BRUSSELS: A British consultant has been hired to help Silvio Berlusconi, the mercurial and gaffe-prone Italian prime minister, start a complex and highly sensitive series of multilateral negotiations on Saturday in Rome over the power and sovereignty of the European Union’s first constitution. Months of tough negotiations lie ahead before the new treaty can be completed. Steady nerves and a readiness to do deals will be needed to rewrite the rulebook.

Britain’s prime minister Tony Blair, the French president, Jacques Chirac, and the German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, will be leading the big countries backing a permanent president to drive the EU’s economic and political agenda and replace the current system of six-month rotating stints.

But Europe’s “smalls” object strongly to plans to downsize and streamline the European commission — the supranational guardian of the general interest, and their best defence against the big guys.

Then there is the awkward squad of Spain and the largest of the new intake, Poland, both ambitious, tough and medium-sized countries fighting hard to preserve what they have.

Mr Berlusconi and colleagues are not starting from scratch: they already have a draft constitutional treaty, drawn up over 17 months by Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president, and his 105-member European convention.

The convention’s broad approach is likely be adopted by all 25 governments — which have accepted it as a “good basis”, amid warnings that seeking to renegotiate it will open up a Pandora’s box and risk destroying the whole delicately balanced deal.

Now, though, it is back behind closed doors for leaders, ministers and diplomats to hammer out the final details. As well as a full-time president, Mr Giscard’s draft creates a foreign minister to boost Europe’s presence on the world stage, a charter of fundamental rights and a more structured defence policy.

It also makes it harder to wield national vetoes that cause gridlock, raising sensitive issues of the balance between the nation state and the union.

Three key issues are unlikely to be resolved until the very end. Spain and Poland are determined to hold on to the complex voting arrangements agreed at the ill-tempered Nice summit three years ago, which gave them almost as much weight as the biggest member states.

Most others want to adopt Mr Giscard’s simple solution, under which a vote would be won by a simple majority of countries representing 60 per cent of the total population. Germany, still the EU’s paymaster, has hinted heavily that stubbornness over voting could affect decisions when the union’s next multi-annual budget is drawn up.

“We don’t yet know what Warsaw and Madrid will want in return,” said one seasoned diplomat. The next tough item involves the European commission. Mr Giscard proposed that the supranational executive should have just 15 full members — ending the practice of one for every country. That would be efficient and simple — but bad news for all those Finns, Danes and Slovenes who want a clear national link with the commission and reject the idea of a two-tier body. Romano Prodi, the commission’s current president, has vowed to resist this too.

Last — but by no means least — comes God. Poland, Slovakia and Italy want a reference in the constitution to Europe’s Christian values or heritage. France and others counter that multiculturalism would require references to Islam and Judaism, so the simplest solution is to avoid religion altogether.And another potentially serious difficulty looms even when everything has been agreed. Governments are painfully aware that Europe’s citizens have little patience with constitutional debates — which could pose a real problem when the time comes to ratify the treaty.

Parliaments may be relied upon to pass it, but there is no guarantee for the referendums that will be held in at least six countries, including Denmark and Ireland, who have said no to big European questions before. With the prospect that just one failure could bring the whole edifice crashing down, there is a real sense of pressure as the EU’s grand bargaining exercise gets under way.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service