European Diary: Birthdays are meant to be happy occasions but the 50th anniversary of the EU next month could prove a bit stormy.
Germany, which holds the six-month rotating presidency of the EU, has planned the mother of all parties in Berlin for the weekend of March 24 and 25th. Club nights, fireworks and free beer and sausages are all part of the programme, which will also see EU leaders gather to sign a declaration celebrating the union.
Celebrating Europe is par for the course in Germany, the paymaster and a founding member of the EU. Billed by German chancellor Angela Merkel as an opportunity to "find Europe's soul", the text is expected to celebrate the EU's crowning achievements while laying out a vision for Europe's future.
But in Eurosceptic Britain, Poland and the Czech Republic, praising the European project is politically dangerous, and plans by Merkel to use the "Berlin declaration" to give momentum to talks to find a new EU institutional agreement are contentious.
According to diplomats, Berlin wants to end the declaration with a clause that outlines the need for Europe's leaders to sign up to a new EU constitution. A target date for the ratification procedure has also been mooted in a series of bilateral talks between Berlin and envoys from all 27 EU members.
"The declaration should not be used in that way and any attempt to give the green light to the EU constitution could be counterproductive," warns Jan Zahradil, the Czech Republic's envoy to Berlin, on the declaration and ongoing talks to find a new EU institutional agreement. "The text should avoid setting concrete goals for the future and not be legally binding."
Last week Prague, which is emerging as a key opponent of more European integration, said it wanted a major revision of the EU constitution and that no time limit should be set on finding a deal. "No deal is better than a bad deal," says Zahradil.
Britain is also anxious that any reference to the EU constitution will be minimal and crucially does not tie it into accepting a certain level of institutional reform in the future. Diplomats have also indicated that it may not agree to plans to praise EU policies that it is not party to, such as the Schengen travel area and the euro.
France and the Netherlands are also worried about including explicit references to the draft EU constitution because their electorates rejected the treaty in referendums in 2005. "We don't want a blueprint for a new treaty," says one Dutch diplomat. The Berlin declaration needs to have a lifespan of 20 or 30 years and shouldn't focus on immediate treaty issues, he says.
But the 18 countries that have already ratified the constitution - plus Ireland and Portugal - are all pushing hard to get the EU constitution mentioned somewhere in the text. Last week in a speech on the EU's birthday, foreign minister Dermot Ahern spelled out Ireland's strong attachment to the treaty.
"It successfully accommodated the interests of both large and small member states. And it goes a long way towards fulfilling the ambitions of making the union's activities more comprehensible to citizens," he said. "The wisest course is to adhere closely to what was agreed in 2004."
The constitution is not the only area of potential discord.
The declaration will also include: a list of future challenges, the need for common policies to tackle them and a statement on the EU's common values. Member states have different priorities and sometimes diametrically opposing views in these areas. For example, the Poles want a reference to Christianity in the text, a position that will upset the secular French.
The Spanish and Italians want to see a reference to the "social dimension" of Europe, while the Czechs want to highlight the need to remove barriers to free movement of labour, goods and services.
Somehow over the next three weeks German diplomats have to find a way to satisfy all 27 member states on a final text without producing a text so bland that it makes the exercise meaningless.
Rumours that the Germans plan to draft in a famous writer to work on the finished text may allays fears that the declaration will be delivered in the all too familiar diplomatic Eurospeak. But agreeing core principles will require tough compromises.
"My hunch is that they will go for a limited exercise to communicate some shared views," says Antonio Missoroli, chief policy analyst at the Brussels-based think tank European Policy Centre. "The problem is it would be very difficult to get all EU states to agree a text in such a short time period."
EU leaders will try to reach an agreement next week at a summit in Brussels. Berlin must be hoping that they are in no mood to spoil the party.