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 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.

Who will be the next European Commission president? Until recently, José Manuel Barroso looked comfortably placed to secure reappointment for a second five-year term at a summit of EU leaders in June. Now the picture is not so clear.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy put the cat among the pigeons on Sunday when he refused to reaffirm the support for Barroso’s candidacy that he had offered during France’s spell last year in the European Union’s rotating presidency. “I like Mr Barroso a lot, I’ve enjoyed working with him, I have confidence in him,” Sarkozy said, his words sounding ever more hollow the longer his sentence stretched on.

Sarkozy suggested it might be best to wait until Ireland has held its second referendum on the EU’s Lisbon treaty - perhaps in October - before choosing the next Commission president. For the pro-Barroso camp, this proposal was out of order. EU leaders had decided at a summit last December that they would select the next Commission chief in June.  If every leader went round disregarding things that have already been agreed, where would the EU be?

It’s doubtful that such arguments cut much ice with Sarkozy. His eyes are fixed on June’s European Parliament elections. His socialist and centrist opponents will try to paint him as being in the same “neo-liberal” economic policy camp as Barroso. It’s quite hilarious, really. Viewed from Brussels, Sarkozy looks nothing like a neo-liberal, but rather like a classic French dirigiste.

Be that as it may, Sarkozy doesn’t want to be identified with an economic philosophy that is seen in France as having brought the world economy to its knees. For French electoral purposes, this philosophy is symbolised by Barroso.

Almost certainly, however, there is another reason for Sarkozy’s doubts about Barroso. The French president thinks the world economic turmoil is an epoch-changing event, one that will bury a certain type of capitalism forever, and one that demands the most creative thinking and vigorous action possible in response. He thinks Barroso and the European Commission in general are missing the point and are haplessly fighting yesterday’s battles.

Perhaps Sarkozy has a point. But if so, which European politician does he think has got the vision, dynamism and courage to do the job? Or would he, in fact, prefer a tame Commission president, who meekly took instructions from a certain visionary, dynamic and courageous leader in the Elysée Palace?

Apart from all their summits on the recession and financial crisis, European Union leaders are planning to get together in Prague on May 7 to launch something called the “Eastern Partnership”. This is an initiative designed to draw six post-Soviet states - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine - closer to the EU, without holding out an explicit promise of membership at some future date.

Let’s hope that fate treats the Eastern Partnership more kindly than it has done the EU’s Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), a similar initiative for the bloc’s southern neighbours. This project, the brainchild of French President NIcolas Sarkozy, was launched in Paris to great fanfare in July. Then it nose-dived in January when the Gaza war broke out.

Libya, never an enthusiastic supporter of the UfM in the first place, said scathingly that the project was “a motionless corpse” and “the time-wasting, play-acting and ridiculous spectacles must end”. Of course, Libya doesn’t speak for everyone in north Africa and the Middle East. But there can be no doubt that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a curse on the UfM.

As for the Eastern Partnership, it seems another example of how the EU often has its heart in the right place, while lacking the power, conceptual vision and unity of purpose to do what it aspires to do. If the partnership had been in place a year ago, it wouldn’t have done much to affect the course of last August’s Russian-Georgian war, or January’s Russian-Ukrainian gas crisis, or Ukraine’s present economic meltdown.

All six states covered by the Eastern Partnership exist in the shadow of Russia, some more comfortably than others. The EU’s offer of free trade deals, visa facilitation arrangements and seminars to improve understanding of EU laws simply does not match the military, political and economic influence that Russia can wield in the region. After all, one of the favoured six - Georgia - was in effect partitioned by Russia a mere six months ago, in spite of all the EU’s protests, after Moscow’s recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

That doesn’t mean the EU should remain inactive. But the Eastern Partnership’s credibility isn’t helped by the open secret that Poland and Sweden proposed the initiative last year largely to counter-balance Sarkozy’s UfM.

However, perhaps the most glaring weakness of the UfM and the Eastern Partnership is that the EU, at the insistence of its budget-conscious governments, is committing only limited funds to both projects. This hasn’t gone unnoticed in the places where it matters. “They have one common problem - they don’t have dedicated finances and support. Whatever isn’t supported by a line in the budget usually doesn’t fly very high,” one interested observer said serenely last week.

Who was he? Vladimir Chizhov, Russia’s ambassador to the EU in Brussels.

