The Constitution does not extend the Union's remit to substantive new areas of competences. Most importantly, and this is where the use of the name ‘Constitution’ might create some confusion, the Constitution is and remains a treaty and its ‘masters’ are still the Member States. They have kept for themselves the power to amend the Treaties or, as constitutional lawyers would say, the Kompetenz Kompetenz, the power for distributing competences. Like the present Treaties, the Constitution does not allow itself to be amended by a majority of Member States. It requires approval and ratification by each of them.

The Constitution begins with a short and entirely new Preamble which was drafted in the Convention. It states, in particular, that ‘the peoples of Europe are determined to transcend their former divisions and, united ever more closely, to forge a common destiny’. Thus, the wording ‘united ever more closely’ replaces the traditional formula of ‘an ever closer union’.

During the Convention and the IGC, some delegations argued that the Preamble should refer directly to God or to Europe's Christian heritage. Others opposed this, and the Preamble limits itself to mentioning ‘the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe’.

Contrary to the Treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam, the Constitution confers only a few new competences of substance on the EU. To a large extent, the substantive content of the present EC Treaty remains the same. The few new competences conferred on the EU in the Constitution are far from being revolutionary.

In the time‐scale of history, sixty years is very short. For centuries, ever since the Greeks and the Romans, since the Normans and the Germans, not to mention the British and the French, the peoples of Europe have constantly waged war on each other. During the last century alone, from 1914 until 1918 and from 1939 until 1945, merciless wars inflamed the European continent causing hatred and massive destruction, leaving its peoples bled white and prey to starvation.

What is the situation of Europe today, only sixty years on?

Europe is at peace. Europe is democratic. Europe is prosperous. War has become unthinkable among the peoples which have united within the European Union. The dense web of commercial, economic, political and legal links they have built between them are such that it is difficult to realise nowadays that the blitz on London, the flattening of Dresden and the occupation of Paris by the German army only took place around sixty years ago.

In simple terms, the present situation might be described as follows: the European Union (EU) has its own law‐making institutions, including a Council composed of Ministers who are members of national governments of the Member States, and a directly elected European Parliament. The Council and the European Parliament share the power of co‐deciding legislative, administrative and budgetary acts, which are proposed by the Commission.

In 2004, on the basis of the numerous Treaties which had built the EU over the years, the Heads of State or Government of the 25 States members of the European Union decided to take yet another step, through adopting a ‘Constitution for Europe’. On 29 October 2004, in Rome, in the very room where the original 1957 Rome Treaty was signed, 25 European Heads of State or Government solemnly signed the ‘Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe’ on which they had reached a political agreement on 18 June 2004.

This Treaty, they declared, ‘completes the process which began when the Treaty of Rome established the basic framework for European integration’ and ‘like the Treaty of Rome, it will serve for many years as the foundation of a Union at the service of its citizens’.

This ambiguous formula contains, in a nutshell, two different interpretations which could be given of this new Treaty.

According to the first interpretation, this formula means that the Constitution would finally mark the end of European integration: it declares it completed, so that it will not go any further. This explains the reason for the deletion of the famous first paragraph of the preamble to the original Rome Treaty about laying ‘the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’, which was repeated by the Maastricht Treaty in Article 1 of the EU Treaty.

The Constitution will restructure the existing texts of the Treaties, streamline legal instruments and procedures and codify long‐standing principles and rules, so as to try and make these texts more consistent and easier to read for the users.

Up to the Constitution, the original Treaties from 1957 had been amended 15 times. As a result, there are at present about 2800 pages of primary law contained in 17 Treaties or Acts, three legal personalities, three so‐called ‘pillars’, 15 types of different legal instruments and several types of decision‐making procedures. Restructuring all this and trying to make it more readable was long‐needed.

This restructuring is the most visible and, in a way, the most revolutionary work achieved by the Convention and the IGC. The choice was made to repeal all existing Treaties and to replace them by the single, restructured, text of the Constitution. This choice entails the re‐ratification by Member States of all those existing, and often old, provisions which have been recopied without any substantial changes for the Rome Treaty into the Constitution. This re‐ratification opens the political opportunity for Euro‐sceptics of all kinds to criticise one or other provision of the present Treaties, claiming that it confers a new competence on the Union, whereas in reality it has been existing for a long time and has been already ratified in the past.

