EU president seeks bigger global role for Europe

* EU president wants to focus on key international partners

* Summits on world governance, climate, energy to be held

By Julien Toyer

BRUSSELS, June 30 (Reuters) - The European Union should focus on cultivating ties with major partners such as China and India if it wants to gain influence in the world, and spend less time and resource on smaller nations, senior diplomats say.

With the EU in the process of setting up its own diplomatic service, with missions in more than 100 countries, attention needs to be paid to major trading partners with geopolitical clout, they say.

"We've got political dialogues covering almost any country of the world, but most of these dialogues have become purely formal, are time-consuming and bring very poor results," said a senior diplomat close to Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council of EU leaders.

"What he (Van Rompuy) wants now is to choose a few of them and give them clear content, detailed objectives and more clout," the diplomat said this week. President Barack Obama's cancellation of an EU-U.S. summit scheduled for May was taken as a wake-up call in Europe, he said.

Diplomats say the EU want to send the message to China, India and Russia that when it comes to climate, terrorism or energy issues, it is better to speak to the bloc as a whole rather than cherry-pick individual member states.