WHAT better way for a new columnist to begin writing Charlemagne than to draw inspiration from Karolus Magnus himself? My first outing, then, is to Aachen, the closest thing that the peripatetic Frankish warrior-king had to a capital. Even in the age of free movement of people in Europe, and an (almost) borderless Schengen area, I notice how firmly the linguistic frontiers seem to have remained in place. The background babble in my train seemed to change according to the language of the signs on the train platforms slipping by. The single market, too, is still fragmented, to just by how the shops change as one crosses the border.

It is a day of immersion into history, Carolingian and modern, to explore the relevance of the “father of Europe”, as his first biographer called Charlemagne. Aachen's cathedral tells its own story in brick, marble, glass and gold. I am drawn in particular to the resplendent shrine of Charlemagne, which depicts the emperor as sitting on his throne, with Jesus above him. So far, so predictable. But look at the figures next to him: the pope and a bishop are standing, slightly stooped. The message is subtle but clear: Charlemagne has primacy even over the pope who crowned him emperor in 800. This has some relevance to the European venture: if European integration is a faith-based project, as my predecessor wrote in his valedictory column, who should have primacy? The priesthood, embodied by the José Manuel Barroso's Commission, or the secular kings, the member states, represented by Herman van Rompuy and the European Council?

Indeed, the newcomer to Brussels is struck by the depth of rivalry between the Council and the Commission, glowering at each other across the Rue de la Loi. It is Mr van Rompuy who is leading the task force to decide how the euro should be governed. But next week Mr Barroso gets to steal the limelight when he delivers his his first "state of the union" address to the European Parliament. The Lisbon Treaty was sold on the basis that it would make European institutions more coherent. The opposite seems to be happening.

At Aachen's Rathaus, built on the foundations of Charlemagne's palace, an electronic board flashes up the pictures of winners of the Charlemagne prize since it was first given out in 1950, along with excerpts from their speeches. On their own, these are often Euro-platitudes of their time. But together they offer an intriguing snapshot of the growing pessimism about the future of European integration.

There was Bill Clinton in 2000, predicting that with enlargement “it will be a bigger Europe than Charlemagne ever dared dream”. Or Jean-Claude Juncker in 2006 warning that, without a constitution, Europe would slowly be killed by the “poison of free trade”. In 2007, Javier Solana was still boasting of Europe as “a point of reference” for the rest of the world. A year later, though, Angela Merkel sounded more defensive, saying Europe must not “surrender” to globalisation and must “retain our model of European society because we are convinced in its rightness”. By this year, with the economic crisis in full force, Donald Tusk felt the need to declare that “Europe is not dying at all”.

Certainly it is hard to imagine a winner today expressing the wild optimism of the first laureate, Richard Graf Coudenhove-Kalergi, founder of the Pan-European Movement, who called for a European confederation and nothing less than “the renewal of the Carolingian empire”. What would Charlemagne have made of all this?