LONDON When Nicolas Sarkozy arrived in Berlin last Monday for a fraught summit with Angela Merkel, an aide to the French president, briefed by Merkel's people, gave him a good tip. “No kissing, cuddling or squeezing.” Charming the chancellor has been a Sarkozy obsession for the past three years. The Frenchman is very touchy-feely. But the German flinches, recoils from the advance.

Gallic tactility collides with Prussian reserve. The result is a Franco-German marriage on the rocks.

But there's nothing new about Franco-German tiffs. Despite the mythology surrounding the EU's core relationship, leaders on both sides have often been at odds. Gerhard Schroder and Jacques Chirac cursed and screamed at each other in eyeball confrontations. Francois Mitterrand sought to subvert Helmut Kohl and German unification.

But the current chill between Berlin and Paris is more ominous, perhaps because it comes in the midst of one of the EU's biggest crises and exposes major differences over fundamentals what is the EU for, how should it be run, where should power lie?

The questions have come into focus because of the crisis over the viability of the euro, highlighting the faultlines, rivalries, divergent national interests and power struggles in the EU.

Merkel's answer is to rearrange Europe's constitutional furniture to establish a stiff new regime of penalties, fines, and loss of votes in the councils of the EU to compel fiscal rigour, while retaining decision-taking at the level of the 27 governments. Sarkozy's recipe is for a two-speed Europe, where the 16 countries of the single currency press ahead with an economic government, preferably French-led, developing common tax-and-spend policies.

In Berlin on Monday both sides called a truce. Senior diplomats expected a “grand bargain” to emerge that would have coupled German discipline with French structures for running Europe. This did not happen, not least because the centrality to the EU of the Franco-German deal no longer holds.

The incorporation of eastern Europe in 2004 enhanced Germany and diminished France. Sarkozy's campaign to head a eurozone government of 16 is nostalgia for that smaller EU of the past that magnified French leadership and influence.

Merkel is an east German whose formative experiences were on the “wrong” side of the wall. She has a better intuitive understanding of Poland than of France. But she has been boning up, reading books on the history of the Franco-German relationship. She seems to have concluded that the current frictions are nothing new, the natural state of affairs.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service