AFP/AP

THEY cannot both be right. For the Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the European Union treaty agreed in Lisbon in the early hours of Friday October 19th will “open new horizons” for the EU, finally giving the 27 member block the international profile it deserves.

But Gordon Brown, attending his first EU summit as Britain's prime minister, had earlier announced that the new “reform treaty” was a modest piece of housekeeping, that merely tweaks the way decisions are taken after a dozen new members have been absorbed in the past few years. He called it clearly less significant than previous EU milestones such as the 1992 Maastricht treaty (which ushered in the single European currency).

Neither man, of course, is a neutral judge of the new treaty's heft. For Mr Brown, minimising its importance helps him with some painful domestic politics, caused by his refusal to offer British voters a referendum on the new treaty (crafted as a replacement for the EU constitution that was killed off by voters in French and Dutch referendums in 2005).

The governments of other countries, including France and the Netherlands, have made similar arguments for avoiding fresh referendums. That is to be expected: avoiding more popular votes was the sole rationale for crafting this new document, which reworks the bulk of the grandly worded constitution into the form of a dull and legalistic treaty.

All in all, it has not been Europe's finest hour. But the treaty has probably created something of substance, despite its furtive birth. Two big innovations stand out, involving the creation of a pair of important new posts. In years to come, the holder of one of these new posts has a good chance of becoming the answer to the famous question posed by Henry Kissinger: if a world power needs to talk to Europe, whom do they call?

First, the new treaty will create a European foreign minister in all but name, beefing up a foreign-policy job currently held by a Spaniard, Javier Solana, who currently glories in the Euro-title of “High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy”. As things stand, Mr Solana wields political clout as the representative of national governments, but lacks staff and funds, because the EU's considerable aid budget and worldwide network of quasi-embassies is controlled by the bureaucratic arm of the EU, the European Commission. The new quasi-foreign minister (whose title will continue to be High Representative) will work for both national governments and the commission, giving him money, a diplomatic corps, and political power.

The new foreign supremo will have a rival, however. The Lisbon treaty creates a new post of an EU president. More properly, the new office-holder will be the standing president of the European Council (the body that represents national leaders). The holder will probably be a European former head of government, elected by serving heads for a two-and-a-half-year term, renewable once. The new president will chair all summits, ending the current system which sees nations taking six-month-long turns to preside over EU leaders' gatherings.

For Euro-enthusiasts, a “Mr Europe” would fill an important vacancy in the global diplomatic order. He would “permit us to better transmit our values and affirm our role as defenders of peace on the international scene,” Mr Zapatero wrote in the French newspaper, Le Figaro, this week. To many Europeans, that sounds like code for: someone must speak for the Western democratic world, who is not America.

Europe has advanced, in the past, by taking the view “build it and they will come”, which means creating new posts and institutions, and hoping that political unity catches up with those structures. Yet creating unity in foreign policy is harder, arguably, than anything that the EU has tried before (nobody has forgotten how the invasion of Iraq left the continent horribly divided). The Lisbon treaty may yet be seen as more than a painful footnote, but doubts remain about whether this is the moment that finally establishes the EU as a big diplomatic player.