The European Union (EU) leaders will hold a two-day brainstorming summit starting from Thursday, trying to save the troubled EU Constitution and define further enlargement of the 25-nation bloc.

Austria's Chancellor Wolfgang Schussel, whose country hosts the rotating EU presidency, wants his colleagues to draw a line under the constitution trauma by 2009 and outline a positive agenda for the union.

According to the draft conclusion, the EU leaders would promise to push forward with further integration, which was put into question after French and Dutch voters threw out the EU constitution one year ago.

The constitution, agreed by European leaders on June 18, 2004, brings together for the first time the many treaties and agreements on which the EU is based. More important, it contains reforms vital for the union to function as it expands.

The constitution cannot come into force unless it is ratified by all member states. Until now, it has been ratified by 13 of the 25 member states, and two others have almost completed ratification.
 
However, the "no" votes in the two founding members plunged the EU into its worst crisis. The EU leaders would not try to agree on how to save the complicated blueprint for Europe's future but effectively prolong the "period of reflection" announced last year.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the bloc, has suggested to leaders that they should do nothing now, but sign a broad political declaration on ambitions and values in 2007, which would serve as the basis for institutional reform at a later date.

The strategy seems clear enough: step up EU cooperation in the same direction indicated by the constitution under existing treaties, while waiting until summer 2007 for new governments in France and Netherlands.

The leaders of France and Germany, the traditional "integration motors", agreed earlier this month that the constitution should be tackled in the first half of next year, when Germany is running the EU for six months.

"We have agreed that the constitutional treaty will be reviewed during the German presidency, after a period of reflection," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel after meeting French President Jacques Chirac.

She added that "a decision should be reached" when France holds the rotating presidency of the bloc in the second half of 2008.

Some argue that, without the constitution, the EU will continue to function on the basis of the existing treaties. However, these treaties provide for an EU of no more than 27 states.

So, either enlargement will have to stop after the accession of Bulgaria and Romania in 2007 (or 2008), or the treaties will have to be amended.

Not coincidently, the EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn earlier this month announced that the union will freeze enlargement until at least 2010.

"After Bulgaria and Romania...no other new accession is foreseen during coming years, at least not before the end of the decade," Olli Rehn told the French parliament on June 6.

Turkey, Croatia and Macedonia are the only countries aside from Romania and Bulgaria to hold official EU candidate status so far, but Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and the-UN administrated territory of Kosovo have also been promised an EU future.

Earlier this year, EU governments already spread uncertainty over its 2003 Balkan accession promises by saying EU membership will depend on "absorption capacity" - EU jargon for problems managing 27 or more veto powers and individual commissioners.

At this summit, Wolfgang Schussel, who leads a country with serious conservations about Turkish membership, will also press other EU leaders to agree tough new language that could slow the pace of future enlargement.

Others like Britain believe turning this into a new criterion would create an unfair new barrier to entry. They would prefer the absorption capacity to be seen as simply a factor to be "take into consideration".

The division on constitution and further enlargement shows the EU was still undecided what it wants to be - a tight organization in which member states share significant sovereignty or a looser grouping of nations states, said EU diplomats.

It is widely believed that no groundbreaking would be made at the summit. But the European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has warned that the union should not be in a hurry to close it borders.

"There are concerns about absorption capacity, but look what it has done for the EU," Barroso told the European Parliament one day ahead of the summit.

"I want an open Europe, not a miniature one. We need an enlarged EU that can face globalization," he added.

(Xinhua News Agency June 15, 2006)