For those of you who missed Nicolas Sarkozy’s appearance last week at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, there are always YouTube and Dailymotion. In one revealing clip, the unforgettable 1968 student rebel Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a Green MEP, is shown berating the French president for his decision to attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

The tieless, slightly crumpled Cohn-Bendit waves his arms about, jabs his fingers and slices his hands through the air. Sarkozy, immaculate in a dark suit, remains seated, listening carefully, his fingers caressing a pen.

In response to Cohn-Bendit’s accusation that he has gone soft on China over human rights, Sarkozy starts by teasing his opponent: “Mr Cohn-Bendit, I know how generous you are. You’ve never been stingy with advice, especially advice for me.” Then the president makes the killer point: “You can’t boycott a quarter of humanity.”

It is a startling thought that Cohn-Bendit, at the age of 63, is 10 years older than Sarkozy and worse dressed. But the real lesson from last Thursday’s political theatre is that Sarkozy is capable of sheer brilliance under pressure.

He had just flown halfway round the world from the G8 summit in Japan, but in Strasbourg he delivered a long speech - having discarded his prepared text - and then answered questions from various MEPs for well over three hours. By the end, Hans-Gert Pöttering, the European Parliament president, wasn’t the only legislator eating out of Sarkozy’s hand.

One senior French official told Sarkozy it was his most impressive performance since he won the French presidency in May 2007. Of course, that was three days before he hosted more than 40 European, North African and Middle Eastern leaders in Paris at a summit that launched a new platform for co-operation in the Mediterranean region. 

That meeting, fraught with risks, went pretty well, too. After a wobble at the start of France’s six-month EU presidency, when he went too far in attacking the European Central Bank and the European Commission’s trade policies, Sarkozy is getting attention for the right reasons. 

Not long ago, I spent some time with a Romanian socialist member of the European Parliament called Adrian Severin. He is an impressive figure. He is not only a former Romanian foreign minister (1996-97) but also - according to his official CV - the proud recipient of the “Man of the 20th Century Award”. This, in case you didn’t know, is a distinction conferred by the International Biographical Centre, which is something based in the English university city of Cambridge.

Severin was talking to me just after Irish voters said No to the European Union’s Lisbon treaty in their June 12 referendum. What he said has stuck in my mind ever since. “There are countries without which the EU cannot function, and countries without which it can,” he pronounced.

For example, he went on, the EU could do without Ireland, but not without France and the Netherlands (which, you’ll remember, voted No to the EU’s now abandoned constitutional treaty in 2005).  And what was the difference between Ireland and the Netherlands? I asked. “Geography,” Severin replied.

I suppose he meant that Ireland is on the periphery of Europe and the Netherlands is, well, a bit closer to the centre. Anyway, he seemed very keen to teach the Irish a lesson or two about what it means to be a good European.

What about Romania itself, though? Is Romania, which joined the EU in January 2007, one of those countries the EU can do without, or cannot do without?

On July 23 we may get some answers to that question. That is the day when the European Commission is due to publish its long-awaited report into Romania’s efforts to meet EU standards on judicial reform and rooting out corruption in public life.

Last November Willem de Pauw, a Belgian prosecutor and adviser to the EU on Romanian affairs, wrote a report (dug up by the Economist magazine) that said: “Instead of progress in the fight against high-level corruption, Romania is presently regressing on all fronts in the fight against corruption.” De Pauw spoke of “the intense resistance of practically the whole political class of Romania against the anti-corruption effort”.

Next time Severin goes to Dublin and tells the Irish they’re a country the EU can do without, he might like to take along a copy of Willem de Pauw’s report.

Just read the latest version of Sarko’s “European pact on immigration“.

To recap, this is his plan for European countries to bring their immigration policies closer together. EU interior ministers broadly backed the measure at their meeting in Cannes on Monday.

But it’s hard to see how the pact - which has already been watered down - will actually change things.

At heart, the plan (which isn’t legally binding)  calls for improved frontier controls, effective removal of illegal entrants and better organisation of legal immigration. Sure - but the EU has said this sort of stuff on multiple occasions.

Yes, the union has made strides on common rules, for example abandoning internal border controls across much of Europe and agreeing to harmonise asylum standards.

Yet progress on unified immigration policies is often slow and becomes mired in spats between member states. 

Immigration is one of the most nebulous topics here in Europeville, with differences in countries’ geographic, demographic and economic situations making agreement on common rules tricky, to say the least.

