LONDON: To watch President George W. Bush in Brussels last week was to see how far Europe has to go if it wants to be taken seriously in the world. On the one side, you had Caesar.

On the other, the prime minister of Luxembourg. And of Belgium. And the president of the European commission. And the European Union's high representative for foreign policy.

And the commissioners for external relations and trade. And dozens of other heads of national governments, different European institutions and departments, all falling over each other to bask in the sunshine of that imperial presence they so often privately deplore.

"If ridicule could kill, there would be bodies piling up in the streets in Brussels," said the Luxembourg Prime Minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, who was partly responsible for organizing the reception of the US president because the rotating presidency of the EU is held by Luxembourg ("area ... slightly smaller than Rhode Island," says the CIA World Fact book). And he promises us an amusing passage in his memoirs on those intra-European squabbles to gain "face time" with the emperor.

Meanwhile, there was Caesar. Two hours before his keynote speech began, we filed through a shabby back entrance into the Concert Noble, a grand ballroom with crimson drapes, where the Belgian aristocracy still meet once a year for a bal de la noblesse.

Gradually the front rows filled with ambassadors and minor dignitaries of the outer empire. A few American tribunes, prefects and great merchants were in evidence. A little later came the proconsuls, men of imperial gravitas, stately courtesy and crisp, regulation haircuts. All wore the Washingtonian toga: sober, dark suit and white shirt.

After a long wait, it was the time of the consuls and high imperial officials, including Condoleezza Rice. Buzz, buzz, went the crowd. Suddenly we found ourselves rising to our feet, led by the imperial household, only to greet Caesar's wife, Laura.

A few minutes later, a voice from the loudspeakers announced: "The prime minister of Belgium ... and the president of the United States". We rose again, and there they were, the Belgian prime minister, with specs and floppy hair, loping in like some gangling, outsize schoolboy, and, flanked by his praetorian guard of secret servicemen, the US president, marching like an emperor: Tom and Jerry.

Seizing his moment in the global limelight, the Belgian prime minister welcomed President Bush to "the capital of Belgium and the capital of Europe". He adapted a remark by one of the Belgian founding fathers of the EU, Paul-Henri Spaak, to the effect that Europe consists only of small countries, "but some know it and some don't. Only a united Europe," he said, "can be a reliable partner of the United States". To walk, he concluded, we need two strong legs.

But where is the European leg? When he got to speak, after the Belgian premier's over-long introduction, President Bush laid out an ambitious agenda for what his administration is calling "transformational diplomacy".

It contained some significant elements, including the insistence on a Palestinian state with contiguous territory on the West Bank ("a state of scattered territories will not work") and placing "democratic reform" at the heart of our dialogue with Russia. Like this agenda or hate it, you sure as hell know what it is.

EUROPE'S AGENDA: Who knows what is Europe's agenda for the world? The question always attributed to Henry Kissinger - "You say Europe, but which number should I call?" - remains posed.

The baffling multiplicity of people the American president had to meet in Brussels, including heads of large-minded small countries and small-minded large countries, as well as those of competing institutional parts of the EU, not to mention Nato just up the road, shows how far we still are from an answer.

Yet despite, or perhaps even because of, the enlargement of the EU, we are moving in the right direction - both in theory and in practice. In Ukraine, the EU's designated foreign minister, Javier Solana, worked with the Polish and Lithuanian presidents, in an ad hoc trio, to help secure a peaceful outcome to the orange revolution.

In relations with Iran, three countries - France, Germany and Britain - are taking the lead, in close cooperation with Solana. There will surely be more of these improvised intra-European coalitions of the willing.

If the constitutional treaty is approved by all 25 member states, then next autumn Solana will become the EU's foreign minister, chairing the council of national foreign ministers and heading what is to be called, euphemistically, the European External Action Service.

The British, and others, did not want it to be called what it really is: a fledgling European diplomatic service. Some friends in the European institutions have been trying to find an attractive acronym to compensate for that cumbersome title. They came up with Extase (External Action Service), which evokes suitably un Eurocratic visions of ecstasy.

To get to Extase, Europe still has to go through a good deal of agony, including some in the original Greek sense of agonia, meaning struggle. The opposition is of two kinds: national and institutional.

Many member states, especially Britain and France, don't want to surrender control of foreign policy. As a result, while the constitutional treaty allows for some qualified majority voting in the council of national foreign ministers chaired by the European foreign minister, it also gives every government the right to invoke "vital and stated reasons of national policy".

It insists the matter be taken to the European Council of heads of government, where the contentious issue would have to be agreed by unanimity. Euro sceptics lobbying for a no vote in the British referendum are deliberately obscuring this point, suggesting that our foreign policy will now be made by the soulless fiat of faceless Euro crats.

Well, as an old Jewish proverb has it, a half-truth is a whole lie. But with such half-truths they may yet secure a no vote in Britain. Then it would be back to the drawing-board for a European foreign policy.

Seen from Brussels, the institutional obstacles loom almost as large. At the heart of the capital of the EU - not of Europe, as the Belgian prime minister suggested, but of the EU - two huge office blocks glare at each other across the Rue de la Loi.

They are the headquarters of the European commission, the attractively revamped Berlaymont, representing the more supra-national side of the union, and those of the council of ministers, the dismal Justus Lipsius building, representing its more inter-governmental side.

To make Extase work, officials from these two institutions will have to merge their efforts, building bridges across Law Street. If the EU's foreign policy is to have any real clout, it will also have to find ways of synchronising the most important instruments of EU-ropean power, trade policy, competition policy and enlargement, with the objectives set by member states and the European foreign minister. Boring bureaucratic stuff, but vital.

What comes out at the end will certainly not be another Caesar. The EU is not a new Roman empire; more a post-modern commonwealth. But if all goes well, the next US president may have a rather less confusing experience when he - or she - comes to visit in 2009. -Dawn \ The Guardian News Service.