What happened at Amsterdam?

Spain's Alphonso X is supposed to have commented: "Had I been around at the Creation I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe". A bit like the Irishman who when asked for directions says: "If I wanted to go there, sure, I wouldn't be starting from here."

And no one designing the European Union tabula rasa would have dreamt of coming up with the Amsterdam Treaty. The "ever-closer union of the peoples of Europe" owes in truth more to the ungainly, rambling family home to which successive generations add eccentric extensions in all directions than to the harmony of an architect's pure conception.

That said, which is more comfortable? Incrementalism has served the integration of Europe reasonably well - political reality dictates that it is by piecemeal change we advance, or we do not advance at all.

But the huge problem of explaining and communicating the nuances of the Amsterdam Treaty to the public is directly related both to that complexity of the inherited structure and to the failure of political will manifested by heads of government at the final hurdle. The result is that it is far easier to describe what has not happened at Amsterdam than what has.

The failure to agree a significant extension of majority voting is the significant feature of this treaty - the dog that didn't bark. Much of the rest is the elaboration of complicated mechanisms designed to mitigate the malign influence of the national veto on efficient decision-making: flexibility provisions severely hedged with conditions, opt-ins and opt-outs, constructive abstention, distinctions between strategy and implementing decisions, and a more restrictive definition of when the veto can be used, the so-called "emergency brake".

The Institute of European Affairs, and particularly the editor of this book, Ben Tonra, have made a brave and largely successful attempt to steer the citizen through this maze and to put the changes in a broader context. Bridget Laffan, Paul Gillespie and John Palmer deserve particular mention in the latter regard.

And, as usual, it is emphatically so of Patrick Keatinge's chapters on foreign policy and security and defence - the clarity he has brought to this dialogue of the deaf improves its abysmal quality. (Unfortunately, a graphic at the end of his pieces purporting to show Europe's overlapping security structures has Ireland outside the EU but in the WEU!). Diarmuid Rossa Phelan injects a surprisingly Eurosceptical note for an IEA publication with a chapter on ratification that has been given extra relevance by the row over the referendum question - an old IEA hand went as far as describing him to this correspondent as "the cuckoo in the nest".

Mr Phelan warns that the Constitution designed "for a sovereign democratic and independent state" was "enacted in part with the very purpose of giving greater legal force and political emphasis to the separation of the state from foreign control". The latest European treaty amendment just emphasises, he argues, the growing "incoherence" between the national constitution and European law.

It is an argument that needs to be made and answered properly by those who say the day of the nation state is passing. But his contention that Amsterdam stands alongside Maastricht as among the most radical extensions of community powers in the history of European integration is almost perverse and smacks of a campaigner already on the trail. The treaty also "arguably marks the end of the constitutional competence to remain neutral", he says, by removing the legal necessity for a further referendum ahead of agreement on a common defence union. Yet it appears that the Government's advice is that exercising future options does require specific referendum authorisation, hence the current confusion over the wording of the referendum question. Whatever the truth, that uncertainty has no place in a constitutional amendment.

Patrick Smyth is European Correspondent of The Irish Times