By Diego Lopez Garrido’s reckoning, the Spanish EU presidency is going to summit its way into the Guinness Book of Records.

Spain’s loquacious Secretary of State for EU affairs says there will be up to ten summits during the country’s six month spin at the helm of the European Union. These include bilateral meetings with Russia, Pakistan, Mexico, Canada, the US, Morocco (the first ever), Latin American countries and Mediterranean countries.

“We are going to enter the ‘Guinness book of summits’ with nine or ten summits. We will be a very, very external presidency”, he said before an audience at the European Policy Centre on Tuesday.

Spain’s presidency, beginning 1 January, will be a curiosity in the arcane world of EU institutional goings-on. It will be the first under the new Lisbon Treaty, and, as such, gets to (begin to) write the template for those that follow.

At stake is proving that the new system will lead to both internal and external coherency – not a given under the new Lisbon set-up.

The rotating presidency runs the day-to-day affairs of the EU while the new permanent president represents the EU abroad in CFSP issues and chairs the regular EU leader meetings – but there are plenty of grey areas. Including the natural, but not writable-into-a-treaty, idea that national politicians enjoy the limelight, and will generally gravitate towards it if given an opening.

Detailed procedural rules have been drawn up to stage manage the system, but as with so much it will come down to the personalities involved. Working in the new system’s favour is that fact that it has the mild-mannered Herman Van Rompuy as its first permanent president and Spain (ie not France or the UK or Germany) as its first presidency country.

So far, Madrid has trod the careful line of underlining that it will be a “loyal” presidency country that will not seek to compete with the new presidency and foreign policy posts and pointing out that it does not wish to be sidelined either.

The summits will throw up some potentially interesting political choreography in this respect.

If held in the third country, then the EU will be represented by Van Rompuy, top diplomat Catherine Ashton and commission president Barroso. But if held in the presidency country ( And Spain would like to host the EU-US summit, says Lopez Garrido) the national prime minister will also have a role. “[Prime minister Zapatero] will also be a part of the meeting in some way,” said an EU official. “We’ll have to see what Spain makes of it.”

Another little wrinkle that may need to be sorted out in the coming months is EU representation at G20 meetings. Commission president Barroso will attend, but should Van Rompuy? He represents the EU in CFSP issues only, so it’s not clear, say diplomats.