Future historians may see the Treaty of Nice as the treaty that either split Europe or paved the way for a genuine EU-state constitution. The Treaty of Nice contains a revolutionary clause: "enhanced co-operation". This allows eight of the 15 member-states to establish a more binding co-operation among themselves even if, for instance, Ireland, the UK and the Scandinavian countries were all against further integration.

The peripheral, more "Euro-realist" countries will be put under pressure and will have to choose between bad and worse: either you approve a genuine EU-state constitution or we go our own way and leave you as dependent followers with limited influence.

That might be the unbearable choice for many if you listen carefully to the speeches of continental heavyweights. Both President Chirac and Chancellor Schr÷der have called for a constitution to be decided in 2004.

Preparations will start one week after the Irish referendum and the British elections, with a summit in Gothenburg.

The official declaration calling for a European debate, a special convention and an intergovernmental conference, to decide on what is effectively the new constitution, will be issued at the EU summit in Laeken/Brussels on December 14th and 15th this year.

Maybe they will avoid the dangerous word "constitution" in the declaration. As someone said in the European Parliament's Constitutional Committee before Nice: "We shall establish a constitution without calling it a constitution; then we can always change the name afterwards".

Perhaps the compromise wording will be a constitutional treaty which will be explained in Ireland, the UK and the Scandinavian countries as just another treaty, and applauded in the core federalist countries as the real historical breakthrough on the way to the "United States of Europe".

By 2004, the EU will have all the tools of powers normally attaching to nation-states:

One government: The Treaty of Nice allows for a qualified majority on the Council of Ministers to nominate the Commission President as a kind of European prime minister who gathers his own government team and decides its composition, backed also by a qualified majority of member-states. Ireland will no longer be able to insist on appointing its own choice as EU commissioner.

One currency: Next year it will be forbidden One defence force:

In December this year the EU military force will be ready to take part in conflicts. Joint exercises with NATO commanders are currently being planned. By 2003 there will be more than 200,000 EU soldiers. Of these, 60,000 will be able to operate 4,000 kilometres from Brussels for as long as a year - as far as the border areas of Russia, the Middle East and the old colonies of Africa.

One police force: The principle of an EU police force has been accepted, with 300 police officers in Europol and a new, much bigger police corps envisaged to work alongside the European Rapid Reaction Force.

Money, military and police are the tools of power that will soon be in the hands of a majority in Brussels. It is difficult to imagine that a constitutional treaty in 2004 will allow one country to block the use of military forces. In the Nice treaty there will be qualified majority voting in 34 new areas. This has been the way that voting has gone in every new EU treaty.

One day, all the powers of a typical independent nation-state will be in the hands of the majority in the EU state. This will make each of the old national states into a kind of European region.

The EU state will not be like the US. It will be more like a federation where the participating states will compete with the federation in power-sharing and still have their own representatives in the UN. The individual European states will more and more be bound to speak with the same voice. Seen from outside, the EU will look like one state.

The anticipated EU constitution will have two parts. The first will include the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, which was adopted as a solemn declaration in Nice. It will be made legally binding and will give EU citizens common human and basic rights, as in all existing states. If there is a conflict of interpretation between the Supreme Court in Dublin and the constitutional court in Luxembourg, the verdict of the EU court will prevail.

A group of judges in Luxembourg will decide on sensitive constitutional issues that are dealt with in very imprecise wordings in the Charter. They will seek to impose a common standard across the Union.

For example, the Charter guarantees the "right to life". But does life start with conception, at week 13, week 19 or at birth? In my vision for European co-operation such issues should be decided by each participating democracy itself, not by majority decisions made abroad.

We should focus European co-operation on the areas where we cannot govern on our own, for instance on issues of trade and the environment. It is not much use trying to clean up our own part of the air or sea. Here we have nothing to lose, but everything to win by cross-border co-operation.

However, if a policy area can be fully and adequately legislated for in the national parliaments of Europe, why move decisions away from Europe's peoples, the electorates? In the SOS Democracy intergroup in the European Parliament we have called for a re-negotiation of the Treaty of Nice so that we can solve the democratic deficit instead of increasing it. We want a Europe of living and vital democracies. Nice is a giant step towards creating the opposite.

Jens-Peter Bonde is President of the Group for a Europe of Democracies and Diversities in the European Parliament

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