BRUSSELS: Europe’s foreign affairs threesome, Spain’s Javier Solana, Britain’s Chris Patten and Denmark’s Per Stig Moeller, are trying with fellow “quartet” members the United States, United Nations and Russia, to keep Middle East peace hopes alive, despite continuing violence and George Bush’s demand that the Palestinians must dump Yasser Arafat and undertake reforms that would challenge a stable democracy.

Confusingly, the EU’s “troika” has changed again since the quartet last convened. Solana and Patten, representing member states and the European Commission respectively, are familiar faces. Now they are joined by Moeller, foreign minister of Denmark, latest holder of the ever-rotating presidency.

In a year that has seen much agonising about Europe’s role in the world, few things are more frustrating than the complex division of powers in the realm of what the wonks call common foreign and security policy (CFSP). Very few Europeans outside Brussels have any idea how it works. Americans and others are simply baffled. It looks like staying that way.

Solana, Nato’s secretary-general during the Kosovo war, was a smart choice to be the EU’s first Mr CFSP. He answered Henry Kissinger’s question: “Who do I phone in Europe when there’s a crisis?” He still flaunts his twice-daily calls to Colin Powell. The problem is, no one in Washington listens to Powell any more. And Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t take calls from Brussels, even from Nato HQ.

Patten is currently in better shape — at least in Europe — because his forthright and articulate views on American unilateralism, the international criminal court and Iraq have made him a hate figure in the Bush White House. But he is maintaining an uncharacteristically prudent silence on the Middle East, bypassing Arafat on a planned tour of the region and hoping that the commission — the world’s third largest aid donor — can help the EU to bankroll Palestinian reform and monitor elections that might, just, revive the peace process.

The EU’s massive clout in world trade and competition policy has no equivalent when it comes to traditional diplomacy, defence and power projection. Valery Giscard D’Estaing’s convention on the future of Europe started looking at this knotty question last week, though disagreements make radical changes problematical and member states, which still call the shots, unlikely to accept them anyway.

Patten is honest enough to insist, against his own institutional interest, that foreign policy must stay strictly with nation states. Chances are: a) that it will, and b) that Europe’s global role will not look much more coherent in the foreseeable future than it does now, however intolerably unassailable US power becomes.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.