J Clive Matthews (London, Europhobia): Ignore the stop-gap measure that is the new EU reform treaty and all the attendant calls for referenda. The really important developments for the future of the EU - and for the UK's relationship with the rest of Europe - will not be governed by bits of paper this year. Nor will they be decided from within the EU's borders.
The US presidential election is the most obvious influencing factor. Whoever becomes president, the relationship between the EU and America - and between the UK and America - will shift. Whether it's Clinton, McCain, Obama, Romney or Guiliani, all the leading candidates are well aware of the need to rebuild friendships in Europe. Will they look to build bridges with Brussels, or to shore up the weakening "special relationship" with Britain? Will the charismatic Sarkozy, "l'Americain", prove a more appealing ally than the taciturn Brown?
Meanwhile, as the campaign progresses, all European powers will be jostling for positions of favour with those who emerge as the eventual candidates, while hedging their bets lest they pick the wrong horse. Where there have been disputes between the EU and US over trade, agricultural subsidies and airline passenger details over the last twelve months, the next year will likely see stagnation.
And then there's the Russian persidential election. The result may be pretty much a foregone conclusion - Putin's man will get the job - but the impact this might have seems barely to have been considered, at least in the British press.
Everyone seems to be assuming that it will be business as usual. Putin's chosen successor, Dmitry Medvedev, may be largely unknown by most casual observers. Kremlin-watchers will know that he was the man who, as a lawyer in Putin's St Petersburg International Relations Committee in the mid-1990s, devised the various cunning (and only semi-legal) financial schemes that enabled Putin's rapid rise to wealth and power.
But that doesn't begin to cover it. Medvedev is more than Putin's puppet - he represents something potentially far more worrying that seems to have received barely any coverage. Most importantly for Britain and Europe, he is currently the head of Russian 50% state-owned energy giant Gazprom, which is Russia's largest company (responsible for around 25% of all tax returns) and the entity that controls 97% of Russia's natural gas reserves (which are themselves the largest in the world).
Gazprom under Medvedev has shown no fear of using threats and bribes to get its way, like cutting off energy supplies to Ukraine to secure price rises (and, some argue, influence elections) and undercutting competitors to secure cheap takeovers. With Putin's help the company now also owns Russia's biggest TV station, as well as several banks - and its own "private security forces". When Medvedev takes over as president, the interests of Russia and those of Gazprom will become even more closely entwined. You thought Dick Cheney's links with Haliburton in the US were bad? Russia will soon be headed by a man who's a combination of Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi and Richard Branson - and in the process it will become the world's first true corporate plutocracy. It's a development the impact of which can be neither predicted nor underestimated.
With North Sea gas supplies dwindling, Britain too will soon become dependent on gas piped in from continental Europe. Within the last week or so, Putin and Medvedev/Gazprom have negotiated deals for a new gas pipeline to central Europe via Bulgaria and Serbia. This completes the Russian stranglehold over European energy supplies, as it will almost certainly scupper an alternate EU-backed pipeline planned to bring gas from Central Asia, via a very similar non-Russian route. With Russia already possessing so much potential to affect the economies of Europe, and with the global economy currently looking so fragile, this pipeline deal could well prove the single most important political development of 2008.
