25 June 2004	Friday	06 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425

LONDON: Suppose a champion athlete like Paula Radcliffe had to run 10km through a swamp before she even got to the starting line. This is Europe's position today.

If, after a bruising 30 months of national debates and referendums, the constitutional treaty finally comes into force at the end of 2006, Europe will only be at the starting line of every race that counts: the 100m sprint to provide a credible alternative to US unilateralism; the 1,000m race to foster reform in the wider Middle East before that region's troubles bring car bombs to all our front doors; the 5,000m to become competitive against the rising economic powers of Asia; the marathon we must start running now if we are to prevent global warming spiralling out of control.

It's the results of these big races, not the details of voting weights, the number of European commissioners or the apportionment of sovereignty, that will determine whether our children are more free, safe and prosperous in 20 years' time - which, in my book, is the main goal of politics.

The European Union is only a means to that end, not an end in itself. The institutional arrangements codified in the constitution are but a means to create those means.

Is there a thinking man or woman alive in Europe who is not depressed by the prospect of spending yet more years of bad- tempered debate on such mind-numbing details? There we shall be, the so-called "opinion-formers", squabbling over contorted paragraphs and wrestling with tabloid shibboleths.

Meanwhile, as the huge abstention rates in the European elections just showed, those whose opinions we are supposed to form have long since switched to another channel, to watch the football - or Paula Radcliffe winning the 5,000m in the European Cup. Who can blame them?

The constitution that emerged from the Brussels summit last weekend is not an inspiring document. It entirely lacks the simplicity, clarity and political poetry of great constitutions.

Its preamble, written by Valiry Giscard d'Estaing, is an embarrassment, especially when set beside that to the American Constitution. The whole thing is too long. It mixes first-order statements about rights and responsibilities with second-order legal arrangements and often vague policy aspirations.

On contentious issues, such as the requirements for qualified majority voting or the size of the European commission, it offers awkward compromises that make the EU more difficult, not easier, to explain to sceptical citizens. But it's the best constitution we've got.

It does not drastically alter the way the European Union works already. It should make some parts of the union function more effectively, despite the enlargement to 25 member states.

Most of the power stays with the member states, although their representatives can find themselves outvoted on a wider range of issues. With a European foreign minister and a single president of the European council, Europe will have more chance of saying something to which the US might actually listen.

These are modest gains; yet for 25 and more European states to cooperate so closely is already a triumph. The problem for those politicians who now have to "sell" the constitution to their bored or hostile voters is that the case for it depends on unprovable alternatives.

What, for example, if we had never had a European Union at all? Radical Eurosceptics, such as the UK Independence party, will claim we could have had a better Europe of sovereign, free, prosperous, closely cooperating democracies: a whole chocolate continent of big and little Switzerlands.

This is deeply implausible. For a clear majority of the present members of the EU, the return of freedom after dictatorship and the "return to Europe" have gone hand in hand. Being in the world's largest trading bloc has made us all richer. But you can never prove what would have happened if the EU had not existed. -Dawn/The Guardian News Service.