COPENHAGEN — By early Saturday morning, the atmosphere at the European Union pavilion at the Bella Center had turned funereal.  A group of ashen-faced European negotiators sipped beer from bottles in dim light as crews began dismantling food stalls, television monitors and giant displays of the Union’s blue and gold flags.  Not far away, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, and Fredrik Reinfeldt, the prime minister of Sweden, which holds the bloc’s rotating presidency, were telling European leaders that to reach a strong global deal eventually, they would have to endorse the Copenhagen accord despite its shortcomings.  Brian Cowen, the Irish prime minister, had an air of grim resignation as he trudged out of that meeting shortly before 2 a.m.  “It’s less than what we wanted, but the process has to go on,” Mr. Cowen said.  And in what appeared to be a sharp reference to the wrangling between China, the United States and African countries that had blocked a more far-reaching accord, Mr. Cowen, as he headed for the exits, shouted: “Certainly it’s not Europe’s fault!”  Mr. Reinfeldt said President Barack Obama had been “very constructive” at the talks, creating a basis for the accord by smoothing over the dispute with China over an international monitoring system for emissions.  Still, the Swedish leader hinted that the Europeans had been caught badly off guard.  Mr. Reinfeldt said he had gotten his first signals that a deal had been struck while still engrossed in meetings.  “We had very tough negotiations two and a half hours after I read on my mobile telephone that we were already done,” he said.  If there was a rush by the Americans to announce the deal, he said, it appeared to have been because of bad weather in the United States.  “He was in a hurry home, he said, because they were closing the airport in Washington,” Mr. Reinfeldt said of Mr. Obama. “There was a snowstorm coming in.”  Ed Miliband, the British secretary of state for climate and energy, acknowledged Europeans’ disappointment in the talks’ result but said he was “absolutely not in the blame game.” Rather, he said, negotiating strategies needed to be examined.  Delaying discussion of the toughest issues until the final moments of the conference came close to dooming the chances of an accord, Mr. Miliband said. “My biggest frustration at this conference is not talking about substance, apart from the last day, frankly,” he said.  Mr. Miliband said the months of jockeying leading up to Copenhagen had resulted in some benefits.  “The process has been a nightmare, but the substance of the last year means you have ambitious targets from lots of countries,” he said.  He noted that Brazil, South Africa, India, China and Japan were among the nations that had proposed limits on their emissions before the talks.  “The success of this process has been the fact that it has concentrated minds and has made all the major players put numbers on the table,” Mr. Miliband said.  But he added: “I would have preferred a much more comprehensive agreement. I think going forward there are some difficult issues if emerging economies don’t want to be part of a legal treaty — which they obviously don’t — about what is the framework in which you operate. We do want a legal treaty, and we will be campaigning for it, but I think there are some difficult issues there.”  Jo Leinen, a German member of the European Parliament who led the chamber’s delegation, said Saturday that the talks “demonstrated the highly unsatisfactory and inefficient method of U.N. conferences” and that “deep reform of the decision-making in the framework of the United Nations” was “an urgent necessity.”  For European industry — which has long complained that policy makers in Brussels, by passing binding limits on emissions, have been moving too far ahead of the rest of the industrialized world — the result in Copenhagen could scarcely have been worse, according to one of its top representatives.
Caught off guard by the Copenhagen accord, European leaders felt pressure to back it even though they thought it did not go far enough and had a process in which they had little influence.