Czech Republic: Czech president Vaclav Klaus has warned that the EU constitution is "empty and bad" and "a danger for democracy and freedom in Europe".
Mr Klaus, one of Europe's best-known EU critics, called for a constitutional referendum in the Czech Republic, calling the EU "a post-democratic institution".
"I'm afraid of Europe," said Mr Klaus to Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.
"I am very sure the majority of Europeans understand what I say and have similar worries. Sadly the debate over the constitution is in the hands of people, in the hands of Europeanists, who have tied their future to the EU.
"These people need international organisations like the EU. It is a perfect forum for them to receive work, salary, profession and reputation. For these people who breakfast in Venice, lunch in Dublin and dine in Stockholm in the evening, it's a case of Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. For them it is a paradise that they have to defend."
Mr Klaus said he differentiated clearly between European integration, which he favours, and the deeper European unification he opposes and which he sees as "tied to Jacques Delors and the Maastricht Treaty".
Increasing EU competences fail to address the absence of a "European people", he said, and would do nothing to create one. Former communist countries had, he said, already fought against the idea that "more regulation from above is needed, the more complicated the system".
"The EU constitution and its instruments are the wrong solutions for the problems associated with enlargement," he said.
The president's views are the opposite of the pro-constitution government, something he said was not necessarily a problem.
"I only hope that the democratic level in Europe is still high enough to put a Yes and a No opposite each other. To say a priori that only a Yes is possible and allowed. That is the tragedy of today's European Union."
Europe had a wide palette of alternatives to the two extremes of a closer Europe with a constitution and a free-trade zone, he said, with "the utopia to return to the state before the Maastricht Treaty".
Mr Klaus said he opposed further deepening of the EU but supported a quick enlargement to include "Turkey, Morocco, Ukraine, Kazakhstan - the more the merrier."