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.

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.

Since February 1999, when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s anti-bribery convention came into force - with the aim of reducing bribery of foreign officials in international business deals - the US has brought 103 cases, Germany more than 40, France 19 and the UK just one.  So says “Global Corruption Report 2009: Corruption and the Private Sector”, a study published on Wednesday by Transparency International, the anti-corruption watchdog.

From a British point of view, the report makes uncomfortable reading.  “UK companies still have a long way to go to increase their awareness and adopt robust anti-bribery compliance programmes,” it says.

It adds that, in the light of the 2006 al-Yamamah affair,  when the authorities cited national security reasons to shut down a corruption investigation into a multibillion-pound British arms deal with Saudi Arabia, ”it is essential for the government to improve its enforcement of the [OECD] convention and bring more cases to court.  The government and companies need to raise their game.  Otherwise the United Kingdom will be perceived as a country that is not serious about fighting international corruption.”

Of course, other nations come in for a hammering in the report, too.  Take the so-called BRIC countries, supposedly jumping from strength to strength as the western world drowns in recession and debt.  Everyone from President Dmitry Medvedev to the man in the Moscow metro knows about Russia’s corruption disease, but it is particularly interesting to read what Transparency International says about the club’s other three members: “Firms from India, China and Brazil are regarded by their peers as among the most corrupt when doing business abroad.”

Has international business corruption increased since the global financial crisis exploded?  The report doesn’t really answer this important question.  But it does point to “the hazardous implications of corporate strategies that seek to exploit weak regulation, taxation and disclosure standards in some pockets of the global banking system”.  It also highlights “financial offshore structures whose lack of transparency, regulatory oversight and co-operation facilitate capital flight and tax evasion, while hindering the recovery of public assets stolen by corrupt rulers”.

Better regulation and more effective enforcement of existing rules are obviously the answer.  But let’s not forget what Tacitus, the great Roman senator and historian, said: “It’s the most corrupt state that has the most laws.”

Oh, dear, oh, dear.  The European Parliament has just released its first official estimate of voter turnout in the elections to the legislature, and it’s a bit of a shocker.  They reckon that a mere 43.01 per cent of eligible voters took the trouble to cast ballots.  If so, that would be the lowest on record and the seventh consecutive decline in turnout since direct elections were introduced to the European Union’s legislature in 1979.

I have sometimes heard it said around Brussels that the EU shouldn’t beat itself up about the low turnout, because the picture is pretty much the same for US mid-term congressional elections, in which voter participation has hovered at the 40 per cent mark for the past 30 years.  Does anyone question the legitimacy of US mid-term elections?

There are several answers to that.  The first is that, yes, some people do think the low turnout for mid-term elections in the US reflects badly on American democracy.  The second is that this isn’t the whole story in the US, because voter turnout in presidential elections has recently been on the rise.  The third is that the EU should stop wasting time on arbitrary comparisons with other countries and concentrate on what action it should take to boost the legitimacy of the European Parliament, its only directly elected institution.

For, in contrast to Congress, the EU assembly does not operate like a national legislature and has never earned a place in the hearts and minds of European citizens.  Giving it more and more powers has, paradoxically, served to distance the parliament even further from the people, because it has caused more and more of the legislature’s real work to be done in committees, where television cameras disdain to go.

Meanwhile, the parliament’s plenary sessions, which are televised, can be excruciatingly painful to watch because they almost never play host to anything resembling an authentic, passionate political debate.

Every five years, well-meaning EU policymakers wring their hands in anguish over yet another fall in turnout in elections to the parliament.  Something must and will be done next time, they insist.  This year, to a certain extent, something was done: YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, MTV and God knows what else were summoned into action to bring out the vote.

What will they think of in 2014?

A new website, http://www.votewatch.eu/, was launched this week with the noble aim of improving transparency in the European Union affairs’s and perhaps even raising the quality of EU public debate. Its main achievement is that, for the first time, it makes the voting records of members of the European Parliament available online. Later this year or early in 2010, the website will be expanded to include coverage of votes in the EU’s Council of Ministers, which groups the 27 member-states’ governments.

In a sense, it’s surprising that it’s taken so long for an initiative like this to get going. In the US, the voting records of congressmen are a key issue at election time. They are subjected to relentless scrutiny by all sorts of interest groups and activists as well as academics and other impartial analysts.

In the European Parliament - which is the EU’s only directly elected institution and which has steadily increased its powers over the past 20 years - I doubt that more than a handful of the most dedicated specialists could tell you how legislators have voted since the last EU-wide election in 2004. It is yet another example of how, overall, the quality of democracy is substantially higher in the US than in Europe.

Yet it would be unfair to call the European Parliament a secretive institution. Details about the assembly’s votes are faithfully recorded on its website. If you are a citizen of a EU country and want to know how your MEP has been voting, there’s nothing to stop you finding out.

However, as Simon Hix and Sara Hagemann, the founders of www.votewatch.eu, point out, it has always been exceptionally difficult for an average citizen to make sense of broader trends in the European Parliament. How often do MEPs of a particular nationality vote with each other, regardless of their political affiliation? How often do they put cross-national party allegiances above national solidarity? How often does a certain notorious minority of them even show up to do a day’s work?

As ever, reality intrudes. When I was with Hix and Hagemann at the website’s launch in Brussels on Monday, a questioner in the audience asked if their initiative was likely to encourage higher participation in the forthcoming European Parliament elections on June 4-7.

The answer? Sadly, but predictably, a flat “No”.

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?