MEMORIES are indeed short lived. The alienation from the people so evident after the Treaty of Maastricht was signed in 1992 and the troubled path to its ratification have faded from the collective political memory. For the EU leaders gathering in Amsterdam next week it's business as usual. The "high level" summit will barter, agonise and struggle until an immensely complicated compromise emerges and the leaders will emerge exhausted, all separately claiming victory to a baffled public.

The "experts" will have detailed treaty provisions to argue and debate over for many years. But the people of Europe will probably understand little of what has been agreed in their name and even less about its overall significance.

The decision making process in the EU is reminiscent of 19th century diplomatic conferences, in terms both of secretive meetings and diplomatic bartering.

Alarm bells only begin ringing when we appreciate that the civil servants and government ministers in question are not negotiating some meaningless convention but something which could impinge on the everyday life of the citizen.

Next week's summit will establish the framework for issues such as the powers of the police, the use made of information in data banks and aspects of the judicial process.

The catchphrase of the Amsterdam Treaty will be the introduction of an EU "area of freedom, security and justice". This mantra has been discovered by the civil servants and the politicians taking the decisions at ministerial level. It is supposedly the successor concept to the "common market" and the "internal market".

Basically, the EU governments are formulating a collective answer to the perceived threats to internal security presented by the cross border activity of drug traffickers, criminals, terrorists, immigrants and asylumseekers, all conveniently lumped together.

But the worry for those who care about the quality of the Europe under construction is that the significant new EU level competences (powers) over important matters such as criminal law, police co operation, asylum, immigration and so on are to a large extent placed in a kind of democratic limbo. There are clearly insufficient possibilities for democratic accountability (parliaments) and judicial control (courts).

Yet the rite of passage from Maastricht to Amsterdam has also had some positive features. This constructive effect is, however, not as a result of something granted by the politicians but rather taken by the people themselves.

Maastricht alerted many active citizens groups to the importance of following the treaty making process itself in an attempt to influence the course of developments. This has happened on a phenomenal scale with the emergence of an organised and potentially potent "civil society". The result has been twofold.

. Firstly, some "influence" can be detected in the sense that the negotiators appear to have taken on board some of the concerns expressed (and often explicitly formulated) in concrete treaty amendments.

. Secondly, "civil society" is actively pushing back the frontiers in terms of information available by publishing on the Internet documents and draft texts as soon as someone, somehow, manages to obtain a copy. This process has been under way for at least the past six months, culminating in the availability of the (confidential) draft Treaty of the European Union last month on the Internet.

The level of cooperation with the European Parliament remains underdeveloped. And of course, once the treaty has been agreed, the national parliaments and European Parliament are only able to agree or reject the treaty in its entirety, with out being able to insist on the alteration even of a single comma in terms of the agreed text.

This brings us to the heart of the matter of what is being actually agreed upon at Amsterdam. The first point is that the complexity is truly mindboggling. The Maastricht Treaty appears almost simple when put alongside what is proposed in the draft Treaty of Amsterdam. In one fell swoop the Schengen system allowing for free movement is integrated into the EU with various permutations possible (in particular the non participation by Ireland and the United Kingdom and the participation by two nonmembers. Norway and Iceland).

We are apparently also to get further "multiple speeds" in various shapes and forms. Not only will groups of member states be able to proceed to more far reaching cooperation if inclined, but we will have "multiple speeds" in relation to the amount of judicial control over various policy areas.

In terms of the "new" competences over matters such as immigration and police cooperation it is striking that the possibility for parliamentary input and judicial control remains scanty.

The European Court of Justice will, it seems, obtain some jurisdiction over these new areas but it is a much more limited jurisdiction than it enjoys, for example, over purely economic matters. And the European Parliament on the whole is consulted but is not legislating on anything near an equal footing with Council of Ministers and its underbelly of committees of national civil servants.

There is a real risk that the exercise of power will take place in a vacuum. Memberstate governments are in many important respects liberated from the rule of law and democratic constraints that operate at the national level.

AT THE end of the day we probably have to take the long view. A great deal of proposed cooperation is inevitable - if we are to see truly effective joint action in areas such as immigration policies, asylum policy and police cooperation. National states lack the capacity to take effective action standing alone.

But another kind of quantum leap is required. We need to rethink how the notion of "public interest" can be fleshed out and take institutional shape even in a European Union of memberstates and peoples. At present, the process of Europeanisation of issues results in the defence of a "national interest" as if the issues concerned were ones of foreign policy.

But when the issues concerned are, on the contrary, ones of internal policy (the police, the judicial system, the rules governing immigration etc) then the "public interest" has to be engaged in a much more participatory and open environment. The technocratic, elitist approach applied to European economic integration has in my view more than surpassed its limits.

Deirdre Curtin is professor of the law of international organisations, University of Utrecht.