EU stares into the void without constitution

The European Union's ambitious drive for a constitution to strengthen integration lay in ruins yesterday after summit talks collapsed just five months before the bloc is set to expand into eastern Europe.

Poland and the Czech Republic warned against Franco-German talk of pressing ahead with a "two-speed Europe" while Britain said the breakdown of negotiations to devise a new rulebook for a union of 25 nations would have little effect.

EU leaders on Saturday aborted a summit due to approve the landmark charter - two years in the making - when a clash over voting power pitting giants France and Germany against Spain and Poland proved insuperable.

Diplomats said Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller rejected a final offer to delay the introduction of a reformed voting system until 2014, prompting France, Germany and Britain to call a premature end to the negotiations.

Some leaders fear the EU now faces a crisis of governance. French President Jacques Chirac said a "pioneer group" of states may forge ahead with closer integration in economics, defence and crime-fighting. But Poland cautioned against this.

"Our philosophy in the discussion is for the enlarged Union to develop jointly, with the same speed over the entire area and not only among the chosen ones," Polish President Aleksandr Kwasniewski told a news conference.

The summit breakdown capped a traumatic year in which Europeans were bitterly split over war in Iraq, EU budget rules were bent, Sweden voted against joining the euro and Britain delayed indefinitely a referendum on the same question.

While European Parliament leaders warned of a crisis of public confidence in the EU, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw tried to play down the significance of the impasse.

"Life is going to go on despite these difficulties," he told BBC television.

Most leaders avoided open recrimination in the aftermath of the debacle, but the blame game started in the European media with some pointing the finger at Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency.

"The person most responsible for the disaster has been... (Mr) Berlusconi, who has facile and bad jokes but is useless at conducting a complex multilateral negotiation," influential Spanish daily El Pais thundered yesterday.

The Italians pulled the plug on the talks after being told a compromise was impossible.

Germany and France led countries backing a new voting system based more on population size. Spain and Poland fought to keep the existing system which gives them weighted votes out of proportion to their populations.

It will be up to Ireland, which takes over the EU presidency on January 1, to try to find a way forward. However, with Spanish and European Parliament elections due next year, some leaders said full negotiations might not resume until 2005.

In the meantime the Union will not only have to absorb 10 new members in May 2004, but also launch fraught debate on its future budget, with an angry Germany already indicating it might not be so generous with its handouts. New member states from the former Communist bloc are banking on substantial assistance from the next budget, but Czech Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla said he feared the constitution deadlock might cloud the financial negotiations.

"There will be problems both from a financial perspective and in many other ways," Mr Spidla told reporters. In the absence of a new charter, the existing Nice treaty will continue to apply with its complex weighted voting system giving Spain and Poland almost as many votes as Germany.

Pessimists predict decision-making gridlock once the bloc enlarges to a 25-nation bloc with 450 million citizens.

Other reforms in the constitution, such as an EU foreign minister to represent the bloc on the world stage, and a simplification of legislative procedures, are also on ice.

"The union has lost its soul," Italy's La Repubblica daily wrote. "The outcome...could not have been more disastrous."