EU summitry - a useful evil

It's easy to be exasperated by the EU's seemingly endless capacity to have summits - a capacity that has stretched still further with the eurozone crisis.

EU leaders travel to Brussels for one of two types of meetings. There is the frantic gathering to fix the latest crisis or the more regular get-together, where sometimes even the summit attendees struggle to justify the meeting.

Both are endurance tests. They start early in the evening and rarely end before the small hours of t...