Paris  - When French President Nicolas Sarkozy traveled to Washington in mid-November to participate in the G20 summit on the financial crisis, the weekly Journal du Dimanche titled a behind-the scenes story about his trip "Sarkozy as Master of the World."

The fawning report depicted Sarkozy as the meeting's top dog: "Sarkozy lectures his partners, the masters of the world: 'At the end of the day, we must all have the same message.' He brandishes a paper, he speaks to them - Bush, Lula, Merkel, Brown, Hu Jintao - as if he were briefing them for a meeting."

Le Journal du Dimanche is owned by Sarkozy's good friend and loyal supporter Arnaud Lagardere, so it can be assumed that the tenor of the story reflected the president's own view of the event - and of himself.

And he did not even seem to be wrong. Calendar, character and the haphazard eruption of historical events combined to thrust the 55- year-old Sarkozy into the role of being, at least for a few months, one of the most influential leaders in the world.

The calendar saw to it that France took over the rotating six-month EU presidency on July 1. History provided a series of crises, beginning with Ireland's rejection of the Lisbon treaty in June, the Russia-Georgia war in August and the global financial and economic crisis.

It also provided a power vacuum which he could exploit: US President George W Bush was unpopular at home and derided abroad; British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was trying to save his political neck; and Barack Obama had not yet become the US president-elect and messiah of world politics.

Sarkozy's energy, ambition and deep love of the limelight did the rest.

It is important to remember that Sarkozy has always known how to exploit crises for his own needs.

In May 1993, when he was mayor of the posh Paris suburb of Neuilly, he decided on his own to negotiate with a madman who held more than 20 children hostage at a local nursery school.

He managed to walk out of the school with several of the children - becoming an instant star - before police killed the hostage taker.

Sarkozy's response to the various crises that he had to confront as EU head was to take personal charge of the responses, to bully his EU partners and to call one emergency summit meeting after the other. This suited him so well that even critics were impressed.

"Sarko superstar. Almost bigger than he sees himself... which is a performance in itself," wrote the left-wing daily Liberation, in spite of itself.

"In a time of crisis, hyperactive becomes energetic, overbearing becomes dogged, and unpredictable becomes pragmatic," a German diplomat said.

Sarkozy single-handedly forced his 27 EU colleagues into agreeing on a unified and surprisingly muscular stance vis-a-vis Moscow.

He then traveled to the Kremlin to convince Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev to accept the EU ultimatum and, according to the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, not string up Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili "by the balls."

When you are king of the world, you can apparently even tell the bellicose Putin that hanging the leader of another country is a bad idea.

The king of the world can also demand, as Sarkozy did, that the heads of the world's most important economic powers gather to construct "the foundation of an entrepreneurial capitalism instead of a speculative capitalism" and "to build the beginning of a new financial world as they did in Bretton Woods."

The 1944 international meeting in Bretton Woods established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the world's major industrial states.

But, as Sarkozy also found out, you can demand it, but you can not make it happen.

Putin did not hang Saakaschvili, but he got what he wanted, i. e. Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and there will almost certainly be no new capitalism, no second Bretton Woods.

Equally, Sarkozy cannot be king forever: in fact, although his reign officially ends at midnight December 31, Obama shoved him off the throne in early November.

Nevertheless, Sarkozy liked being top dog so well that he began a campaign of press leaks to have himself crowned king of the eurozone, once his EU mandate ends.

This angered the current master of the euro, euro-group head Jean-Claude Juncker, as well as the government of the Czech Republic. As Prague succeeds France in the EU presidency, it felt - no doubt correctly - that Sarkozy did not trust the Czechs adequately to fill his shoes.

After his ploy failed, he swiftly organized an international meeting on the financial crisis in early January, to be co-hosted with another former master of the world, Tony Blair.

Sarkozy has a hard time letting go. It's not surprising. Once you've been king of the world, how can you be happy being the king of mere France? (dpa)