Set for 2006: e pluribus Europe

Wherever you walk in this city's eastern district, construction crews are busy on earthmovers, cranes and facades of scaffolding as they raise another edifice to house new European Union offices.

This weekend, EU leaders will inspect the central pillar of a different kind of architecture: a draft European constitution that its framers hope will give stability and strength to the Continent's political structure as the Union prepares to expand eastward.

In 224 pages, the weighty tome sets out for a generally bemused public exactly who decides what and how in the European Union, weighing the interests of individual member states against its supranational ambitions.

"The result is not perfect, but it is more than could have been hoped for," said Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president who chaired the prickly 16-month convention that drew up the constitution as he unveiled it last week. "We have sown the seeds from which, in time, a real people of Europe, a European demos will sprout."

Europe has been tied together economically through its common market, but with the new document, hopes are that a common sense of citizenship and identity will emerge among the Continent's 450 million people.

Mr. Giscard d'Estaing will present the document to a European summit that opened Thursday evening in Salonika, Greece, attended by heads of government from the 15 current EU members and from the 10 - mostly East European - nations that will join next year. Their initial review will pave the way for an intergovernmental conference later this year that could amend the draft.

Emerging from months of painstaking negotiations between large countries and small ones; between advocates of a federal system and those more attached to the nation state; and between representatives of governments, European civil servants, and parliamentarians, the text is a compromise.

Though it satisfies nobody fully, it proved acceptable to almost all the 105 delegates to the convention.

"This document does explicitly base itself on the hybrid character of the EU, which is a union of states and of people," says Peter Ludlow, a veteran commentator on EU affairs. "It is both intergovernmental and supranationalist."

The constitution offers something both to those seeking a closer union, and to those jealous of national sovereignty, but it seems unlikely to end the permanent and often acrimonious debate between the two sides.

Though the word "federal" was excised from the draft in the face of British complaints, changes in the EU's voting system that will make it harder for any one country to block a common initiative clearly expand the authority of EU institutions.

Since the European Parliament is the only one of those institutions to be directly elected, this worries skeptics like Jens-Peter Bonde, a Danish delegate to the convention. "Now we have a constitution like the Americans made in 1787," he says caustically. "But the one thing we missed out was democracy."

Others would have liked to see member states stripped even further of their ability to veto EU plans, fearing that the Union could be rendered impotent if it lies at the mercy of 25 individual governments.

Page: 1 | 2