This general assessment will be made on two levels:

• does the Constitution fulfil the mandates that its authors were given by the 2000 Nice Declaration and by the 2001 Laeken Declaration? Would its entry into force succeed in making the Union more democratic and more efficient?

• assessment from a legal, economic and social point of view: would it drive the European economy towards a more ‘liberal’ or rather towards a more ‘social’ path? as well as from a political and historical point of view: would it transform the European Union into a federal State or would it rather confirm the present nature of the Union and of its relationship with the Member States?

Section 1: Does the Constitution fulfil the Nice and Laeken mandates?

The Nice mandate

The Constitution addresses all four questions raised in the 2000 Nice Declaration.

The delimitation of powers between the EU and the Member States

The delimitation of powers between the EU and the Member States, though not much altered as compared with the present legal situation, is made clearer for the reader, thanks to the codification, in Part I of the Constitution, of the existing situation both as to the three categories of competences (exclusive, shared and supporting) and as to their content (Articles I‐12 to I‐17 Cst). However, some competences were difficult to categorise and, in any case, they are subject to possible development.

Besides the Treaties' structure, the second most visible changes brought about by the Constitution are of an institutional nature.

These reforms concern the number of institutions and their respective powers, composition or internal functioning.

They also give increased rights to political actors other than the EU institutions, such as the national Parliaments, the Committee of the Regions and the citizens themselves.

They establish a number of ‘facilitating’ mechanisms in order to allow for more flexibility in the functioning of an enlarged EU: ‘enhanced cooperation’ among some of the Member States, pre‐established cases of ‘inbuilt closer cooperation’, simplified revision procedures for amending the Constitution and an express right for a Member State to withdraw voluntarily from the EU.

Section 1: Adapting the institutions to an enlarged EU

The number of EU institutions is increased from five to seven, by the addition of the European Council and of the European Central Bank. Their respective powers are somewhat reshuffled through a widening of the scope of the codecision procedure, an increase in the number of cases where a (redefined) QMV in the Council will apply, the creation of the new offices of a full‐time European Council President and of a Union Minister for Foreign Affairs, the formal mentioning of the Eurogroup which will be chaired by a President elected by his peers and, finally, a reduced number of Commissioners as from 2014.

The Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe is the result of a long process.

Section 1: A short history of the idea of establishing a European Union

The idea of transforming the European Economic Community into a ‘European Union’, a single entity which would integrate all aspects of European integration, officially emerged for the first time at the 1972 Summit of the Heads of State or Government in Paris. It was then stated that ‘Member States of the Community, the driving wheels of European integration, declared their intention of converting their entire relationship into a European Union before the end of this decade’. However, the idea got lost in the turmoil of the economic crisis of the seventies, despite the recommendations made in the ‘Report on European Union’, known as the ‘Tindemans Report’, which was submitted, at their request, by the Belgian Prime Minister to the Heads of State or Government in December 1975.

Ten years later, the ‘Solemn Declaration on European Union’, signed (which is very unusual for a Declaration) at the European Council in Stuttgart in June 1983, re‐launched the idea by reaffirming the ‘will to transform the whole complex of relations between their States into a European Union’. For its part, in 1981, the European Parliament had mandated Altiero Spinelli, one of its members and a former Commissioner, together with an institutional committee, to propose amendments to the existing treaties.

Europe at a crossroads

For centuries, peoples and states have taken up arms and waged war to win control of the European continent. The debilitating effects of two bloody wars and the weakening of Europe's position in the world brought a growing realisation that only peace and concerted action could make the dream of a strong, unified Europe come true. In order to banish once and for all the demons of the past, a start was made with a coal and steel community. Other economic activities, such as agriculture, were subsequently added in. A genuine single market was eventually established for goods, persons, services and capital, and a single currency was added in 1999. On 1 January 2002 the euro is to become a day-to-day reality for 300 million European citizens.

The European Union has thus gradually come into being. In the beginning, it was more of an economic and technical collaboration. Twenty years ago, with the first direct elections to the European Parliament, the Community's democratic legitimacy, which until then had lain with the Council alone, was considerably strengthened. Over the last ten years, construction of a political union has begun and cooperation been established on social policy, employment, asylum, immigration, police, justice, foreign policy and a common security and defence policy.