The year is 2018. European president Brian Cowen picks up a call on his mobile from Peter Mandelson, Europe’s foreign minister. Waving his arms around furiously on the tiny screen, Mandelson explains that there is more bad news coming in from the war in Georgia. At least a dozen troops from the EU intervention force have been killed in a roadside ambush.

Hawkish as ever, Mandelson demands that he is allowed to call a majority vote to get more troops in: “We’ve got to grasp the nettle. Now we are in we have got to win. We need to get the smaller member states to pull their finger out.”

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But the truth is nobody really knows where the EU is going in the long term. Europe will certainly look very different in 10 years time, and under the Lisbon treaty it will take a big step towards a more federal model.

One of the most worrying aspects of the Lisbon treaty is that it leaves so much still to be decided. Indeed, it is now beginning to dawn on politicians that they have signed up to something far more significant than they originally believed.

As a European commission source told one Brussels correspondent last week: “Changes that enter into force with the treaty are more far reaching than people think. A lot of people are just beginning to realise what they have signed up to. There has never been such a constellation of jobs and institutional changes aligned at the same moment. A lot of people are talking about a new epoch.”

To be fair, the politicians knew they were signing a blank cheque. In January this year EU bigwigs prepared a confidential document which listed more than 30 separate areas of the Lisbon treaty where decisions have not yet been taken on how the proposals will actually work in practice.

In particular, the document explained that EU leaders should only begin to discuss the most sensitive issues after ratification was out of the way in “difficult” countries, especially Ireland. It instructed EU governments to be ready to negotiate “as soon as possible” after the Irish referendum.

In time-honoured EU fashion, none of these details will ever be discussed in public. Instead we will have to rely on leaks to newspapers just to get a sniff of what is actually being agreed on our behalf over innumerable private dinners and late night meetings in Brussels.

As soon as the referendum is over, the starting gun will be fired for an epic process of horse-trading. Deep inside the Brussels institutions, the big players in Europe — France, Germany and Britain — will carve up the spoils, haggling over how the new institutions should look, and which candidates will take the top jobs created by the Lisbon treaty.

The most important of these new positions will be the EU president, who will instantly become the face that represents Europe across the globe. The president will be in charge of what is now known as the EU council, the body that brings together the governments from each country in the union.

It will be a tremendously powerful position, but incredibly, we know little of what the role will actually entail. It’s likely that the president will be in charge of the 3,500 civil servants who already work for the council secretariat — a substantial powerbase — but that number could easily rise. Brussels correspondents are already reporting whispers from top-level meetings where issues such as the president’s trappings of office are being discussed, from the official plane to a White House-style residence.

Lisbon also holds open the possibility that this new EU president will also soon become president of the EU commission, combining the two roles into a new “super president”, a thought that worries many European capitals, and appeals to others.

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