Prime Minister David Cameron will hold talks with his anti-federalist European political bedfellows today.
Ahead of the latest EU summit on the eurozone crisis he is meeting the leaders of the Poland's Law and Justice, and Poland Comes First parties, and the Civic Democratic Party of the Czech Republic.
With the British Tory party, they form the backbone of the controversial European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the European Parliament, set up after the 2009 euro-elections when Mr Cameron fulfilled his pledge to break away from the more mainstream pro-federalist centre-right European People's Party.
The move was branded at the time by the then Labour foreign secretary David Miliband as a British Tory partnership with "unsavoury allies".
Today marks the first formal gathering of the ECR political party leaders before an EU summit. After flying to Brussels Mr Cameron will have private talks over lunch with Czech prime minister Petr Necas, and they both then go into a full ECR meeting.
Later he will join the start of a summit billed as a low-key assessment of the economic prospects and the chances of kick-starting growth.
The Prime Minister who has welcomed continuing efforts to tighten controls on the eurozone economies, will repeat UK calls for more to be done to boost the EU's single market.
On the summit table for agreement before leaders leave Brussels on Friday afternoon are draft conclusions including a pledge to achieve a "fully functioning Digital Single Market by 2015", which could generate additional growth of 4% by 2020.
The Prime Minister will say that, in addition to establishing a single market for the digital economy, concrete measures are needed to complete other unfinished and potentially lucrative parts of the single market policy, from opening up services to bearing down on unnecessary rules and regulations.
With market and investor pressure off the eurozone for the moment, no major decisions are likely, but there will be talks on eurozone banking union, with Mr Cameron continuing to endorse closer 17-country eurozone integration as long as the planned measures do not hamper the progress of the 27-nation single market.
But behind the scenes, divisions are deepening within the eurozone on the balance between austerity and growth.
In an interview today in six European newspapers including the Guardian, French president Francois Hollande seemed to widen tensions between Paris and Berlin.
He warned that the Franco-German motor which has traditionally powered the EU could stall because of disputes over how to resolve the euro crisis.
President Hollande challenged German chancellor Angela Merkel to reverse her insistence on strict austerity measures which have been accused of choking off economic growth prospects.
And he attacked the idea that Germany could dictate austerity strategy on the grounds that it was effectively bailing out those in trouble: "We're all taking part in this solidarity.....let's stop thinking that there's only one country who's going to pay for the others. That's false."
He claimed that the EU was "very near" to the end of the eurozone, but warned that decisions taken at the last EU summit in June had to be implemented swiftly.
The French president dismissed German pressure to set up either a "federalised union" or a "political union" in the wake of the crisis and insisted that, while France and Germany remained an "accelerating" force of the EU, "it can also be the brake if it's not in step. Hence the need for Franco-German coherence".
Meanwhile European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said on the eve of the summit that failure to forge a closer union was "nourishing populist debates ultimately to put an end to this project".
Speaking at the European People's Party congress in Bucharest, he said: "It is clear that the euro area needs to evolve to a fiscal union....and ultimately a political union."