These factors, and varying traditions and political stances towards immigration, complicate matters yet further.  For example, the EU has tried for ages to agree on a “bluecard” scheme to attract skilled workers, but has yet to succeed.

Sarko owes his election victory last year in part to his tough stance on immigration. However, France’s own domestic proposal to establish immigration quotas is in disarray after an independent commission set up to look at the question concluded that they were unworkable.

And the French president may yet find that progress on his goals for Europe is slower and more cloudy than hoped.

Question: What do the European Central Bank, EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson, French army commanders, French public television broadcasters, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia and Snagglepuss the Mountain Lion have in common? Answer: they have all come under withering attack in the past week or two from President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.

Actually, Snagglepuss hasn’t, but Sarkozy has sprayed his ammunition so far and wide that it was probably a close-run thing. It would be easy to dismiss the presidential antics - imagine Silvio Berlusconi on speed and you are halfway there - as a huge embarrassment for France just as it started its six-month European Union presidency on July 1. But I reckon there is a great deal of method in Sarkozy’s madness.

What I suspect he is up to is seeking to exploit a weakness in the human brain known to specialists as “source amnesia”. As Professor Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt explained in a recent article, we store facts first in the hippocampus, a finger-shaped structure deep in the brain and then, after much re-storing and reprocessing, transfer them to the cerebral cortex. But after a while, facts are separated from the context in which we learned them. It becomes hard for us to remember whether certain statements are true. Even things we once knew to be lies can be erroneously recalled, months later, as truths.

I am not saying Sarkozy is deliberately feeding lies to the European public. But if you consider his spirited attacks this week on the ECB’s monetary policy and Mandelson’s tactics in the Doha world trade talks, he is surely calculating that if you repeat something long enough and loudly enough, a good number of people will start believing you, even if at first they disagreed.

Whether this will improve Sarkozy’s chances of stopping a rise in ECB interest rates or getting a better deal for French farmers in the Doha round remains to be seen. Not for the moment, it would seem.

Pierre-Luc Séguillon, the veteran French political journalist, puts it neatly. He says “President Bling-Bling”, the Sarkozy of celebrity friendships, large wristwatches, fancy sunglasses and Carla Bruni, has morphed into “President Biff-Baff”, Sarkozy the confrontational politician unafraid to say the unsayable. As for the rest of Europe’s leaders, some are no doubt praying that German chancellor Angela Merkel will have a quiet word in his ear to calm him down.

An EU survey sheds more light on the decisive “no” vote in Ireland’s referendum on the union’s Lisbon reform treaty.

The study shows that those who voted against did so because of; a lack of knowledge of the treaty; a desire to protect Irish identity and safeguard neutrality; a lack of trust in politicians; the potential loss of a permanent commissioner in Brussels and to protect the tax system.

The word “protection” stands out here. How deep is the European public’s suspicion that Brussels encroaches too far into everyday life?

Consider some of the European Commission’s recent events. There’s bread and butter work such as reporting on public finances and pursuing postal market liberalisation.

But then there are softer activities - such as efforts to increase children’s fruit and veg intake, measures highlighting diversity - which you’d think would be left solely to member states.

Is this institutional creep? Could Brussels spend its time better on other matters?

Voters can throw out their government if they feel that it has gone too far. Give them a referendum on an EU topic and they’re also likely to make plain their irritation with Brussels. 

For a good chuckle, check out the Wikipedia entry of Hans-Gert Pöttering, the European Parliament’s president. Point No.3, headlined “Commission Speculation”, says there are rumours that Pöttering will be Germany’s next member of the European Commission, succeeding Günter Verheugen.

The entry states: “It is widely known that Angela Merkel wants to nominate a Christian Democrat as Commissioner designate for the next Commission mandate 2009-2014 and Pöttering is seen by many as a strong and properly qualificated contestant for the job.”

Hmm. Let’s have another look at that. “Properly qualificated”? If I were a betting man, I’d say that boo-boo represented a German-speaker’s attempt at translating “qualifiziert” (”qualified”). Which raises the fascinating question of who wrote or edited the Wikipedia entry.

Editing your Wikipedia profile, or the profile of your boss, your company, your friend or your political hero, is not unknown. Changes to Richard Nixon’s profile have been traced to the computers of CIA staff. Changes to entries about Roman Catholic saints have been traced to Vatican computers.

