LONDON: The European Union is a success. Its 25 members are discussing proposals for a new, carefully crafted constitution that will make it at once more governable and more democratic — a pipedream even 18 months ago. Its new currency reaches new highs against the dollar. It is about to take over peacekeeping in Bosnia from Nato. It is a fast-developing, positive and progressive force.

And yet it doesn’t seem like that. This is happening almost despite Europe’s leaders. Britain’s Euro-scepticism is so ingrained that nobody speaks up for how inspiring and noble European integration actually is. That for Europe to stand together is more important than ever, given the ambitions of the conservative revolutionaries now running the United States.

But then, neither do Gerhardt Schroeder, Silvio Berlusconi or Jacques Chirac. These are times when national leaders feed their publics a populist diet of the sanctity of national sovereignty and suspicion of the foreign ‘other’ — and citizens are more suspicious than ever of appeals for Europe — witness the scale of Sweden’s ‘no’ vote to the euro. If there is a virus spreading across Europe, it seems more Iain Duncan Smith’s assertion last week of the mystic privileges of the national ‘Volk’ and defence of the ‘country he loves’ from initiatives such as the European constitution than a belief in making common cause to serve common interests and values.

Berlusconi has promised to fight for Italian interests, Schroeder has accused the European Commission of being ‘anti- German’ and Paris carefully ensures it does nothing that might risk its public accusing it of putting obligations to Europe before those to France. Its row last week with the EC over casually breaking (for the fourth consecutive year) the terms of the growth and stability pact rules governing the size of budget deficits is a classic indicator of the current European mood.

I am a critic of the pact and believe it has long outlived its purpose; the notion that governments should pledge to keep their budget deficits within a strait-jacket of 3 per cent of national output or suffer escalating fines whatever the wider economic circumstances struck me as absurd when the pact was first mooted — and is even more absurd today. The big economies should not be self-defeatingly cutting spending and raising taxes, thus worsening Europe’s sluggish economy, just to meet the terms of the pact. Both Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission, and Vice-President Pascal Lamy have spoken out against it; they are right.

What should be happening is that France and Germany, with budget deficits exceeding the pact’s limits, should be leading an intelligent discussion about changing or abolishing it. Instead, they choose the easier course of doing just what they liked. This might undermine the European process, but what comes first is their national concern rather than constructing sensible rules with which they can comply.

The EC does not want to censure France, knowing that it is intellectually and economically wrong to do so — and that anyway it will be ignored. On the other hand, it can hardly ignore the provisions of a key economic statute, even if it is silly and in need of reform. So when France shed a crocodile tear last Wednesday and promised to do better in future — although carefully promising no specific action, merely offering the fig leaf of compliance — it was gratefully received by the EC.

The Commission delivered a stern lecture that everyone knows is meaningless, and the crisis seems to have passed. An EU statute has been enforced; the Commission has done what it had to; and France’s policy is completely unchanged. It has cocked a snook at Europe and won the necessary domestic plaudits.

But the crisis has not passed; it has as deepened. Europe is weaker. EU processes are revealed as a sham. There is plainly one rule for the big states and another for the small, as EU Commissioner Fritz Bolkenstein said bitterly last week; the smaller countries could not get away with the approach that France has adopted. They are even more convinced that the EC does too little to protect their interests compared with those of the big states. The atmosphere is rancorous and unconstructive.

I got a small taste of the current mood at a seminar this weekend on European solidarity — or rather the lack of it — in Vienna, organized by the Institute for Human Sciences. The argument that there are common European values that potentially underpin European solidarity gets short shrift. Either European values are indistinguishable from American values such as a commitment to democracy and human rights, so the proposition is meaningless, comes the reply, or they are so elusive and incapable of being articulated that they produce no meaningful European solidarity. When Prince Schwarzenberg, the institute’s president, said that European values, given the experience of the past century, would sit easily in Hell, there was a widespread nodding of heads.

But what makes the terms of the debate in Europe different from in Britain is that this scepticism sits side by side with passionate idealism; it is just because of the experience of war, communism and fascism that the claims of the European ideal cannot be so easily shrugged off.

Last Friday Danuta Hubner and Noelle Lenoir, the Polish and French Ministers for Europe, joined the German Christian Democrat Elmar Brok — chairman of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Human Rights Committee — in making the case for European integration simply because it is better for nations to collaborate than not, and because citizens thus get a better purchase on events and more sovereignty. For every Schwarzenberg talking the language of Iain Duncan Smith, there is still somebody prepared to put the European case — and out of this tension comes political momentum and genuine creativity.

Europeanism always ebbs and flows — and there is little doubt that at the moment it is ebbing — but I return to London more confident about the robustness of the EU’s underlying structures, and its chances of long-term success, than I was when I left.

It is about to absorb 75 million people from Eastern Europe as members; it is about to agree a workable constitution for 25 European states: the show is still on the road. It has its critics and its problems — but Schroeder, Chirac and Berlusconi lead countries where there are still powerful pro-European constituencies prepared to make the European case: they are careful to campaign against Brussels and not the idea of Europe. Chirac may snub Europe over France’s budget deficit, but powerful voices in France regret he has done so — and want a better system of European rules that need not be blatantly ignored. That is what is different. Enough Europeans still want to keep the project moving that it retains powerful traction. Would that there were more in Britain prepared to do the same.—Dawn/The Observer-Guardian News Service.