Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schussel, proud leader of just over 8 million Austrians, assured the European Parliament Tuesday that the leader of almost 300 million Americans would most certainly get an earful on the Guantanamo detention camp at his "summit" with President George W. Bush.

And Jose Manuel Barroso, whose elective credentials stem from the fact that he used to be prime minister of the 9 million citizens of Portugal, told reporters grandly that unless Bush was prepared to make some pretty big concessions, there would be no success at the world trade talks.

And further sweetening the atmosphere ahead of Bush's "summit" with the European Union leaders, Barroso -- in an interview with the German press -- accused the United States of "discrimination" and of creating "second-class citizens" by requiring tourists from the new EU members like Poland to go to the trouble of obtaining visas in order to visit the United States.

Barroso is the current president of the European Commission, a job for which he was chosen by his peers, the political leaders of the 25 nations of the European Union. This means that he runs the EU bureaucracy, with its annual budget of around $120 billion. Were he and his fellow EU commissioners to be elected instead of appointed, they might carry a little more clout with their own people.

The striking thing is how much more clout they carry these days with the Americans. Austria's Schussel, who governs fewer people than the mayor of New York City, or the EU Commission's Barroso, who may claim to "govern" 480 million Europeans but whose budget is about five percent of that of the U.S. federal government, not only get their moment in the spotlight but even get the American president to grin and bear it while they put him in his place.

The twice-yearly summits between the U.S. and European leaders are a curious fixture of the diplomatic calendar, dating back to those heady days after the end of the Cold War when President Bush (the Elder) decided it would be a good idea to confer regularly with folk like Britain's Margaret Thatcher and Germany's Helmut Kohl and France's Francois Mitterrand. The problem was that the European Union was not organized that way, so Bush found himself meeting the leaders of Luxembourg, which, with a population of 650,000, is smaller than Washington, D.C., or Ireland, whose population of 3.5 million is fewer than that of Los Angeles.

The EU is organized on a system that rotates the chairmanship of its Council every six months, so an American president will always be meeting someone new at his regular summits, and in some cases, someone he has never heard of. But as well as the EU Council, the body that brings together the leaders of the 25 member states, the EU is also represented by the current head of the Commission, who gets to hold the job for five years.

For President Bill Clinton, this meant he kept on meeting an agreeable but notoriously ineffectual Luxembourger called Jacques Santer in "summits" so tedious that Clinton suggested dropping the whole twice-yearly summit plan, and meeting only those Europeans who mattered, like Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac. Clinton was talked out of it by his diplomats (and by Blair), but after 2001 it was quite widely assumed by senior European officials that the new Bush administration would find ways to ditch the EU summits.

To his credit, the current President Bush took the advice of his father and decided to continue with the EU "summits," even though they meant putting up with constant sniping and complaints about the Iraq war and Guantanamo, about global warming and the Kyoto Protocol and trade disputes and visas, from politicians he barely knew. And on Wednesday in Vienna, Bush's patience snapped when a reporter asked him why new opinion polls showed that two-thirds of Austrians thought that the United States was "the greatest threat to world peace."

"That's absurd. We are a transparent democracy," Bush snapped. "We'll defend ourselves, but we are working with our partners to spread peace and democracy around the world."

But Bush has now learned the art of getting something in return for such indiginities, helped by the polite diplomacy of his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a beefed-up team at the U.S. diplomatic mission to the EU led by his father's old White House counsel, the ultimate Washington-insider lawyer Boyden Gray. Above all, the near-collapse of Bush's old foes in the French government and the arrival of the pro-American Angela Merkel as the new German Chancellor have combined to shift the balance of power within the EU. And Bush made his priorities very clear before his meeting in Vienna with Barroso and Schussel.

"A free and sovereign Iraq requires the strong support of Europe," he said before flying to Vienna, adding that "America and Europe are united on one of the most difficult challenges facing the world today: the behavior of the regime in Iran."

The bottom line is that after the bitter trans-Atlantic rows over Iraq, Bush and the Europeans have both learned that they are both weakened when they argue. It was the same lesson they had to learn during the Cold War, once they realized that the Soviet Union's prime concern was to divide them.

New players in the post-Cold War world from al-Qaida to Iran are trying the same strategy, so the Europeans and the Americans are painfully learning the need to focus again on what unites them rather than on what divides them.

And even if they do not see eye-to-eye on issues like the Middle East and global warming, they certainly have common interests in confronting Islamic extremism, in stabilizing Iraq and in keeping nuclear weapons out of the Persian Gulf.

They also have a profound common interest in keeping the global economy functioning healthily, which means promoting free markets and free trade and global growth which will help them as the two 900-pound gorillas of the global economy. They account for almost half of global GDP and over 60 percent of world trade. With 12 percent of the world's population, the two economic superpowers currently consume 40 percent of global energy.

That is the common ground that makes it worthwhile for Bush to spend time with Austrian chancellors, Maltese premiers, Luxembourg commissioners and even to put up with the arrogance of French politicians.

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