However, the situation in the Balkans threatens to hijack this week's European Union summit in Berlin and distract government leaders and their foreign ministers from the main business of the meeting.

Some time may also have to be spent on further discussions of whether next week's cancelled meeting with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) should be allowed to go ahead after all.

The Europe-Asia Meeting (Asem) foundered over Europe's refusal to allow Burma to take part. Concerned over human rights under Burma's military regime, Europe refuses to grant visas to senior Rangoon officials and bars high-level contacts with the regime. But Asean members repeated last week they would not take part in any meeting from which one of them was excluded.

The summit was supposed to be the pinnacle, too, of Germany's six-month EU presidency.

Now, instead of negotiating curbs on agricultural spending and reforming the EU budget, the 15 member states may be haggling over the bombing of Belgrade.

If the conversation does turn to swords instead of ploughshares, Mr Schroeder and his Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer will have a much harder time forcing their colleagues to take the tough decisions required under the EU's Agenda 2000, introducing farm-sector reforms and working out a more equitable distribution of the costs of EU membership.

Decisions are urgently needed before detailed negotiations on the EU's planned eastward enlargement to include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary can begin.

Those decisions have already been made harder by the resignation of the commission. Commission president Jaques Santer will be on hand and still able to participate in the presentation of compromise proposals.

But as the leader of a caretaker, lame-duck executive and his authority completely destroyed, he will be in no position to support the presidency's efforts at banging heads together.

Nor will Mr Lafontaine's absence from the budget negotiations provide much comfort. The German Government's own agenda, which hardly fits with its supposed neutrality in the presidency chair, is to get a massive reduction in its 14 billion deutschemark (about HK$60.58 billion) contribution to the EU budget. It needs the negotiating skills of a forceful and passionate politician to make any progress.

Meanwhile, Britain, which already enjoys a hefty rebate on its budget contribution, has made it clear it will fight tooth and nail against EU proposals to cut its relief.

As for Spain, it is fighting to retain its position as the biggest beneficiary of the EU's structural aid to poorer regions, while France has already won the battle to keep its vast share of the 45 billion euro (about HK$380.59 billion) farm budget.

In the end, delay may be no bad thing. If the meeting is taken up with the problems of Kosovo, there will be less pressure to reach an agreement for which the EU is not yet ready.

Clearly, the chances of a full agreement on Agenda 2000 at this summit were slimmer than either Mr Schroeder or Mr Fischer cared to admit, even before the commission resigned and renewed turmoil began in the former Yugoslavia.

Nevertheless, Germany was already showing a surprising eagerness to make costly concessions in both the agriculture and the budget rebate negotiations.

Germany was apparently determined to reach agreement at almost any price to make the presidency a success.

At the same time, the summit may try to reach a quick conclusion and paper over the cracks.

This would show that member states can provide leadership, put the show back on the road and, as one EU official put it, 'show the European public that the European ideal can be salvaged and must be backed'.

It would also be a politically symbolic gesture of wresting back some of the authority which has gradually been allowed to slip away from national governments and into the hands of the commission.

Under Germany's weak and nervous leadership, the result could all too easily be a shoddy compromise, which failed to curb spending and pushed up the costs of taking in new members, such as Poland and Hungary, to unacceptable levels.

As Germany's opposition parties have been arguing with increasing force over the past few weeks, it would be better to have no agreement at all than a bad compromise which has to be unpicked again next year.