May 17, 2003	Saturday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 14, 1424

BRUSSELS: Valery Giscard D’estang is offering Europe’s smallest countries a grand bargain if they back a permanent president of the enlarged EU as the centrepiece of the union’s new constitution.

Fifteen months since work began on this highly ambitious project, the endgame started on Thursday when the imperious former French president banged his gavel for silence in the European parliament.

The key to success, diplomats say, is to win support for a fulltime EU president by guaranteeing that all member states will be represented on the European commission. This classic trade-off lies at the heart of an emerging deal to rewrite Europe’s rulebook for years, perhaps decades, to come.

A final draft has to be ready in just two weeks and submitted to next month’s EU summit in Greece. “By then everyone will see the things they want and name their price,” said one senior figure.

The presidency — designed to boost efficiency and give Europe some badly needed clout on the world stage — is the biggest issue in the part of the treaty dealing with how power should be distributed.

Other proposals are for a foreign minister to help the union speak with one voice, and greater integration in sensitive areas such as asylum and cross-border crime.

Underlying all of these are thorny questions about the balance between member states and the commission, which initiates EU law in areas that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

The idea is to make all this simpler and more accessible for disenchanted citizens complaining of distant and impenetrable institutions.

But integrationists fear Mr Giscard — the president of the convention on the future of Europe which has been drawing up a blueprint for a new constitution — is pandering to big governments at the expense of europhile visionaries. Furious critics panned his presidency proposal as foolish and insensitive.

On the eve of battle, the main divide is between big and small member states, whose interests will diverge next May when the 10 newcomers join the club and start squabbling over who pays what towards the EU’s Euros 90bn annual budget.

“This week’s session will be about people repeating their declared positions,” predicted one influential insider. Stung by his critics, Mr Giscard has scaled back his bigger ambitions for the presidency, but he is still hoping to bring countries such as Austria, Finland and Portugal on side by dangling the prospect of them keeping their commissioners — ignoring calls from big member states that without downsizing, the supranational executive will seize up with 25 or more members.

Fierce debate is expected over the proposal for an EU foreign minister because it touches on national sovereignty, especially in Britain, which prefers the more anodyne title “external representative”.

Other Nato members such as Denmark and the Netherlands have teamed up with neutral states such as Ireland and Sweden to oppose Franco-German calls for a common defence policy.

Rattled by a sudden outbreak of Conservative attacks on the constitution, the Blair government is playing down the significance of the whole exercise.

But there is no doubt the convention will make proposals that Britain and others will reject: for a European public prosecutor, for example.

With almost every member state protecting some interest, no one quite knows what the final outcome of the convention will be. But Brussels is braced for what promises to be a riveting spectacle of public debate accompanied by coded signals and tense huddles in little groups.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.