Constitutional thaw?

Nicolas Sarkozy this week confirmed his widely anticipated bid for the French presidency. He is campaigning in part on a commitment to a European 'mini-treaty' - an attempt to salvage the practical parts of the ill-fated European constitution. If he wins, as opinion polls continue to suggest he will, he would thus have a mandate to put France's name to such a document without the need to risk another 'non' in a second referendum. But what hope of a 'mini-treaty' across Europe as a whole?

If commitment to the European project is a prerequisite to reviving any element of the constitution, the signs from member states are not encouraging. Public support for the bloc is brittle and waning even in the newly acceded east, after Labour markets in the west failed to liberalise beyond Britain, Ireland and Sweden and nationalists and populists took power in Poland to Slovakia while Hungary and the Czech Republic succumbed to governmental paralysis. Unless these trends are reversed such states will join traditionally more eurosceptic older members like Britain in being unlikely to endorse a treaty promising yet deeper integration. Britain itself, despite never actually rejecting the original, looks ever less likely to accept a simple constitution-redux, as Gordon Brown replaces a greater Europhile in Tony Blair as Prime Minister, while David Cameron, a Conservative leader who still needs to burnish his Eurosceptic credentials after failing to fulfil a pledge to pull the party out of the European parliament's pro-integration EPP-ED bloc, waits in the wings.

All of which is a great shame, for the constitution contained much of necessity if the EU is to function coherently as a 25-and-counting member bloc in the 21st century. A 'mini-treaty' could create the post of a European foreign minister, and reform the ludicrous situation whereby every member state is guaranteed a commissioner in Brussels, which is set to subdivide the bureaucratic pie into 27 once Bulgaria and Romania join the club next year. If Europe is to regain the momentum needed to forge such a rationalising document, a catalytic first step would be to regain a sense of mission, and a mission, moreover, with which Britain and the recent arrivals could sympathise. One appropriate agenda has already supposedly been agreed upon, at Lisbon in 2000, when member states committed themselves to transforming the EU into "the world's most dynamic and competitive economy" by 2010. Yet little has been done to nurture the knowledge-based economy Lisbon promised, and the key Eurozone countries with their bloated public sectors continue to stagnate. With fragile coalition governments in Germany and Italy, however, it asks a lot of Angela Merkel or Romano Prodi to lead the way. Thus, if he serious about moving forward in Europe, not to mention getting to grips with long term unemployment in France itself, it falls to Nicolas Sarkozy to go further in his presidential platform than a promise of support for a new 'mini-treaty'. By putting his name to serious structural reform of the French economy now, he could claim a mandate to overrule the street protests which stymied Dominique de Villepin's sadly tepid CPE, re-establish the economic dynamism of his country, and pull Europe along with it.