Andrew Duff, the British MEP and thinker on the future direction of the European Union, is known by some in Brussels as one of the "astronauts". How come? "He’s on another planet," says one ally of Jos Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president.
Although Mr Duff’s enthusiasm for further European integration is not shared - to put it mildly - by large sections of public opinion, one has to give him credit for thinking out loud about what the EU should do next with its comatose constitution.
The constitutional debate is not over, in spite of the obituaries written for the treaty when it was rejected by French and Dutch voters in the spring of last year. It is true the original text is dead as a doornail, but a rebranded and slimmed-down version will come back on to the political agenda next year.
German diplomats believe that by January - when Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, takes over the EU presidency - 18 out of the 25 current member states will have ratified the original treaty, placing a strong moral and political obligation on the others to agree to many of the proposals in the original text.

What shape will it take? It is unlikely to look much like Andrew Duff’s Plan B, an ambitious attempt to revitalise the treaty but probably too ambitious by half. But the ideas Mr Duff raises are worth discussing.
On his first point - that "the constitutional treaty cannot come into force without serious revision" - I would agree. But while most national capitals are trying to find ways to make the treaty smaller and less worrisome for sceptical citizens, Mr Duff wants to beef it up.
This is also the approach taken by another federalist, Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian prime minister, who would be running the European Commission by now if France and Germany had had their way. In his book "United States of Europe", Mr Verhofstadt argued: "The constitution was not rejected because it was too ambitious, but because it was not ambitious enough."
The problem is that for countries like Britain, France and the Netherlands, the political priority is to make the amended text so modest in scope that they will be able to ratify it through parliamentary votes, not through referendums.
So when Mr Duff proposes including in the new treaty new provisions on strengthened economic governance, a new Social Protocol and the highly controversial question of the EU’s financing and spending priorities he seems to be paddling against a powerful tide heading in the other direction.
But at least he is thinking about the treaty. The danger for the EU is that by pretending the problem does not exist, it will be woefully underprepared when the German presidency kick-starts the treaty renegotiation next year.

October 24th, 2006 in Constitution | Permalink