By ELAINE SCIOLINO, New York Times, June 15, 2003

BRUSSELS, June 12 It will be much less than a United States of Europe. But
it will be more than the distillation of five decades of treaties into one
document.

For 16 months, Europe's most important and exclusive club has struggled to
draft its first constitution. The process has been awkward and
unpredictable, ambitious and timid, as delegates from the 15 member nations
of the European Union and the 10 that are to join next year fight to
protect their countries' national interests even as they agree to cede bits
of sovereignty.

Philadelphia it ain't.

The founding fathers came together in 1787 for a Constitutional Convention
to forge a document that created a national identity and institutionalized
the sovereignty of the American people in one nation-state. The 105
delegates who made up the Convention on the Future of Europe tried to do
something much more modest: codifying common ground among long-established
states that will give their union more of a logical structure and perhaps
more power as they expand eastward.

"Until now, Europe was mainly associated with a common market," Ana
Palacio, Spain's foreign minister and a delegate representing her
government, said in an interview. "Now Europe will be more and more a place
of citizenship. Now people will associate Europe with a constitution."

Indeed, one article in the draft constitution states, "Every national of a
member state shall be a citizen of the union." When the union expands, that
means a mega-Europe of 450 million citizens, larger than any population
mass except for China and India, and an economy of more than $9 trillion,
close to that of the United States.

The proposed constitution also states that European Union law will have
primacy over that of member states. It simplifies voting rules and spells
out areas like trade policy in which the union will have full authority and
other areas to be shared with the member states, including justice,
transportation and economic and social policy.

It will also set up a new structure for an organization that was created
for only 6 states and will soon have 25, with two permanent presidents, one
foreign minister, a stronger administrative arm and a Parliament with
expanded power to pass more legislation.

But for many participants in the process, including Giuliano Amato, a
former Italian prime minister and a constitutional law expert who is one of
two vice presidents of the convention, the proposed constitution is lacking
because it fails to create a common foreign and security policy.

"I'm not entirely satisfied," he said in an interview. "Too many member
states are defending themselves instead of sharing power at the European
level to make things better. It's each state beyond the constitution.
That's why I'm not even sure we are entitled to call it a constitution."

[On Friday, despite deep disagreements within the delegation, Valéry
Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president who is the convention's
president, told the final plenary session in Brussels that the convention
had adopted a historic first draft. The forum rose for the union's anthem,
Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," and toasted their endeavor with Champagne.]

With over 400 articles, the constitution is very much a work in progress.
Mr. Giscard d'Estaing will present it to a summit meeting of the member
heads of state in Greece next week. Then, in October, it will go into
intergovernmental review, in which each member state has the right to
demand changes. Each parliament including those of next year's 10 newcomers
must ratify the document before it comes into force. Some countries, like
Ireland and Denmark, will have national referendums as required by their
constitutions.

Even the pope has weighed in, lobbying thus far successfully for a specific
reference in the text to God and Europe's Christian heritage. After all,
the union's debt to the "civilizations of Greece and Rome" and later "by
the philosophical currents of the Enlightenment" are mentioned.

One of the main challenges to forming a more perfect European Union is one
that the American founding fathers confronted: how to find a way for big
states and small states to share power. France and other big states would
like a strong president from a large country who would reflect their views,
an idea that is anathema to the smaller states. Spain has vowed to fight to
retain complex voting rules that give it power disproportionate to its
population. (Spain has 27 votes in the union, only 2 fewer than Germany,
which has more than twice its population.)

Britain, which is skeptical about creating anything that looks like a
European state, is demanding the absolute right for any member nation to
veto decisions on foreign policy and taxation. Sometimes the big-small
divide is trumped by history. Germany, for example, is more inclined to
create a federal structure that would more closely resemble a United States
of Europe.

Another issue yet to be resolved is how to make the union more accountable
to its citizens by opening the decision-making process to public scrutiny.
"Right now, if my prime minister goes to Brussels and makes decisions
behind closed doors, I as a parliamentarian cannot hold him to account
because I only know the outcome, I don't know the process," said Gisela
Stuart, a member of the British delegation and of the European Parliament.
"It's the same with the ministers. They can tell me anything."