But the European Parliament, majestic and terrifying though it no doubt is, isn’t the CIA or the Vatican. And naturally, I have no idea who wrote or edited Pöttering’s Wikipedia profile.

But two things are clear. First, Pöttering will be out of his present job after the next European Parliament elections in June 2009. Second, no one close to Merkel seriously thinks she wants to make Pöttering Germany’s next EU commissioner.

All of which makes me wonder who is promoting Pöttering’s candidacy on the Wikipedia website. But the truth is I’m not properly qualificated to judge.

With the European Union’s Lisbon treaty in deep trouble, some of the finest minds in Brussels are at work devising solutions to problems of which the general European public is wholly unaware. For example, the size and composition of the European Commission.

If the Lisbon treaty doesn’t come into force next year, the next Commission will have to be selected according to rules set out in the EU’s 2003 treaty of Nice. These state that when the EU has grown to include 27 countries (which it now has), the number of commissioners should be “less than the number of member-states”.

But Nice does not say how EU governments are to achieve the reduction. In the light of Ireland’s No to Lisbon, this gives ample scope for political and bureaucratic deal-making over coming months.

Fear of losing their commissioner played a part in the Irish voters’ rejection of Lisbon, but few seemed to understand that Ireland would be worse off under Nice. Lisbon contained a provision stating that, if all member-states agreed, they could abandon the commitment to reducing the Commission’s size and keep one commissioner per member-state. Before the Irish vote, many in Brussels had quietly assumed this was exactly what would happen after Lisbon took effect. By contrast, Nice has no such provision.

So if the Nice treaty remains in force next year, what can be done? One member-state has already proposed an answer. Cut the Commission in size, as Nice stipulates, but only from 27 to 26 members. Let the country which loses its commissioner take the job of High Representative for foreign policy (at present, Javier Solana of Spain). Let him or her attend Commission meetings. Hey presto! Everyone’s still in the room.

You have to admit, it’s an ingenious proposal. In fact, it’s so ingenious that it almost makes you ask, “Why bother with Lisbon, after all?” Which, of course, cannot possibly have been the question at the back of the mind of the country which floated the proposal … the UK!  

According to participants at the EU’s post-Irish referendum summit in Brussels, the atmosphere among the 27 national leaders is not one of crisis or despair, but resignation and a sense of having been there and done all this before - i.e., after the French and Dutch threw out the old constitutional treaty in 2005.

However, it’s also clear there are more than a few mutual recriminations going on in the corridors of the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels. “It’s what I’d call the ‘day after effect’,” says one top-level EU official, referring to last week’s Irish rejection of the Lisbon treaty.

If Ireland is a problem, what does that make the Czech Republic? The Czechs have been resisting efforts to include a line in the final summit communiqué that would emphasise the EU’s efforts to go ahead with national ratifications of the treaty in spite of the Irish No. This is irritating some delegations, who think the Czechs are riding on the coat-tails of the Irish rather than doing the decent thing - or the courageous thing - and joining the rest of the EU in defending the Lisbon treaty.

The situation at present is that the Czech Senate (upper house of parliament) has sent the Lisbon treaty to the nation’s constitutional court for scrutiny. President Vaclav Klaus has declared the treaty dead - the only EU head of state to go so far. The Irish No, meanwhile, has emboldened critics of the treaty in the ruling Civic Democrat party, whose hold on power is not particularly strong. All of which makes Czech ratification of Lisbon far from a done deal.

Mirek Topolanek, the Czech prime minister, is giving private assurances that his government will ratify Lisbon. But when Czech officials appear in front of TV cameras at the summit, they are saying something subtly different. For example, Alexandr Vondra, the Czech minister for European affairs, says the Lisbon treaty is “in the parking lot” and a jolly good thing, too. ”Don’t press us. Any pressure could be counter-productive,” Vondra warns.

In the end, the Czechs may have to buckle. They are due to take over the EU’s rotating presidency next January, and it would create a disastrous impression if, when they move into the hot seat, they were seen as bad team players.

But if I were a betting man, I would not expect the Czechs to have ratified Lisbon by the EU’s next summit on October 15-16.

According to the memorable aphorism of Robert Kagan, the conservative US scholar, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus. But when President George W. Bush was in Europe last week and heard about Ireland’s rejection of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty in a referendum, it must have seemed to the outgoing president that Europeans are so incapable of getting their act together that they’re really from Pluto - which astronomers no longer classify as a planet.

