WORLDVIEW:French president Jacques Chirac was woken early on the morning of July 3rd last by a ringing telephone. A member of his staff apologised for disturbing him, however he had just received word from Warsaw that the meeting of the Weimar Triangle later that day was cancelled. President Lech Kaczynski had "digestion problems".
Polish commentators attacked Mr Kaczynski for cancelling - at incredibly short notice - the meeting of the grouping created with France and Germany in Weimar in 1991 to aid Poland's accession to the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Association (Nato).
Mr Kaczynski denied the widespread suggestion that the "digestion problems" were caused by a German newspaper article a week earlier comparing him to a potato. No doubt the Polish president will be at pains along with his French and German colleagues to show it's business as usual during the meeting on Tuesday week at Saareck Castle in the German state of Saarland.
But since Poland's European Union accession two years ago, there has been no new initiatives from the group, instead the growing feeling that, the Weimar Triangle is a structure in search of a purpose.
"The Weimar Triangle is a bit like the Bermuda Triangle. Good ideas, necessary ideas, go in there and vanish forever," remarked Dr Robert Picht, rector of the College of Europe at a recent conference in Warsaw organised by Poland's Institute of Public Affairs.
Rather than an equilateral triangle, he said the imbalances in the Weimar Triangle's sides were becoming increasingly obvious. Is the structure really trilateral or just two sets of bilateral relations: Paris-Berlin and Berlin-Warsaw? The fact that chancellor Merkel will meet Mr Chirac for bilateral talks before the Weimar meeting week only strengthens the latter impression.
The bad feelings over the Iraq war divisions have subsided somewhat to be replaced with fresh ill-will in Warsaw over Berlin's deal with Moscow to build a gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea - guaranteeing western Europe gas supplies but making central European supplies more vulnerable than ever to the whims of Gazprom and the Kremlin.
At the recent conference in Warsaw, the results of a three-way country survey suggested ordinary people are immune to the political irritations of the last months between the countries, in particular between Germany and Poland.
The percentage of Germans with a positive attitude towards Poland has risen from 57 to 60 per cent in the last six years, while the negative verdict has dropped from 29 to 27 per cent. The survey of Polish attitudes to Germany shows some interesting differences. Germany is Poland's preferred economic partner yet just 17 per cent viewed Germany as an ally - half the level for the US.
Some 15 per cent said Poland had no allies in the world. Meanwhile 79 per cent had a negative view of Berlin's relations with Moscow - a consequence of the Baltic Sea pipeline agreement.
German ambassador to Poland, Reinhard Schweppe, suggested the Weimar Triangle could act ideally as the motor in the enlarged Europe, just as the Franco-German motor had in the past.
"A Franco-German compromise always showed the way to agreement in the EU. This does not function any more. We need another partner in this mini cosmos," he said.
Dr Picht disagreed, pointing out that while France and Germany could block alternative positions in the old EU of 15, a French-German-Polish grouping couldn't as easily form a blocking minority in the EU of 27.
Poland's accession to Nato and the EU are the great achievements of the Weimar Triangle but, looking to the future, none of the participants in the discussion could name one EU policy on which the Weimar three are united or any instance where the three have acted as a motor, driving forward even one project in Brussels.
"The Weimar Triangle urgently needs to be filled with substance and all of Europe is waiting for Poland," said Dr Picht. Two ideas have emerged from Warsaw in recent months, an "energy Nato" and a 100,000-strong EU army, and both have been shot down.
The growing list of aggravations between the countries - from the pipeline row to Poland's energy talks veto over Russia's boycott of Polish produce - suggests that a stronger Weimar Triangle is needed more than ever.
Dr Wolfram Vogel, researcher at the German-French Institute in Ludwigsburg, suggested that the already difficult three-way structure now had another element to cope with: German discussion of its "national interests", until recently absolutely forbidden in any policy documents.
That goes some way to explain why, in the pipeline row, Berlin has listened patiently to Warsaw's energy concerns and then carried on regardless with the structure that will guarantee its own national interest of energy security.
Like many conference speakers, Dr Vogel said it was high time for the Weimar Triangle to justify its existence or risk being written off as a talking shop.