European Diary: Even All Souls' Day, which traditionally brings the EU institutions to a standstill, could not stop the tension building over tomorrow's publication of a European Commission report on Turkey's progress towards EU accession.
Excerpts from the report began popping up in the press last week and these, together with the cancellation of crisis talks in Finland aimed at preventing a "train crash" in Ankara's accession talks, have kept diplomats on tenterhooks over the weekend.
With all the political focus on Turkey it would be easy to forget that two other candidate countries, Croatia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, will also receive monitoring reports from the Commission tomorrow.
Four other potential candidates - Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia - will also get updates on their progress, and the Commission will publish a strategy paper on future enlargements, which will all be debated by EU leaders in December.
The Commission's new blueprint on enlargement was requested at the June European Council amid increasing concern over the scope and pace of enlargement in some European capitals. It will seek to define "absorption capacity", a concept introduced as an element to be considered in future enlargements back in 1993, but which remains something of a mystery even to the most dedicated Brussels-watchers.
"It's a strange term, because Britain, France or any new member state would not like to think they had been absorbed by the EU," says Antonio Missiroli, an analyst with the think tank the European Policy Centre (EPC). "But states such as France want to use it as a tool to stop the process of enlargement by insisting that we can't move further down the road of taking new members until the EU has solved its own institutional issue."
In the wake of the rejection of the EU constitution in a French referendum last year, Paris pushed hard to have "absorption capacity" set as a new criterion for EU entry. It is supported by Austria and Germany, who are both opposed to Turkey's EU ambitions, while most new member states and pro-Turkey Britain are opposed to imposing any fresh restrictions on future enlargement.
At the June summit, French president Jacques Chirac failed to get it adopted as a new criterion but the prevailing mood of "enlargement fatigue" at the meeting led the Economist to deride the EU as a "communist-era toilet paper . . . tougher and less absorbent than ever!"
The fault lines over enlargement policy will be exposed again tomorrow when it is anticipated that the French and Austrian commissioners, Jacques Barrot and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, will urge the Commission to take a tough line on Turkey. Mr Barrot is also unhappy with a phrase in the commission's new report on "absorption capacity" which concludes that the "EU is defined by its values rather than by fixed geographical limits". His views reflect those of presidential aspirant Nicolas Sarkozy, who objects to Turkey's accession at least in part because most of its territory is in Asia rather than Europe.
"France is historically in favour of a small Europe and has never been an advocate of enlargement," says Antonio Missiroli, noting Paris's veto of British entry to the Common Market in 1963. "France sees itself as stronger in a smaller union and it views Turkish and Balkan countries' entry to the EU as diluting its power . . . Turkey is also very controversial because it is seen by some as too big, too poor and too Islamic." However, friends of the enlargement process, particularly enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn, are likely to win the day in tomorrow's debate, with the Commission set to propose that geographical borders should not play a formal role in deciding future enlargement.
In a recent interview Mr Rehn argued that drawing thick lines on the map could hurt Europe's strategic interests and send negative signals to neighbouring countries with aspirations to join the EU. His implicit message was that ruling out accession for states such as Ukraine would undermine reforms and destabilise the EU's neighbours.
But enlargement sceptics will also derive some encouragement from the fact that the report will recommend no new enlargement until an institutional settlement is agreed by EU states - something that is unlikely until 2009 at the earliest.
This will dismay Croatia, which has been hoping for EU entry in 2009, and Macedonia, which is anxious that its EU ambitions do not get caught up in the wider institutional debate.
But with next month's European Council due to be dominated by a debate on enlargement and "absorption capacity", the tense atmosphere in Brussels is here to stay.