The same thought may cross the mind of President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia when EU leaders arrive next week in the western Siberian city of Khanty-Mansiysk for an EU-Russia summit. Of course, it’s possible Medvedev will be rather more exercised about the revelation that the US has been thinking about putting part of its proposed missile defence system in Lithuania - which is precisely the sort of things that Martians, rather than Plutonians, do. 

Today the leaders of the EU’s 27 member-states are rolling into Brussels for a summit whose main theme, before the crisis erupted over the Lisbon treaty, was supposed to be a robust European response to soaring fuel and food prices. Of course, there isn’t much the EU can do on that front, either, because in the end it’s mostly a question of world demand and supply.

Still, I don’t buy the oft-heard argument that EU leaders are totally out of touch with public opinion. Take last Monday’s meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg. Much breast-beating went on there about whether the Irish referendum result showed that the EU was too technocratic and too elitist. According to two people who attended the discussions, one foreign minister - Radek Sikorski of Poland - even burst out: “Why don’t we write treaties that even we in this room can understand?”

A question to shake up any solar system!  

In the Orwellian world of the European Union, no does not really mean no, a treaty pronounced dead by popular vote is still alive and the bloc’s parliament rejects the popular vote as undemocratic.

Ireland may have rejected the Lisbon treaty, which requires the approval of all 27 member states to become law, but the EU’s leaders have vowed to press ahead with ratification.

Perhaps most baffling of all is the European parliament’s reaction. The speaker of the people’s elected assembly, Hans-Gert Pottering, said: “It is of course a great disappointment for all those who wanted to achieve greater democracy, greater political effectiveness and greater clarity and transparency in decision-making in the European Union that the majority of the Irish could not be convinced of the need for these reforms of the European Union.”

I’ll let you read that again. Yes, these citizens were wrong. Through exercising their democratic right to vote they have delivered a blow to democracy. What Pottering really means, and he has a point, is they have delivered a blow to the expansion of the powers of the parliament. It was the biggest potential winner of this reform.

At the moment around two-thirds of legislation has to win the approval of parliament. Under the treaty it would get new powers over farm policy, trade, justice and other areas. This could be a good thing but the problem is that too often the 785 MEPs, unheralded in their own countries and dependent on party patronage for their seats, get captured by special interests.

Parliament’s agriculture committee features more farmers than a barn dance. Trade debates tend to be dominated by members briefed by NGOs. Things are improving slowly, with the parliament fighting stirring battles on civil liberties issues and holding member states to their promises on environment and energy. Yet they will not improve fast as long as the people do not care. The next elections in 2009 could see turnout across the bloc fall below 50 per cent.

The assembly, which has already adopted the trappings of the dead constitution such as playing the Ode to Joy to visiting heads of state, threw its usual fit of pique when meeting on Monday in Strasbourg. It was “inconceivable” that the EU could expand further without reform, it said. In other words, what was good enough for those who got in early is not good enough for the latecomers: blackmail.

Paul Van Buitenen, the whistleblowing auditor whose revelations of corruption and nepotism brought down the commission in 1999 and who is now an MEP, sums up the dilemma well.
 
The EU has become frozen in transition from national states to a supranational system. National parliaments now mostly implement rules decided in Brussels yet they are where most citizens believe power lies and where most media attention is focused. The Brussels institutions make most of the laws but nobody pays them much attention.

 “We cannot continue with this halfway house. Either we move forward to having a proper European parliament with real powers to hold the executive to account. Or we return power to national parliaments and continue as separate nation states,” he told me recently.

The Irish seem to have opted for the latter. Pottering has not: “We must now calmly reflect on how to proceed. The reform of the European Union is important for citizens, for democracy and transparency.  Therefore I hope that it will be possible to find a solution so that reforms can come into force by the time of the European elections in June 2009,” he said.

Let’s have a vote on it.

Talking of votes, the house will vote on Wednesday on whether to approve Jacques Barrot’s move from transport to justice commissioner and Antonio Tajani of Italy as his replacement.

It should go reasonably smoothly. Indeed, there could barely have been a dry eye in the civil liberties committee on Monday night at Barrot’s hearing. “As a child I was impressed by Robert Schuman, who was a friend of my father, while my adult years have been marked by all the struggles to advance the European project,” he intoned.