EU: Five days before the start of final negotiations on Europe's new constitution, the EU's biggest new member-state has expressed serious misgivings about the draft text under discussion.
At a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels yesterday, Poland circulated a six-page document identifying changes of "fundamental importance" it wants made to the draft.
Warsaw opposes the abolition of the system of weighted votes in the Council of Ministers, which gives each country a number of votes in vague proportion to its population size. Poland and Spain are leading opposition to the change, which they believe will diminish their influence within the EU.
Poland also wants to retain the right of each EU country to nominate a member of the Commission. It rejects plans to allow some countries to co-operate more closely on defence, and wants the Christian tradition to be mentioned in the constitution's preamble.
The Czech president, Mr Vaclav Klaus, delivered a blistering attack on the draft constitution, warning that it would create a European superstate. Speaking in Prague, Mr Klaus said that the constitution involved more radical changes to the EU than its supporters admitted.
"This is crossing the Rubicon, after which there will be no more sovereign states in Europe with fully-fledged governments and parliaments which represent legitimate interests of their citizens, but only one state will remain. Basic things . . . will be decided by a remote 'federal government' in Brussels and, for example, Czech citizens will be only a tiny particle whose voice - and influence - will be almost zero," he said.
Mr Klaus's position is largely ceremonial, and Prague's centre-left government is broadly supportive of the draft text, although it has some reservations.
Italy's Foreign Minister, Mr Franco Frattini, warned that he would force any minister who attempted to block consensus in the talks to take the blame in public. Germany's Foreign Minister, Mr Joschka Fischer, said that failure to reform the Nice Treaty could complicate negotiations on the EU's financial perspectives, which are due to start in 2005.
"I understand everybody has a wish list, we do as well. If we do not find an agreement, it's Nice. But I doubt if it's in the interest of the 25 to start the difficult finance negotiations with Nice," he said.
The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, said that the negotiations were different from previous Inter-Governmental Conferences (IGC), as much of the groundwork had already been completed in the Convention on the Future of Europe.
"Every government reserves the right to raise any issue but we're not starting from scratch. We have a Convention report, which allows us to set a context for what it is we want to discuss. We need to build a consensus to make sure we get decisions at the end of the day that will bring us the constitutional treaty we have been working for," he said.
Mr Cowen expressed confidence that the negotiations can be completed before the end of this year, when Ireland assumes the EU Presidency for six months.
"The objective still is to try to complete this during the Italian Presidency. Whether that happens or not is really down to whether or not there is sufficient political will to do so. We'll certainly do what we can to assist in that respect," he said.