Nicolas Sarkozy has every reason to feel satisfied with the events of the past week. In the early hours of Saturday morning, the French president emerged triumphant from a tetchy summit of European Union leaders, having secured a symbolic and potentially far-reaching change to the bloc's new treaty.

Pressed by Mr Sarkozy, the leaders agreed to drop the EU's commitment to "free and undistorted competition" from the objectives of the Union's draft constitution - a change hailed by the president as a crucial rebalancing of the bloc's priorities. "Competition as an ideology, as a dogma, what has it done for Europe?" he asked derisively, adding that "the word 'protection' is no longer taboo".