European Council 2007

Surely there must be someone who hase something exciting to share about last weekend's European Council summit. Since I, myself, have yet to reemerge into civilisation, I limited myself to defending the EU, generally, and the deal they made in particular, on I-don't-know-how-many blogs at the same time (like the Wallström blog, the blog by the BBC's EU reporter Mark Mardell, and the special EU constitution blog of the Dutch NRC newspaper.) My favourite so far is this column by the FT's Gideon Rachman. Just a short exerpt:

"The result is almost impossible to read or understand. And that is entirely intentional. Many things happened at the summit. But perhaps the most important was that the EU finally abandoned the idea that it wants ordinary Europeans to understand what it is doing.

The abandonment of “transparency” brings the EU full circle to where it began when the idea of writing a constitution was dreamt up six years ago. Back then it was conventional wisdom that one of the Union’s biggest problems was that European citizens found it so hard to understand. Why not simplify the complex mess of interlocking treaties and incomprehensible language into a single, readable document?

Big mistake. It turned out that once Europeans were told what the EU was really doing, they were often horrified."

But, like I said, if anyone has had any real involvement in the summit, I suggest they post them here before they submerge into their six months of Presidency. I imagine that, if you're working to keep the EU running, while at the same time trying to make a difinitive deal for the Reform Treaty, you wouldn't have time to do much apart from breathe and talk. Even eating would be difficult, except for the fact that fortunately a lot of business gets done over dinner.

Just one request: Much to my disappointment, the Constitutional Treaty had scrapped the phrase about "an ever closer union". Could someome please check and make sure that the original preamble from 1957 will survive this IGC? Please?