When Chou En-Lai was asked about the long-term impact of the French revolution, he famously replied: “It’s too soon to tell.” That sort of lofty vagueness can earn you a reputation for great wisdom if you happen to be a Chinese revolutionary leader. But for a journalist to adopt a similar approach would be professional suicide – rushing to judgment is all part of the job.

So, in that spirit, my offering this week is a shortlist of the five most significant events of 2006. Here they are, in chronological order.

January: Russia blocks gas supplies to Ukraine. A cut-off of energy supplies between two neighbouring countries, which lasted just a couple of days, could have been trivial. But Russia’s decision to turn off the taps to Ukraine marked the moment at which western Europeans began to feel directly threatened by developments inside Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The cut-off temporarily affected supplies to western Europe. That underlined both the European Union’s growing dependence on Russian energy and Russia’s willingness to use energy as a political weapon.

This is an extract from Gideon’s regular FT column. You can read the remainder here, or comment below.

Finland’s six-month presidency of the European Union has been pretty unremarkable in most ways. But I will miss Erkki Tuomioja, the Finnish foreign minister – who has been thrust into the spotlight as the chairman of all the EU’s foreign policy deliberations over the past six months.

I first came across him when I was doing a TV interview outside an EU summit a couple of years ago. As I was standing on the BBC’s gantry, I noticed an unkempt figure, with a straggly beard, a rucksack and a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament badge in his lapel. I was a little alarmed by this, and was hoping that somebody from security would turn up and move him on. But then it turned out that he was the other guest – and, in fact, Finland’s foreign minister. He has made a striking chairman of the EU’s foreign affairs council.

As for the European summit, which is the nominal reason for my presence in Brussels. It’s a bits-and-pieces occasion. The EU has managed to avert a major crisis over Turkey’s bid to join the EU, by cooking up one of its traditional half-baked compromises, which successfully pushes the problem a few months down the road. There is a bit of discussion about the Balkan countries’ prospects of joining the EU – not too great, in the medium-term at least. And a half-hearted row about what the EU should do about Russia banning Polish food imports.

The news that David Duke has turned up in Tehran to speak at the Holocaust denial conference, brings back fond(ish) memories of interviewing the former KKK leader, when his political career was really on a tear in Louisiana in 1990. It is startling to remember that – in that year – Duke got 43 per cent of the vote in the Senatorial race.

I did a formal interview with a rather evasive Duke in the garden of his house in New Orleans. My main memory of this was his rather peculiar appearance: following recent plastic surgery – he had very tight skin, highlighted hair and a very prominent chin. (He had recently had chin implants).

I then had a much more interesting conversation with Duke’s campaign manager, who gave me a lift to a campaign rally – somewhere out in the state’s backwoods. It was a long drive and the manager (I’ve forgotten his name) had a large gun on the floor of his pick-up truck, which kept sliding around beneath my feet.

It is somehow fitting that Jeane Kirkpatrick and Augusto Pinochet should die within a week of each other. For it was Kirkpatrick who did most to provide an intellectual justification for American tolerance for Latin American dictators, like Pinochet.

By making a now famous distinction between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” regimes, Kirkpatrick sought to defeat the idea that there was a “moral equivalence” between American support for right-wing dictators and Soviet support for their own client regimes. The general idea was that authoritarian regimes were less awful than the totalitarian variety – because they allowed more space for civil society and free markets and were, partly as a result, much more likely eventually to give way to democracy. The fact that the Pinochet regime did eventually give way to a restoration of democracy in Chile was hailed by some as a perfect illustration of the Kirkpatrick thesis.

But the fact that the death of Pinochet has provoked some bitterly divided reactions in the west, is a reminder that his name can still revive memories of the political battles of the Cold War. For some on the right in Britain, America and parts of Europe, the Pinochet regime had a lot to be said for it. Not only did it prevent Chile “going communist”, it also served as a testing ground for important free-market economic reforms – such as the privatisation of pensions. The fact that Chile today is both democratic and more prosperous than the Latin American average is used to illustrate the argument that a “Pinochet period” might be necessary in some countries. I’ve heard that argument made by Thatcherites, by American right-wingers and even (oddly enough) by officials in Singapore.