Where next on the constitution?
How seriously should we take the collapse of efforts to agree a European constitution? At the moment the consensus in Brussels is pretty black. Even the arch-federalists - who are normally incurable optimists - seem depressed and almost unbalanced. There is even wild talk from fairly eminent people in Brussels of "kicking the Spanish and Poles" out of the EU. Elmar Brok, a prominent German member of the convention that wrote the draft document, called the collapse of the Brussels summit a "disaster." Andrew Duff, a British Liberal Democrat, issued a widely ignored call for the convention to reconvene and put pressure on national governments to agree a deal. The Brok-Duff duo rushed off to Dublin at the beginning of the Irish presidency to urge Bertie Ahern to immediately convene a series of meetings to restart negotiations. But the Irish told them that this would be precisely the wrong course of action. They prefer a cooling-off period and some quiet diplomacy to establish if there might still be room for a deal.
They may get a pleasant surprise. For the collapse of the talks was provoked by a dispute over a very narrow issue - the voting weights of Spain and Poland. And the Brussels negotiations were abandoned before the Spanish and Poles were put under any real pressure. Diplomats from both countries had indicated that they were prepared to compromise and the Poles were expecting a long night's negotiating. Their preferred option - delaying the implementation of the new population-based voting system until 2014 - was not acceptable to the Germans. But who knows what would have happened if Silvio Berlusconi had allowed real negotiations to get underway? As it was, the Italian prime minister joked that he would not allow the discussions to carry on into Sunday morning because he needed to be free to watch AC Milan in the final of the World Club Championship. (At least, people assumed he was joking.)
It is possible that as the Irish work the phones in preparation for the EU summit they will be chairing in March, they will discover that the real stumbling block is France. At the Brussels summit it was Jacques Chirac who seemed the least willing of all the leaders present to enter into a marathon negotiation. "He was talking about calling the whole thing off and going home almost as soon as we arrived," recalls one participant. Some theorists suggest that the French might actually prefer to see the constitutional negotiations fail, since that might allow them to revive their own dream - a Franco-German hard core forging ahead from the rest of the union (see Peter Ludlow's account on page 38). If Bertie Ahern discovers that there is a German-Spanish-Polish compromise to be found, the key question becomes whether Germany would be willing to take part in an exercise aimed at isolating France and forcing Chirac to accept a compromise. The French will be hoping that their "special relationship" will mean that Germany would baulk at any such exercise. The French may even be taking precautionary steps to shore up relations, by inviting Gerhard Schr?der to the 60th anniversary of the D-day landings. German exclusion from the 50th anniversary was a particularly sore point in Bonn last time around.
Gisela who?
The apostasy of Gisela Stuart, the British representative on the 13-person presidium which drafted the constitution, provoked a predictable sensation back in Britain. The Times even claimed - ludicrously - that Stuart's Fabian Society pamphlet, which argued that the "convention was riddled with imperfections and moulded by a largely unaccountable European elite, set on a particular outcome from the very start," had caused the failure of the Brussels summit. Sad to say, however, it was barely noticed by the press outside Britain and hardly mentioned at the summit. Stuart's fellow conventioneers, however, did notice and were genuinely startled by the tone of her pamphlet. John Bruton, the former Irish prime minister, who was a fellow member of the presidium, claims that he had not realised how fed up Stuart was, adding, "She seems to have developed some sort of complex about Giscard." Jens-Peter Bonde, the veteran Danish Eurosceptic, says that he agrees with many of Stuart's arguments, but notes with a furrowed brow, "Whenever I talked to her during the convention, she was defending what was going on."
The answer to the riddle seems to be that Stuart has simply changed her mind, now that she is spending more time in Birmingham than Brussels. When she first arrived at the convention, she seemed mildly overawed to find herself in such august company. For a former junior health minister to be suddenly working in a small group alongside ex-presidents and prime ministers must have been a startling experience. Indeed Stuart once told your diarist that it was such a privilege to watch great minds like Val?ry Giscard d'Estaing and Giuliano Amato at work, that she would "pay money" to do it. Familiarity, however, evidently bred contempt. Stuart's pamphlet is full of jabs at Giscard and the French. Neither does she seem too fond of Giscard's British chief of staff, John Kerr - who at one tense point in the discussions apparently passed her a note advising her to stop baiting the former French president.
