The "period of reflection" is over. In the wake of the French and Dutch referendums two years ago the EU leaders decided to put institutional reform and the draft constitution on hold. Although approved by 18 member states to date, the constitution is clearly not viable in its present form, and the German presidency will now try at this week's European Council meeting to relaunch the process by salvaging what it can. Angela Merkel hopes the meeting will establish an intergovernmental conference this autumn to allow a limited renegotiation of the text for approval in December, and ratification by member states by mid-2009.
That ambitious timeframe, the Germans argue convincingly, will require acceptance that the difficult compromises on institutional reform and balance achieved in the current draft must be kept intact. These are the real meat of the constitution and are key to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the Union: a new semi-permanent EU president, the extension of majority voting, the upgrading of the Union's diplomacy through a minister for foreign affairs, and the slimming down of the commission to 18 (the jobs rotated equally through the member states over time).
The concern is that calling into question this first chapter in the draft may open a can of worms of competing national claims. Unfortunately that is not a view being taken in Warsaw whose insistence on raising its vote allocation is threatening to scupper the meeting.
Leaders will, however, almost certainly agree to jettison both the politically charged term "constitution" in favour of "treaty", and will revert to the old tried and tested approach, however cumbersome and inelegant, of drafting an amending treaty rather than one which replaces all that went before. The proposed minister for foreign affairs will lose his/her title, and the flag, anthem, and motto of the Union will lose their treaty standing, symbols as they all are of a traditional state. Such cosmetic changes, we are told, will reassure the public that a monster super-state is not being created.
The reformulation of the draft as an amending treaty will also make possible the deletion of the third chapter of the constitution, essentially a restatement of EU policies that is unnecessary if previous treaties remain extant. New clauses may also be proposed on global warming, energy security, enlargement, the Charter of Fundamental Rights (allowing the full chapter on the latter to be deleted from the draft), and extra rights for national parliaments.
For Ireland, a supporter of the current draft, the priority remains producing a text that can be sold in a referendum. Yet, in truth, and there will be little Taoiseach Bertie Ahern can do about it this week, a treaty stripped down largely to process and institutional reform will do little to inspire voters for whom the EU has become an abstraction with little impact, as they see it, on their lives. The possibility of a Nice rejection still remains.