Posted Sunday, June 15, 2003; 14.29BST

	eu 2004-Committee Pay attention! Constitution approaching

The E.U. wants more clout — so why do so few Europeans seem to care? A recent poll commissioned by Elcano Royal Institute, a Madrid think tank, found that only 1% of Spaniards even know what the constitutional convention is meant to do. In Britain, lurid tabloid headlines like blueprint for tyranny have ensured that people are generally opposed to the constitution, but most newspapers on the Continent have run small articles on the debate.

That's partly because these deliberations have been so arid and technocratic. This constitution is the child of a slow, bureaucratic process rather than a sudden cataclysm. Revolutions provide a highly charged atmosphere for constitution writing (think of the U.S. and, more recently, Poland). Wars will do nicely, too, as they did for the Weimar Constitution of Germany in 1919 and — far more successfully — for the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany. Constitutions normally mark a reshuffling of the deck for a society that knows it's in dire need of new governance — or of governance, period.

Not this one. The driving force behind the new constitution is the need to rationalize some of the E.U.'s 29,000 pages of legislation and streamline its byzantine bureaucracy and decision-making processes before it becomes even more bloated as 10 new members join next year, with others bound to follow. No wonder grandiose comparisons to America's Founding Fathers sound forced. "Our work compares favorably with that of the Philadelphia Convention," said Alain Lamassoure, a French member of the Convention. "They were 13, but we were 28, and they could solve their British problem using methods that we currently deplore."

Unlike America's founding document, the new draft constitution did not follow a crisis, but it may yet cause one. Not all of the eight countries that have promised to submit the final document to referendums are sure to approve it, and E.U. officials can't say now how they would handle a no vote. If it passes, the constitution could bring the E.U. up from an abstraction and into the consciousness of every European. But to really make a difference for ordinary citizens — the people who run away when the E.U. is mentioned — the constitution has to answer three key questions about what the European Union is, and what it should become.

SHOULD THE E.U. HAVE A COMMON FOREIGN POLICY?
A large majority of people think it should. A poll taken by Eurobarometer, the E.U.'s polling institute, in March and April found that two-thirds of E.U. citizens favor a single European foreign policy, and almost three-quarters want a common defense and security policy; only in the U.K. does support for either fall below 50%. With the diplomatic divisions over Iraq still fresh, it's easy to forget that the E.U. is already supposed to have a common policy — at least in principle. Former NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana has been High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy since 1999, during which time he's traveled frequently to the Middle East, helped avert civil war in Macedonia and held chats with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell several times a week. In practice, however, E.U. policy has been bitterly divided and all too often driven into the ditch by the clashing political interests of individual member nations.

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