World View/Paul Gillespie: Three things should be avoided by the faint-hearted, according to Winston Churchill: watching a limb being amputated, a child being born - and a treaty being negotiated.
Once again European Union leaders are gathered for a long weekend of high and low politics in Brussels, with a great deal at stake for themselves and their nation-states and for the joint European project they are committed to make work.
Long-time observers recall Maastricht in December 1991, when John Major triumphantly declared "Game, set and match" at four in the morning after securing Britain's opt-out from the euro and the social chapter. Or Amsterdam, at a similar hour, when exhausted Dutch leaders announced the end of a less ambitious treaty.
And Nice, the worst of all, when after four days and nights Jacques Chirac proclaimed a deal enabling EU enlargement to take place on the basis of maintaining a rough political parity between France and Germany.
Brian Cowen observes that it seems the moon must be up before the smoke-filled rooms can function politically. But Nice above all exemplifies Churchill's warning about such statecraft. As Bertie Ahern put it at a pre-summit briefing here, "Nice was a damned disaster. If you do the style that happened in Nice where you break and go back and forward it drives people mental. In Nice at the end of the day you were almost waiting for someone to throw a punch."
Then, of course, the leaders had to go off and sell it, he and most of the accession states, in bruising referendums. So it is not surprising that Nice should be the ghost at the end of this latest EU negotiating feast.
On this occasion leaders are trying to complete "a treaty establishing a constitution for Europe". Nice left many dissatisfied and had at least four "leftovers" deemed necessary if a greatly enlarged EU is to function successfully.
They were summarised and elaborated upon two years ago by the Laeken declaration, also in Brussels, which gave a mandate to the Convention on the Future of Europe. It was asked to frame proposals on three subjects: "How to bring citizens closer to the European design and the European institutions; how to organise politics and the European political area in an enlarged Union; and how to develop the Union into a stabilising factor and a model in the new world order."
The declaration also asked whether the simplification and reorganisation of the treaties should not pave the way for the adoption of a constitutional text.
The convention was a radical innovation, compared to previous treaty negotiations, drawing in national parliamentarians and interest groups and concluding with a draft treaty establishing a constitution.
Remarkably, most of its text has survived the last few months of intensive inter-governmental talks. This weekend's efforts to find agreement are on that basis, and amendments will not change its fundamental format.
It is in three parts. The first sets out the definition and objectives of the EU, dealing with such issues as fundamental rights and citizenship, institutions, decision-making, common foreign policy, security and defence, finances, the EU's neighbours and membership.
I got through it in an hour on the flight to Brussels yesterday morning. It is a perfectly readable document for anyone interested in political affairs. Part 2 is the text of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Union, drawn up by national parliamentarians and now to become part of the treaty. Part 3, much the longest, spells out the policies and functioning of the EU in detail, boiling down the texts of several different treaties into one.
The draft has had a very mixed reception, in terms of style, political process and outcome. It has been mocked unjustly as unreadable and far too long. But the first and second parts are the size of most constitutional documents, with similar subject matters; while the third has to exist so long as the EU is a treaty-based organisation between sovereign states.
The alternative is the far more opaque jungle of multiple treaty texts; at least this one is fully cross-referenced. Such documents are rarely best-sellers, even in national settings.
More ambitious constitutionalists mock the grandiose rhetoric brought to the convention's work by its president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, compared to its failure to catch the imagination of the European public, citizens and media.
This was no Philadelphia, they say. The outcome lacks the finalité politique constitution-making requires and is more like another messy treaty compromise which will need to be revisited.
The opportunity was missed to engage citizens in a constitutional imperative, for example, by mandating the next European Parliament to act as a constituent assembly for an enlarged and more powerful Europe, or by arranging an EU-wide referendum or national referendums on one day, to ratify it.
All this may be true, but does it not make too large assumptions about the nature of the EU? It is not a nation, or a state with a monopoly on the use of force; it has no fixed territory, nor one single centre of sovereignty. If it is, as political scientists argue, a novel and unprecedented entity, a "multi-layered and poly-centred polity", then it cannot be judged by traditional criteria.
Rather may this treaty herald a new kind of perpetual, open-ended Philadelphia, in which governance and policies are built continuously as the EU adapts to internal and external challenges. It would, in that perspective, mark a decisive transition to a more flexible means of adaptation. But the member-states retain control over its momentum.
The EU does not need a political identity like national ones, nor does it have the means to build one. It can operate with an "identity-lite" appropriate to its tasks, and additional to, not substituting for, the national, local or regional.
A European "demos" will be built by transnational political practice necessitated by growing interdependence.
This is strongly disputed by critics who say the EU constitution would supplant national ones in the name of legitimising a new power structure based on France and Germany.