, or roughly 5 per cent of Italian gross domestic product. What nonsense. The Bruegel economists conclude that the Italian measures announced since September add up not to a stimulus, but to the opposite - a small fiscal tightening of €0.3bn!

As it happens, there are very good reasons why it would be imprudent for Italy to embark on a spending spree right now. With a public debt higher than its annual economic output, and with financial markets acutely nervous about traditionally profligate borrowers such as the Italian state, Berlusconi and his colleagues need to show great care in navigating their way out of the recession.

As the Italian example suggests, there is rather more support in private around Europe for Germany’s well-known apprehension about the EU-wide fiscal stimulus than is admitted in public. To name just a few countries - in and outside the eurozone - that share Germany’s wariness, think of Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. And, of course, the European Central Bank is sympathetic to Germany’s position, too.

The bottom line is that, whatever the severity of the recession, Europe’s leaders are loath to do anything that might imperil the euro and the cohesion of the eurozone. For them, this is the multi-national European project that matters. As far as possible, therefore, they will try to stay within the limits set by the Stability and Growth Pact, the EU’s fiscal rulebook. And this means restricting the scope of a European fiscal stimulus.  

What is the European Commission doing in the financial crisis? Commission president José Manuel Barroso answered that question last Friday in a speech that deserved rather more attention than it got.

After listing various initiatives the Commission is advancing on capital requirements, deposit guarantees, accountancy rules, credit ratings agencies, executive pay and cross-border financial supervision, Barroso delivered a remarkable message.

“One thing is clear: there is no national ‘autostrada’ out of this crisis - our economies are too interconnected. And protectionism is no solution either,” he said. “…There are political forces at work that are trying to use the crisis to turn the clock back. To question open societies. To impose failed recipes based on failed ideas. So I want to be quite clear: the solution will not be found by looking backwards, it will be found by looking forwards.”

This passage of Barroso’s speech is worth a second look. The language he used to denounce opportunistic protectionists and economic Neanderthals could hardly have been stronger, and yet he carefully avoided putting a name to the bad guys.

Who, for example, is “questioning open societies”? That is a pretty dramatic accusation to level at anyone in today’s Europe - and Barroso surely meant political forces in the European Union, not the usual suspects in Russia, North Korea or Zimbabwe. And who is promoting “failed recipes based on failed ideas”?

Perhaps the key to Barroso’s thinking lies in his unusual choice of the word ‘autostrada’ - the Italian word for highway or motorway - to explain why defensive economic nationalism leads to a dead end. He could have said ‘ road’ - this part of his speech was in English - but he didn’t.

Barroso gave his speech at Milan’s Bocconi University, just as it emerged that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government was preparing to tighten the rules against foreign takeovers of Italian companies. The government, aware that Italy’s economy is yet again in recession, is also demanding changes to the EU’s climate change policies on the grounds of cost. 

Could it be that the political forces Barroso was criticising are in Italy itself?

José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president who wants to be reappointed next year to a second five-year term, has in recent days received two important but somewhat curious endorsements. The first was from Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, who has been sharply and publicly at odds with Barroso over the European Central Bank’s policies and over the European Commission’s handling of world trade negotiations.

The second was from Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister. The areas of potential or actual conflict between Italy and the EU are numerous to list here. But among them are Italian state aid to the near-bankrupt airline Alitalia, a rubbish collection crisis in Naples, and the treatment - or mistreatment - of Italy’s gypsy population.

To these one might add a warning from Berlusconi, issued on the eve of a summit of EU leaders in Brussels last month, about the European Commission. “We must no longer see public remarks by commissioners who create a lot of trouble for ministers [at national level],” he declared.

Barroso puts up with this needling from the likes of Berlusconi and Sarkozy because, if he wants the EU’s 27 government leaders to re-select him next year, he really has no choice. At the European Parliament there have been mutterings, even among the centre-right political forces to which Barroso belongs, that the former Portuguese prime minister should not be a shoo-in for reappointment.

Some legislators hold Barroso partly responsible for the two treaty crises that have dominated his term of office - the collapse of the EU constitutional treaty after the French and Dutch referendums of 2005, and the debacle of Ireland’s rejection last month of the Lisbon treaty.

Such accusations seem wildly unfair, but that’s politics for you. Barroso’s unofficial re-election campaign began to wobble after the Irish vote, but with the timely expressions of support from Sarkozy and Berlusconi it’s back on track - though at a political price we cannot yet know or calculate.

To the 23 official languages of the European Union can be added a 24th – Silviospeak.
Yes, Berlusconi is back and once again turning heads and headlines across Europe.
The incoming Italian premier has yet to form a government but has already irked Brussels on two issues: his defence of lossmaking airline Alitalia and the nomination of a Italy’s European commissioner.
The billionaire businessman helped wreck talks to sell Alitalia to Air France/KLM by holding out the prospect of an Italian takeover. Now, if local businessmen do not stump up the cash, he could just nationalise it, he said on Tuesday.
He invented a new word – “zignare” - to describe the hectoring of the Commission, which is anxious to ensure that the airline does not receive any more government subsidies, disadvantaging its competitors.
“If they continue hectoring, we could take a decision in which Alitalia could be bought by the state - by the state railway,” Berlusconi told a news conference. “It’s a threat, not a decision.” Some suspect it may also be a joke since the railway lacks the resources to take on the airline.
Jacques Barrot, the EU transport commissioner, has expressed doubts over whether an emergency 300m government loan complied with state aid rules. The Commission on Tuesday said that nationalisation would not pose a problem as long as the state did not pay above market rates for the 50.1 per cent of Alitalia it did not own. Given the lack of private buyers a market rate could be difficult to gauge.
Italy gave Jose Manuel Barroso, Commission president, a further headache on Tuesday when Franco Frattini, its commissioner, asked for his leave of absence to be extended until May 15. He took time off to campaign with Berlusconi and is expected to become Rome’s foreign minister.
Barroso last week said that if he resigned Italy would lose the sensitive justice and home affairs post, which temporary fill-in Barrot would retain. The new Italian would take Barrot’s transport portfolio. Rocco Buttiglione, Berlusconi’s last pick, (cd xref to beeb or our story) had to withdraw in 2004 after offending the European parliament with remarks about homosexuality and the role of women.
Patience with Italy is strained in Brussels. After his time spent with Berlusconi, it might be wise for Frattini not to return.