" In der Ruhe liegt die Kraft", loosely translatable as "in calm lies strength", is the motto of Germany's doughty chancellor Angela Merkel. The sentiment, perhaps unsurprisingly, echoes the words of Thucydides which adorned the office of another statesman of our time, the former US secretary of state, Colin Powell: "Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most".
It says much about their consensual style and, notably, its contrast with the latter's former boss. One German official has said of Ms Merkel's dealings with difficult coalition partners that "she doesn't forge decisions, she manages discord".
With Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac on the way out this year, and Silvio Berlusconi in enforced retirement, Ms Merkel and Spain's Jose Luis Zapatero now effectively assume the mantle of senior representatives of the large states, and Washington already looks to her as a key interlocutor. "She's the big player in Europe right now," said US deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs, Kurt Volker, recently.
Ms Merkel has a busy six months in store. She has taken over both the presidency of the EU and chair of the G8, each of whose agendas is crammed and difficult. On Wednesday she briefs MEPs on German's priorities. She has already made a preliminary trip to Washington and meets President Putin before the end of the month when she then embarks on a tour of the Middle East.
Any EU presidency is a marathon - Germany will preside over 4,000 internal meetings, 40 with non-member states and summits with Russia, Japan, Canada and the US. But one of her most thorny challenges is bringing about agreement on what might be termed a road map for the revival of the EU's beached constitutional treaty. The hope is that it can be in place in some form before the 2009 European elections. That means broadly establishing by the end of the German presidency in June what member-states can and cannot live with in the current text, whether it is to be a "constitution" or merely a "treaty", and at the June summit launching a short intergovernmental conference. Its deliberations, the Germans hope, will culminate in early 2008 with a text that can go to member states for ratification during the year.
And, while acting the honest broker, Ms Merkel - perhaps more willing than any of her predecessors to articulate the idea of a German national interest - will also want to uphold its corner as one of the states most committed to saving the current agreement and the integration process, a precarious balancing act. "We have to strive to get a compromise but we will not approach [the constitutional treaty] in a minimalistic way. That is the German starting point," she told The Irish Times. It is a position with which Ireland will concur.
Ms Merkel insists strongly, and correctly, that failure on the part of the Union to reform institutionally is not an option and would be a bar to future enlargement. But she has a battle on her hands.