The Polish Foreign Minister moved deftly through the crowded briefing room to greet a Warsaw journalist with a deep bow and a kiss on her hand. At 79, Mr Wladyslaw Bartoszewski exudes the elegant charm of an earlier age.
But his personal biography leaves him better placed than any of his counterparts in Europe to assess the rival visions of the continent's future that EU leaders have been advancing in recent months.
As a resistance fighter in the Polish Home Army, he spent a year in Auschwitz during the second World War, and his tree stands in Yad Vashem in recognition of the Jewish lives he saved. After the war, the communists locked him up for seven years and he spent most of the intervening decades as a writer and historian.
In Sweden on Sunday, Mr Bartoszewski told us what he thought of proposals by the German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, for a new division of power within the EU.
"It needs to be viewed with caution because it is rooted in 19th and 20thcentury utopias. And we need to consider to what extent his idea of a universal European government threatens the position of the nation-state," he said.
Mr Bartoszewski's lukewarm response followed a sharper rejection of Mr Schroder's ideas from the French European Affairs Minister, Mr Pierre Moscovici. Austria and Denmark have told Berlin they are not impressed by the plan, and the British government issued a tight-lipped statement welcoming the Chancellor's contribution to the debate on Europe's future.
In fact, Belgium and Luxembourg are the only EU member-states that have responded warmly to Mr Schroder's ideas. Yet the Chancellor is reported to be delighted with the impact of his intervention and he repeated his call for a stronger European government when he addressed a meeting of European centre-left parties in Berlin yesterday.
In a paper addressed to his Social Democratic Party (SPD) last week, Mr Schroder called for the European Commission to be transformed into a functioning government for Europe. He wants the Council of Ministers to be replaced by a second chamber of parliament similar to the German Bundesrat and the European Parliament itself to be given control over the EU budget.
The 20-page document also proposes that responsibility for such policy areas as agriculture and regional policy be returned to the member-states.
Paris was slow to react at first, and Le Monde described the silence of the French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, as "numbing". But last Wednesday Mr Moscovici dismissed the proposal as "a very German idea" and issued a clear warning that Paris would resist one of its key demands.
"The Council of Ministers - which in practice represents the nations - cannot be reduced to a second chamber, a senate of the European Parliament," he said.
Austria's Chancellor, Mr Wolfgang Schussel, expressed the fear that Germany was bent on creating a "European superstate". And some British observers interpreted Mr Blair's decision to stay away from yesterday's meeting in Berlin as an attempt to distance himself from Mr Schroder.
The Chancellor, who wanted Economic and Monetary Union to be postponed and complained three years ago that the EU was "burning up" German money, is an unlikely European visionary. And his latest proposals are directed as much towards his own electorate as to his European partners.
SPD strategists believe that Mr Schroder has effectively neutralised Europe as an issue in next year's federal elections in Germany by stealing the clothes of the conservative opposition. His proposals succeed in addressing the concerns of both the integrationist heirs of Mr Helmut Kohl and the more sceptical supporters of the Bavarian Prime Minister, Mr Edmund Stoiber.
The Chancellor knows that the debate on Europe's future cannot begin in earnest until after the French and German elections next year. But the agenda will be set at a summit of EU leaders in the Belgian town of Laeken in December, and Mr Schroder wants to make sure that Germany's demands are at the centre of the discussions.
All EU member-states and the candidate countries will bring their own preoccupations to the debate once it begins. But the former Christian Democrat leader, Dr Wolfgang Schauble, believes the argument will boil down in the end to a fundamental question of how power is divided in Europe.
"The political discussion will ignite in the next few years over the question of what the EU should decide and what belongs to the nations. The limitation of competences is the actual power question," he said.
