Compromise man: the new, consensus-loving head of the European Council. Photograph: Reuters

It is said that if you know how to run Belgium, which surely boasts Europe’s most bafflingly multi-layered system of government, then you will know how to run the European Union.

If true, who is better qualified to be the European Council’s first full-time president than Herman Van Rompuy, 62, the cool-headed, poetically inclined Flemish Christian Democrat who served as Belgium’s prime minister for just under a year before his move to the top?

During his short spell in charge of his country, Van Rompuy deployed his calm personality and methodical intellect to bring a domestic constitutional crisis off the boil. Tensions had grown between Belgium’s Dutch- and French-speaking communities since an inconclusive general election in June 2007. Van Rompuy achieved the considerable feat of winning the trust of Francophone politicians and banishing the spectre – admittedly, somewhat exaggerated – of the disintegration of the Belgian state.

These conciliatory, consensus-building skills are precisely what caught the attention of other EU leaders as they began the search last year for a president of the European Council who, by general consent, needed to come from their own ranks – that is, to be a present or former head of government – in order to command sufficient respect. “His real mission – if any – should be to build consensus among the heads of state and government. His tools will be deftness, persuasion and moral authority,” says Gilles Andréani, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.

Whether Van Rompuy’s appointment impresses policymakers in Beijing and Washington is an altogether different matter. As Belgian prime minister, he handled no foreign policy issue more demanding than a dispute with the Netherlands over the dredging of the river Scheldt. Arguably, the Americans and Chinese will conclude that by choosing Van Rompuy as president and the equally little-known Baroness Catherine Ashton as the EU’s next foreign policy high representative, the leaders of Britain, France and Germany in particular are signalling that they intend to keep major EU foreign policy decisions firmly under national control for the foreseeable future.

Of course, Van Rompuy’s ascent to the presidency was smoothed by the fact that he came from a smaller member state deeply committed to the European project. Twenty of the bloc’s 27 countries have populations......