The new constitution will introduce a single foreign minister to give the
union a single actor on the international stage. It will also create a
permanent president, elected by member heads of state, who will serve up to
a five-year term to replace an unwieldy system in which the presidency
rotates among member states every six months.

Already there is intense speculation that Joschka Fischer, the German
foreign minister as well as a convention delegate, is eager for the job of
European foreign minister, even though it will probably not be created
before 2006. In recent weeks, he suddenly began to talk to Anglophone
journalists in English, and friends in Brussels said that he had asked them
where one might want to live there.

But there will continue to be two presidents indefinitely one for the
Council of the European Union, which consists of the heads of state of each
member country, another for the European Commission, a kind of executive
body that is more federal in nature and tends to take the smaller states
more seriously.

"You have an animal with two heads," said Mr. Amato, who favored a proposal
to merge the two presidencies in 2015. "Can an animal with two heads
survive for long?"

Mr. Giscard d'Estaing answered yes. "We still have seven monarchies in the
system," he said in an interview. "Some went through violent revolutionary
uprisings, like France. Some were under the Communist rule for 50 years, 70
years. So if we try for an oversimplified system it cannot work."

The draft constitution clearly states that "member states shall actively
and unreservedly support the union's common foreign and security policy in
a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity" and shall "refrain from action
contrary to the union's interests or likely to impair its effectiveness."

But that was language picked up from previous treaties and did not prevent
the union's deeply painful split on Iraq, which pitted countries like
France and Germany against Spain and Britain.

In a setback to those who wanted a more powerful union to help
counterbalance the United States when it comes to issues like foreign
policy, defense and taxation, each country even Luxembourg, with a
population of 440,000 has the right to veto any decision on foreign policy
and defense.

In one of the most ambitious expansions of the union's authority, the draft
constitution also would create a European public prosecutor to combat
terrorism and cross-border crimes like corruption, fraud and
people-trafficking. It simplifies legislative and legal procedures and
extends decision-making by majority vote, particularly in areas like
justice, law enforcement, immigration, asylum, energy and the annual
European Union budget.

The draft document also gives the union a "legal personality" that would
allow it to sign international treaties. A solidarity clause will require
member states to provide mutual assistance in case of terrorist attack. The
constitution also explicitly bans slavery (which the original United States
Constitution did not) and the death penalty (which was never banned in the
American Constitution). There is even an exit clause so that a member state
can secede from the union if it chooses.

On defense matters, the constitution pledges enhanced "structured
cooperation" for "more demanding tasks," but does not pledge military
resources for common purposes. Not surprisingly, no effort was made to coax
France and Britain to give up their seats as permanent members of the
United Nations Security Council.

Underscoring just how important national differences remain, the
constitution will be published in the union's 11 current official languages
21 when the 10 new members are admitted next year. There was no agreement
on what to call the new union once it has a constitution, so delegates
deleted the space in the draft's preamble where a new name would have appeared.

Even the inclusion of the dreaded word "federal" as a description of way
the union would function was found to be objectionable, particularly by
Britain. It was replaced by anodyne phrases like "united in an ever closer
fashion."

"The reality is that you have different visions for Europe," Jean-Luc
Dehaene, the former Belgian prime minister who is a convention vice
president, said in an interview. "So never fight for words. Just because
someone doesn't want to name the baby, you don't throw out the baby."

Even in the best of circumstances, the constitution will not come into
effect for years. So it will not solve the immediate problem of how to
absorb the 10 new countries next year. With the expansion, the population
of the European club will increase by 20 percent, but the average wealth
per person will fall by about 13 percent because most of the newcomers are
relatively poor.

That means that the new union, which started out as a club for the rich,
will have to find ways to balance the interests of a country like
Luxembourg, which has a per capita gross domestic product of nearly
$43,000, with a country like Lithuania, which has a per capita G.D.P. of
$3,200.

The constitution also will not do away with the 80,000 pages of European
Union laws and regulations that dictate what members can and cannot do in
some of the biggest and smallest areas of life. The rules govern such
things as how to make cars and cigarettes, how corporations carry out
acquisitions, how high a budget deficit a country is allowed to have, who
is a dentist, what preservatives can be used to make beer, how many hours a
week people can work and when hunters can shoot small birds.