A European polity is struggling to find an identity

World View: Only connect, said E.M. Forster. Two cheers for democracy, he added. And while he hated the idea of causes, he said that "if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country". Paul Gillespie writes.

His remarks came to mind yesterday here in Brussels as the Irish EU presidency strove to complete negotiations on the new constitutional treaty and broker the appointment of a president for the next European Commission. These mammoth political tasks overshadowed the busy and useful work it has done over the last six months on foreign policy, security and economic issues, which passed through virtually unamended.

How to connect the EU to its voting public has been a constant theme in commentary on the results of last week's European Parliament elections. As Pat Cox put it yesterday, Europe was "the constant missing ingredient state by state" in the campaigns. Such a disconnection is dangerous for any polity, especially for one in which at least nine states out of 25 will be holding referendums on the treaty.

Turnout in the elections was 45.3 per cent, with 158 million voters participating in the largest transnational elections ever. It was constant in the 15 older member-states - and up in several of them including Ireland. By contrast, in six of the new 10 members it was very low. Many of the contributions to the summit addressed the low turnout; implicit in them is a sensitivity to the anti-incumbent voting pattern so clearly visible in the results.

Abstention, as Cox put it, can usually be interpreted as indifference; but in some cases it has shifted towards Eurosceptic hostility - most clearly in Britain, where English nationalism has adopted the EU as a hostile other. The sentiment suffuses negotiations at this summit, provoking Jacques Chirac to say: "I'm afraid that we are delaying the creation of a Europe that will avoid being blocked by a single country."

Blair must play a nationalistic game for home consumption. He combines it with arguments for a more flexible European economy to handle global competition and a determination to block candidates for the Commission job whom he regards as anti-American on Iraq and NATO. Guy Verhofstadt is unacceptable to Blair for this reason arguably more than for his federalist sympathies.

Verhofstadt, it should be remembered, brokered the Laeken Declaration adopted at a Brussels summit in December 2001, which set the agenda for the Convention on the Future of Europe. He posed a series of questions for its work, most notably by asking how to bring citizens closer to the European design and how to organise politics and the European political area in an enlarged EU. Its 15-month deliberations, involving 105 members drawn from governments and parliaments of 28 states, the European Parliament, the Commission and nominated president and vice-presidents, produced the draft constitutional treaty on which this summit based its negotiations.

The substantial parts of the text in bold print represent changes made in the inter-governmental treaty negotiations over the last year; but, all told, the basic structure of the Convention text, and most of its content, have remained unchanged.

Contrary to Eurosceptic critics such as Chris Johns writing in this newspaper during the week, it radically simplifies and clarifies the previous treaties. It spells out the values and objectives of the EU, how its institutions should work, where competences lie, how decisions are made and which states are entitled to join. The straightforward 59-article Part I of the document spells these out in summary form and can be easily read in an hour or so. It is systematically cross-referenced to detailed treaty clauses in Part III and to the short 54 articles of the Charter of Fundamental Rights in Part II.

The agonising bargaining between governments here is about these detailed rules. It is contradictory for such critics to denounce the text's supposed obscurity and complexity without acknowledging that they arise precisely from the fact that it is a treaty between sovereign states. A federal constitution would be simpler, while many national ones do not need to be cluttered with such detail. But this reflects the EU's hybrid and original status intermediate between an international organisation and a state.

Such an entity must develop into a federal superstate or be dismantled back into an inter-governmental organisation, such critics say. It cannot have a political or democratic life of its own - what is known in political theory as a demos, the people making up a political community. Usually this has been confined to nations, whether by virtue of their primordial identifications, or their experience in building common markets, warfare, welfare and democratic participation. They draw the conclusion that only within national communities does there exist sufficient solidarity, mutual identification among people so that minorities consent to majority rule and obey a government so mandated. Since there is no European people there cannot be a European demos.

The constitutional endeavours here fly in the face of such critiques. They are based on assumptions that a European polity is struggling to emerge and find an identity supplementary to the national ones, rather than replacing them. The more governing is done at European level the more necessary it will be to create political and constitutional, as well as legal, structures to channel and represent it. It will be done as much by contestation as by agreement and consensus. Hence there needs to be more politics at European level.

National leaders resist this because they resent the loss of power involved. But voters express their own frustration with such impotence by voting against incumbents or abstaining. Such trends are common in the results. Despite the lack of connection between them they do express a common reality. Finding the political energy and the intellectual vocabulary to make these connections is a real challenge for Europe's political class.