Let us for a moment forget about the debate inside the European Union on its future evolution and look at what is happening elsewhere. Countries in different regions of the world are increasingly seeking to solve common problems through sovereignty sharing and common institutions. This year the member states of Mercosur - the South American "common market" - have explored their own version of a Nice Treaty, including possible new areas for exercising shared sovereignty and collective decision-making.
At the other end of the American continent, the recently elected President of Mexico, Vicente Fox, has told the new Bush administration that any further extension of the North American Free Trade Area must depend on the introduction of some of the social and environmental policies which the EU has implemented. A similar debate has started in the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
Meanwhile, the member-states of the Association of South-East Asian Nations are discussing with Japan and other Asian governments the establishment of a currency-support fund which could, eventually, lead to a single currency for the entire region, moving well beyond modest arrangements for trade and co-operation.
There is growing international recognition that, without sharing, there may be no effective exercise of sovereignty in a globalised system where the capacity of individual national governments to shape events alone is steadily diminishing. In this, the European Union's unfinished 50 years of experience of both integration and unification is ground-breaking.
It may be these regional unions will act as building blocks for a new system of world governance to manage an increasingly globalised economic system in the 21st century. Certainly their emergence puts into context the ratification of the Nice Treaty and the wider post-Nice debate about the eventual form political union should take in a united Europe.
Surely it is time to bury the hopelessly out-of-date language of "centralised state" and "superstate" which has marked too many of the exchanges over the Nice Treaty. The ideological and institutional trappings of an 18th- or 19th-century "nation-state" are quite irrelevant to the issues surrounding the next stage of European integration, including political union. A federation of the nation-states and regions of Europe - far from being a superstate - opens the way to far more effective and democratic power-sharing at all levels of governance - local, national and European. It is also helping to melt borders which have divided peoples in Europe - not least in Ireland.
It is equally misguided to represent a common European foreign, security and defence policy as some grotesque re-run of traditional imperialism. The motivations which inspired intervention in the ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia had far more to do with public revulsion against the 1940s' style ethnic cleansing in modern Europe than with any supposed drive to colonise the Balkans or sequester its natural resources. Indeed that may be why some of the old Cold War hardliners in the US and elsewhere are so opposed to what is happing in Europe.
The Nice Treaty was intended to prepare the European Union to function - democratically and efficiently - as the EU expands in membership from 15 to 25 and eventually to 30 or more states in the years ahead. The most telling criticism of the Nice Treaty is that it falls well short of what is needed to achieve this. Instead of making it easier for an expanding European Union to take majority-vote decisions, the treaty makes it more difficult. It fails to tackle at root the continuing paralysing grip the national veto exercises in key areas of decision-making. It adds yet another complicated treaty to those which have preceded it and postpones a long overdue move to a voter-friendly democratic constitution.
For all this, a rejection of the Nice Treaty would be a massive and unjustified blow to the aspirations of the tens of millions of our fellow Europeans who demand their right of EU membership. Those who vote to reject Nice will have to account to the Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and so many other Europeans for why they remain locked outside. Rejection of the treaty on the grounds that the EU club should remain a restricted club for the privileged denies the soul of Ireland's own historical experience.
THE racists and xenophobes of the far right are already campaigning against the Nice Treaty on these grounds. But for green or left critics to join them would be a disastrous betrayal of their basic values. As we have seen in Britain, Denmark and Austria, it is the far right which gains from such endorsement. Ratification of the Nice Treaty is certainly not enough. In order to admit as many as possible of the candidate countries into the EU by 2004, negotiations must be completed by the end of next year. The enlarged EU must then agree a comprehensive constitutional reform. This is not a technocratic but a highly political question. European Union citizens should clearly understand what the different responsibilities of decision-makers at the EU, member-state and sub-national level are in future and to whom they are accountable.
Belgian, German and Finnish leaders have already made some constructive if ambitious proposals for the 2004 inter-governmental conference which will try to define the political character of the Union and its institutions.
The unreadable and mind-bogglingly complex legal treaties should be replaced with a simplified constitution which - as President Havel of the Czech republic has said - should be "capable of being read and understood by every secondary-school child in Europe". There should be clearer limits to the authority of the different levels of governance in the EU. A closer partnership of regional, national and EU governance will help bring decision-making closer to the citizen. The charter of fundamental rights adopted at Nice should be given legal teeth so it can be used by citizens in the courts.
Europhobes have often denounced "rule by unelected Brussels' bureaucrats" - a grotesque caricature of the European Commission. So why not elect future presidents of the Commission? This would give the embryonic European political parties a real role in helping create the EU executive and would give voters meaningful choices in European Parliament elections.
There is a case also for transferring the law-making role of the Council of Ministers to a new European Parliament senate - representing national governments. This would make for greater openness and democratic accountability. It would still leave the European Council - the regular meetings of EU heads of government - playing an essential role along with the Commission in helping shape the strategic development of the Union.
The European Parliament should be given more responsibility as well as more power. It should not only have a major say in how EU taxpayers' money is spent, but also how revenue is raised. In the event of deadlock between the MEPs and the European executive, it should be possible to dissolve the European Parliament and call early elections.
None of this is about transferring major new powers to the EU. The post-Nice agenda is about constitutionalising and democratising the Union and its institutions. But it is only one aspect of an even wider process of creating institutions of global governance which are so badly needed for protection of the environment, observation of human rights, the enhancement of social standards and for economic development and justice.
Jean Monnet, the "founding father" of the European Union, once said that European integration "is not an end in itself but only a stage on the way to the organised world of tomorrow". He said the European Community as it was would mark the transition from "the law of force to the force of law". This is what the post-Nice debate should be about. For far too long, we in the European Union have been denied that debate.
John Palmer is the director of the European Policy Centre in Brussels