The bad feeling between France and the Czech Republic is finally out there for everyone to see. For anyone who likes their European Union united, it is not a pretty sight.

Suspicion was in the air even before the Czechs took over the EU’s rotating presidency from France on January 1. The French doubted that the Czechs would be up to the job. The Czechs sensed that President Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to stay in the spotlight even after the end of France’s six-month EU presidency. “Old Europe” was in the red corner, “new Europe” was in the blue, and Round One was about to start.

Since last week, things have gone from bad to worse. Sarkozy infuriated Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek by suggesting in a television interview that French car companies should move their production back to France from eastern Europe in return for receiving French government tax breaks.

Topolanek responded by telling the Czech newspaper Hospodarske Noviny, in an interview published on Monday, that Sarkozy’s remarks were “unbelievable” and capable of wrecking the Czech government’s efforts to secure parliamentary approval of the EU’s Lisbon treaty.

Later on Monday, France officially announced a €6bn aid plan for the French car industry. But the details had already been widely leaked. Topolanek got in first by announcing in Prague that he intended to summon EU leaders to Brussels in late February for an emergency summit on how to respond to the financial crisis and recession. He specifically cited what he called Sarkozy’s “protectionist steps and statements” as the reason why a summit was necessary.

The abyss of EU disunity was reached later still on Monday when the Elysée palace published a letter on its website from Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel. This letter proposed a summit of exactly the kind that Topolanek had just announced. Tellingly, it was addressed to Topolanek (and European Commission president José Manuel Barroso) but made no mention of the Czech leader’s initiative!

The truth is that the French are not alone in thinking that the Czech EU presidency isn’t going well. There is a widespread view in western European capitals that the Czechs are not giving a decisive lead on the financial crisis. Many think the Czechs are too prone to express their own opinions, rather than act as the impartial co-ordinator of 27 governments’ views.

But the Czechs think Sarkozy and the French government never gave them a fair chance in the first place. They think his remarks on the car industry were outrageously over the top and that his economic nationalism is dangerous for the EU.

Doubtless the row will be patched up eventually. But when you consider what’s at stake in terms of fighting the financial crisis and recession, this is not the EU’s finest hour.

José Manuel Barroso’s campaign for a second term as European Commission president is coming along nicely. Last week he secured a public endorsement for the first time from Gordon Brown, the UK premier.

Of course, it’s hardly a campaign in the normal democratic sense. European voters aren’t directly involved. The vast majority probably has no idea what’s going on. The selection of the Commission president, one of Europe’s most powerful jobs, rests with the 27 leaders of the European Union’s member-states.

This is an electorate so small that it rivals those obscure English university clubs whose members are said to launch ritual attacks on foxes with champagne bottles. Even the body that chooses the pope, which is drawn from the Roman Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals, is at present more than four times bigger, with almost 120 cardinals aged under 80 and eligible to vote.

Still, this is the way Europe operates, it’s written into the EU’s rules, and very few leaders seem inclined to change it. You can’t blame Barroso for working the system as he finds it.

And there can be no doubt that he is working it very cleverly. Brown likes Barroso not only for his liberal economic instincts, but because he thinks the centre-right former Portuguese prime minister would strike up a good relationship with President Barack Obama - an important consideration for Europe in the early months of the new US administration.

With Brown in the bag, you may ask, how can Barroso fail to get a second five-year term? For Barroso already has the public backing of centre-right heavyweights such as France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Other centre-right leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s long-serving prime minister, have also signalled their support, as has Hans-Gert Pöttering, president of the European Parliament.

On the left, meanwhile, Portugal’s José Sócrates and Spain’s José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero are behind Barroso. So, too, is Matti Vanhanen, Finland’s centrist prime minister.

Doubtless this explains why Martin Schultz, the German leader of the European Parliament’s socialist group, says of Barroso: “In terms of his politics, he is a very vague person. One day he is left-wing, the other he is liberal, the next he is conservative. We want a socialist at the head of the Commission, but unfortunately it is the European Council [of national leaders] that nominates.”

But perhaps European public opinion may exert some influence on the process, after all. The European Parliament is up for re-election in June, and if centre-left and liberal parties across Europe were to inflict a heavy defeat on the centre-right - at present, the largest group in the legislature - then it is conceivable that pressure would grow to replace Barroso with a nominee from the political family that had triumphed at the polls.

