EMILE NOEL paints a depressing picture - a Europe in 2005 which is divided and paralysed by inadequate decision procedures, whose economic solidarity has been undermined and whose integration is in danger of unravelling.
It was a sobering assessment, from the Commission's first Secretary General that would be echoed next day by the appeal to member states from the Commission President, Jacques Santer, to give the EU the means to match its ambitions. They are unlikely to do so.
Mr Noel was speaking at a meeting of the Brussels branch "of the Institute of European Affairs on Tuesday night on where he saw the EU going after the Inter Governmental Conference. Not where it should go, he made clear, but where the road it was now travelling would lead it.
Would the IGC create a new institutional order to match the "challenges faced by the EU Scepticism would be de rigueur", Mr Noel argues. The best that can be hoped for, he fears, is some tinkering with the institutions and some fine words about jobs, more for appearances than anything else.
Crucially, there would be no significant increase in majority voting in any of the EU's three pillars. Franco German frustration at EU weakness on foreign policy would lead increasingly to a case being made for an avant garde of the willing and able and as he spoke, the two governments revealed their plans for just that.
A special meeting of foreign and European ministers to coordinate the IGC positions of Paris and Bonn issued four pages of guidelines on how a system of "constructive abstention" would work. The idea is that one or two member states should not be able to obstruct actions in the military or police sphere that the others want to take simply because they cannot come on board themselves.
A veto would only be allowed when strictly defined vital national interests were at stake and the rest of the time the minority would constructively abstain, allowing the action to proceed. The abstaining country would be expected, however, to contribute to the funding of such actions.
The concept received the Commission's imprimatur a day later when it published its submission to the IGC.
The idea that the EU should allow for integration at different speeds is not new. It will happen when the first wave of countries join the single currency; the semi detached Schengen group of countries has already decided to lead by example on the abolition of passports.
Increased support for a multi speed approach, or "differentiated integration", is the inevitable product of the reluctance of some to move at all while others want to accelerate the process, an institutional expression of the need to bypass the expected deadlock over any "extension of majority voting.
Mr Noel believes it is also inevitable that new institutions will have to be created in the EU to carry out the tasks the avant garde sets itself in the welds of internal and external security, and monetary policy.
Critical to its success, however, and to the whole European project, would be the willingness of those being left behind to accept, or at least constructively abstain on, the process of differentiated integration itself.
Such new institutions may function effectively but the old institutions, with further enlargement, could be increasingly paralysed by the progressively more difficult requirement to achieve unanimity.
Creaking institutions would compound the difficulties to be faced when the EU budget is renegotiated in 1998. Enlargement, he argues, will make it difficult to justify both continuing income support for farmers in the 15 and the levels of funding going to the current EU's less developed regions.
The alternative of a massive expansion of the budget is not on and he warns of the dangers cuts will have on the solidarity of the EU. At the same time, it will continue to face the challenge of making its citizens accept its legitimacy.
He argues that there are dangers of an unravelling of the integration process and a threat to the EU after enlargement unless the concept of differentiated integration is accepted by all as a key component in the EU's evolving architecture. "The avant garde is the way to maintain the momentum," he says.
