EU:The black and yellow bulldozer parked menacingly at the police line above the Julius Lipsius building was merely a symbolic presence, ignored by the 27 heads of state and government inside.
The wheels of the giant inflatable toy bore the words "EU Commission" and "EU Parliament", and a man in a suit and bowler hat sat at the wheel. The visage of the character from a Magritte painting had been erased, to turn him into the faceless Brussels bureaucrat. "Clearing the way for the new constitutional treaty," said the front of the bulldozer.
Members of the Independence/Democracy Group from the European Parliament gathered around it to show their opposition to the summit.
"Everything is very choreographed," said Kathy Sinnott, the Irish MEP. "I'm not a cynical person, but I'm cynical about this summit. To me it's a stitch-up job. They all know their parts. What is to emerge at the end is to have a big united front - and bulldoze it through Europe."
Further up the hill, at the entry to the 50th Anniversary Park, four young people in black pin-striped suits were bundling cardboard cut-outs of the European leaders, all plugging their ears, into a taxi. "We took pictures of ourselves and then super-imposed the heads," explained Paul Stephenson from the Open Europe think-tank in London. With information nearly as scarce as harmony at the summit, 35 camera crews filmed the cardboard cut-outs.
"Millions of Europeans voted against the constitutional treaty, and our leaders still don't listen," Stephenson said. He objected to the "elitist" way the summit is being conducted. "It's all behind closed doors, in secret."
Inside the massive, liver-coloured granite and glass building, the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, was the object of much attention. "Lech is the one with the spot on his cheek," said a member of a delegation, distinguishing Kaczynski from his reputedly more hardline twin brother, the prime minister, Jaroslav. "Maybe they sent us the mean one, and pretended he was the other." The Poles brought a team of mathematicians to Brussels, to promote their idea of representation based on the square root of the population of each country. By coincidence, the logo for the German presidency looks like a mathematical equation.
I failed algebra, and it took me hours to decipher it. European federalists say the Poles' idea is the fairest way of solving the vote-weighting question. It may make sense mathematically, but politically it's another hard sell.
The real problem, stressed the same delegation member, is not Poland, but Britain. "There are ways to get out of the Polish blockage," he said. "Whereas when the British say, 'No Charter of Fundamental Rights', there's an attack on the European spirit. Other countries are sincerely engaged in the federalist project.
"They can say No too. [The Italian prime minister Romano] Prodi is at wits' end. [The outgoing Belgian prime minister Guy] Verhofstadt is at his last EU summit, so he has nothing to lose." The struggle between federalists and free-marketeers is as old as Europe, but it is coming to a head over the shreds of the constitutional treaty.
British tabloid journalists are here in battalion strength. "Those in favour of a federal Europe just won't let go of their ambition," a senior writer for one tabloid told me indignantly. So why are the British the most Eurosceptical nation in the Union, I asked him.
The tabloid writer wore his press credentials on a Royal Air Force ribbon instead of the EU presidency strap they came on. "Because our history is one of stand-alone independence in the world," he said.
"We have a tremendous sense of our own identity. We don't feel the need to share power with others not elected by the British people." The summit is "a big conspiracy", as proved by a letter Angela Merkel sent to the EU heads of state and government, the tabloid writer continued. The objective was "to use different terminology without changing the legal substance", the letter said.
It also referred to "making the necessary presentational changes." This is being called the "three-shirt summit," because the haggling could run on well into tomorrow. Delegates, diplomats and journalists all dread a sleepless night. The British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, said she packed a bag to last until Sunday.