After all, the man or woman picked by EU national leaders as Commission president must still win approval from the European Parliament in a vote of confidence. And EU leaders are anxious to settle the matter of who should run the Commission as quickly as possible - in other words, at a summit scheduled for June 18-19. If the left had just scored a big election victory, the legislature might not be in the mood to offer a tame endorsement of Barroso’s re-nomination.

Knowing how the EU works, however, one can imagine a more likely scenario: a compromise under which Barroso is re-appointed, but he agrees, when putting together his new Commission, to give it a political balance that reflects the European Parliament election results.

It’s not exactly democracy as practised in the recent US presidential election campaign, primaries and all. But it’s very, very European.

If you were to give Nicolas Sarkozy the benefit of the doubt, you would say that one reason for his current diplomatic foray into the Middle East is his deeply held belief that the European Union needs strong, energetic, high-profile leadership to make its influence count in the world.

If you were to take a more sceptical view, you would say that Sarkozy enjoyed running France’s six-month EU presidency so much that, when it came to an end on December 31, he simply couldn’t bring himself to move out of the spotlight.

For the Czech Republic, which took over the EU presidency a week ago, the temptation to cough politely and say to Sarkozy, “Excuse me, pal, it’s our turn now”, must be strong. After all, Sarkozy’s trip to the Middle East is likely to be interpreted in many parts of the world as a signal that the Czechs are not to be taken too seriously when it comes to negotiating and speaking on the EU’s behalf.  

But Czech feathers are not the only ones ruffled by the French president’s trip. His visit to the Middle East has coincided with one from an EU delegation led by Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech foreign minister, and including Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the bloc’s external relations commissioner.

How seriously are Solana and Ferrero-Waldner, as the institutional expressions of EU foreign policy, going to be taken while Sarkozy is on his travels? One or two other large EU countries, such as Germany and Italy, are getting worried that Sarkozy, in his desire to shake the bloc out of its allegedly lethargic ways, risks shaking it up to the point of damaging its institutions.

One Sarkozy-designed institution that is unlikely to prosper as a result of the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is the EU’s new Union for the Mediterranean, which the French president launched last July. This structure groups all 27 EU states as well as the bloc’s neighbours in the Balkans, north Africa and the Middle East, including Israel. It was always going to be vulnerable to the first outbreak of trouble over the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

With Israel not proving particularly receptive at the moment to Sarkozy’s call for a ceasefire in Gaza, it may not be long before we know just how serious the damage to the Union for the Mediterranean will be.

According to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, last weekend’s G20 summit was a big success. “Never before have Anglo-Saxons agreed to subject credit ratings agencies to oversight and regulation,” he declared.

You know what, he’s right. Check out the ‘Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum’, the 8th century AD masterpiece by the Venerable Bede. This greatest of all Anglo-Saxon chroniclers had nothing to say about credit ratings agencies, and not just because he wrote in Latin.

Almost every day, all over the European media, one comes across the term ”Anglo-Saxons”. It is usually intended to mean Brits and Americans, with perhaps a glance in the direction of Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders.

To my mind, the term carries a deeply unpleasant undertone of invoking alleged racial origin to define nationality and establish a stereotype of national character. Weren’t Europeans supposed to have stopped doing things like that after the destruction of Nazism? Moreover, the term is, of course, utterly inaccurate.

After all, whom did American voters just elect as their next president? A direct descendant of the Venerable Bede? (A Belgian newspaper reported two days after Barack Obama’s victory that genealogical researchers had discovered he was 1 per cent Belgian. But that’s another story.)

The millions of African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians and many others who live in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles would be flabbergasted, and possibly rather amused, to hear that in Europe they are categorised as Anglo-Saxon. So would all sorts of people in Montreal, Toronto and Sydney.

It goes for the UK, too. Huge numbers of Londoners are no more Anglo-Saxon than my cats. Look at the family tree of any Englishman - which is what is generally meant when “Anglo-Saxon” is applied in a British context - and you will soon discover an Irish father-in-law here, a Scottish aunt there, a Polish or Indian grandmother somewhere else.

So, speaking as someone with three half-Japanese nephews, two of whom recently played in the famous Eton v Harrow annual cricket match, I say - it’s time to stop calling us, or them, Anglo-Saxons!