Ian Black: Inside Europe

It is a truth not widely acknowledged, though gloomy francophones know it well, that Brussels speaks with an English accent these days. For the past three years the voice has been that of Jonathan Faull, sometime Londoner, lawyer and chief spokesman for Romano Prodi, president of the European commission. Faull stepped down last week to the regret of many of the hundreds of journalists who pack the commission's subterranean press room every day. Patient if evasive, he was professional in sometimes trying circumstances. Prodi's own communications skills remain poor, and even native Italian speakers find it hard to make sense of their gaffe-prone former prime minister.

Faull has spent 25 years at the heart of Europe, so he is a communautaire-minded fellow who can sound convincing - even when resorting to flawless French - when he insists, say, that Prodi didn't really mean that the eurozone's deficit rules are "stupid", or that war in Iraq "is not inevitable". His noon press briefings often ended with a cheerily continental "bon appetit". But he retained a sharp sense of the mood across the Channel and was regularly driven round the bend by British europhobia.

Spinning in Brussels is not the same as spinning in London: with 15 member states, 13 candidate countries and assorted American, Japanese and Arab hacks following stories from competition policy and Cypriot peace talks to the latest widgets directive, there is no uniform media culture. The commission is less disciplined than a government and finds it hard to put across a single message or "manage" the news. It is not done to slag off the member states, and Alastair Campbell-type joshing or laddish soccer references do not work when so much is lost in translation. The result is bland and defensive.

Faull is off to run the justice and home affairs directorate. But English - triumphant in an enlarged union - is here to stay. His successor is an enormous Finn called Reijo Kemppinen, who is not likely to be cracking many understated one-liners in his native tongue. "My French," laughs a sheepish Kemppinen, "is like Europe: still under construction."

War in Iraq is a dismal reminder of the EU's failure to get its act together on the world stage. So what will the chemistry be like at the Brussels economic summit on Thursday? Tony Blair always tells fellow leaders that Europe should strive to be as rich as America and stop whingeing about it. But can he and Jacques Chirac, or Jose Maria Aznar and Gerhard Schröder put aside their recent poisonous exchanges to talk about labour market reform and energy liberalisation?

Never underestimate Europeans' capacity for fiddling while Baghdad burns. Or, to put it less harshly, to recognise their limitations, fight their national corner and stay friends. Finland and Italy have just proved the point by patching up a spat over the location of the new EU food safety authority - a project born of scandals over BSE, foot and mouth and dioxin-tainted chicken. The Finns deployed smoked fish buffets in their campaign for Helsinki while Silvio Berlusconi, battling for Parma, taunted them for not knowing what prosciutto was.

The deal is that Helsinki gets the main agency and Parma a smaller branch dealing with goods marketed under traditional names such as Dortmunder beer, Ardennes butter or Kalamata olives. It's the same sort of absurd and wasteful bums-on-seats logic that brought us a European parliament divided between Brussels and Strasbourg. Berlusconi and Finland's Paavo Lipponen want a decision at the summit. Let's just hope it can be squeezed in between discussions on how to make Europe's sluggish economy more competitive and trifles like the catastrophic state of transatlantic relations or the future of Iraq.