A European Union summit launched an ambitious project to reshape the bloc for the 21st century yesterday but ended in acrimony when leaders failed to agree on how to share out a dozen new EU agencies.
Wrapping up a two-day summit, the 15 leaders took the unprecedented step of agreeing on a political Convention to chart the future course of the union, adopting the grand-sounding Laeken Declaration on the Future of Europe.
The Convention, due to start work in March, will draw up proposals for reforms to make the EU operate more smoothly and effectively as it prepares to welcome up to a dozen new members - mostly former Communist countries of central and eastern Europe - in the next few years.
As the leaders deliberated in the sumptuous surroundings of Brussels' Laeken palace, anti-capitalist protesters hurled Molotov cocktails at police and vandalised buildings and cars during a march in the city centre.
Police said about 70 people were arrested, 10 of them for possessing weapons.
The EU leaders named veteran former French President Mr Valery Giscard d'Estaing to chair the Convention which could bring far-reaching changes to the way the EU works, perhaps even setting the bloc on the road towards its own constitution.
But they showed no such grand vision when it came to deciding which EU countries would host a dozen new EU bodies, including a food safety agency and maritime safety agency.
The summit became bogged down in the petty politics and horse-trading which have given the EU a bad name, finally ending in disarray as leaders squabbled over which country should get its own agency, considered one of the perks of EU membership.
Italian Prime Minister Mr Silvio Berlusconi lost his temper in an angry finale, rejecting a package deal offered by the Belgian EU presidency because he insisted Parma in Italy, not Helsinki, must get the seat of the food safety agency.
"I said a strong 'No'. I even had to raise my voice. I ran into a tough hurdle but I did not give up," he told reporters.
France insisted on winning the maritime security agency for Nantes on its Atlantic seaboard, rejecting a Belgian compromise proposal that would have given this agency to Lisbon.
French President Jacques Chirac complained that the Belgians had tried to please everyone with "an inflation of agencies...a whole series of seats of agencies that don't really exist or might eventually be created but haven't yet undergone the necessary studies."
The issue will now be left for Spain to sort out when it takes over the EU presidency in January.