Welcome to the Luxembourg presidency, the guys who gave us cheap petrol, dodgy banks and Jacques Santer. The man running the show for the next six months is Jean-Claude Juncker, the youthful, chain-smoking prime minister of Luxembourg, famously close to Chancellor Kohl.
Luxembourgers are no lapdogs, but since the middle ages they have taken orders from more powerful neighbours in France and Germany. Kohl's nickname for Juncker is "Junior," a playful reminder that when Europe's senior statesman speaks, the rest of Europe had better listen.
Junior will be judged on how he handles two issues: monetary union and enlargement. The first is straightforward: Luxembourg is the only EU member state that precisely fulfils the criteria for the single currency. The EU's plans to admit new members from the former Soviet bloc is another story.
enlargement looks great on paper. Mission for the millennium. The stuff of which heroes and history are made. Pro-expansion slogans are all over the European commission in Brussels. But there is a suspicion that Juncker is not convinced; neither are most of the 15 member states.
Juncker claims that he is chummy with most of the ten leaders of central and eastern Europe who are queuing up to join the union. He says Luxembourg (population 400,000) has no hegemonic ambitions-a laboured joke against the Germans. But are his motives really beyond reproach?
Luxembourgers fear that enlargement spells a giant leap backwards-back into the 19th century, into what AJP Taylor called the perpetual quadrille of the balance of power. This explains the merry dance over Agenda 2000, the European commission's 1,100-page blueprint for widening the union, which Santer has just presented to the European parliament.
the authors of Agenda 2000 are known inside the commission as the gang of three: Jim Cloos, Carlo Trojan and Fran?ois Lamoureux.
Cloos is a Luxembourger, a Reading University graduate who read Russian and became the bureaucratic dynamo running Jacques Santer. Trojan is a secretive Dutch-Italian who is about to be promoted to secretary general of the European commission. Lamoureux is a scheming French intellectual who once served as a hit man for Jacques Delors.
The trouble over Agenda 2000 concerns which countries should be invited to join the first wave of countries negotiating to enter the union. Cloos and Trojan favoured a shortlist of three: the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary.
Their list matched the Nato alliance's choice of new members. It also fitted Chancellor Kohl's preferences, but the Scandinavians were furious that plucky little Estonia was left out. And what about Slovenia, the pocket economic battleship steaming around the Balkans?
Kohl is in unholy alliance with the protectionist-minded French, Greeks, Italians and Spanish. They regard the prospect of Estonian accession, with all those Chicago School free-marketeers in Tallinn, with trepidation.
enter hans van den Broek, the Dutch commissioner responsible for dealing with enlargement. He had little stomach for an expansion of the EU on German terms-where the Czechs play South Korea to Germany's Japan; where the Hungarians are paid off for opening the border with Austria in 1989, trigger for the fall of the Berlin Wall; and where the Poles come into the EU on the back of German war guilt.
Ever since Hans van den Broek arrived in Brussels in 1993, he has looked like a loser. Scarred by his experience during the Bosnian war, he has spent most of his time fretting about Milosevic and Karadzic and fighting turf battles with Leon Brittan. But Hans fought for five-the Czechs, Estonians, Hungarians, Poles and Slovenians-and he won.
the last word on enlargement will rest with EU leaders, who will make their choice at a summit in December in Luxembourg under Juncker's chairmanship. Junior fancies himself as a chairman. He brokered the deal between the French and Germans over monetary union, both in Dublin and in Amsterdam (although he has since blotted his copy book with some people by telling Der Spiegel magazine that delaying the single currency is feasible).
But he has little time for Tony Blair. At their first encounter in Downing Street, Juncker laid out his agenda for the six-month presidency, stressing social policy. The son of a railway worker, Juncker takes all this stuff seriously. But Blair stunned his visitor by dismissing him as "old Labour."
