The rotating six-month presidency, which Spain assumed Jan. 1, is the first under the Lisbon Treaty, which aims to streamline the EU's decision-making and lend it a greater role in international politics.

Belgium's Herman Van Rompuy is now the first full-time EU president, with Britain's Lady Ashton heading the body's foreign affairs brief. Together with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso they are intended to represent the EU on the world stage.

As a consequence, Spain will have a somewhat smaller profile compared with that of previous presidencies, observers say.

"An EU presidency from the start has limitations. But the stronger institutional basis the EU now gets in foreign policy will push the development that the EU increasingly speaks with one voice," Almut Moeller, an EU expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations, told UPI in a telephone interview Tuesday.

Van Rompuy will chair the summits of EU leaders and Ashton those of EU foreign ministers, with the two Spanish officials, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, playing important bystanders.

That doesn't mean they can't shape EU policies.

Moeller said Moratinos has been very active and outspoken recently, with many thematic initiatives tabled.

"It seems like he and Lady Ashton have agreed to a work-sharing model," she said.

As a former EU special envoy to the Middle East, Moratinos knows the Arab-Israeli conflict very well, and Spain has said it wants to help create a Palestinian state by the end of this year.

Madrid also plans to finalize accession talks with potential member Croatia within its presidency so the country can join the bloc in 2011.

It has vowed to boost the EU's ties with the states in northern Africa, and with Latin America -- a region with which Spain shares deep historic, social and economic ties.

In a bid to boost the presidency's profile, Madrid has made sure that the EU-U.S. summit won't be held in Brussels, but in Spain.

"That was a diplomatic chess move … to get a summit that produces nice images," Moeller said in reference to U.S. President Barack Obama's popularity in Europe.

Yet Spain's main task will be to help broker an agreement on a replacement of the Lisbon Strategy, a model aimed at making the EU the world's most competitive economy by 2010.

Economic prosperity is crucial for Spain and for Europe as a whole. While the body is still recovering from the global downturn, Spain has been hit especially hard: The country's unemployment rate has doubled over the past decade and now towers at around 19 percent.

For the EU, economic recovery is only one of many steps in the way to become a global superpower.

"Whether the EU will really play a larger role in international politics depends on many factors, not least whether the EU and its member states will be able to maintain their economic performance and their social cohesion in the long term," Moeller told UPI.

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