EU: The problem citizens have may not be with the EU's institutions butits policies writes Denis Staunton in Brussels.
Three days after Sweden's decisive rejection of the euro, Mr Romano Prodi remained yesterday serenely confident of the European people's desire for more integration and a strong role for the Commission in their affairs.
Mr Prodi acknowledged that he had underestimated the difficulty of persuading Sweden to adopt the euro but he expressed confidence that a referendum in Sweden on the new constitution would be a success.
"A vote not to go along with or to adopt the new rules of the Union would be of a completely different nature. People facing that choice would have to think about it more carefully. It could radically change the course of that country's future," he said.
The Swedish referendum result was a serious disappointment for the Brussels establishment. In the aftermath of the vote, however, few in the Commission, the European Parliament or the Council of Ministers believe they share much blame for the result.
"To be blunt, they don't care. It doesn't matter whether Sweden joins the euro and neither Britain nor Denmark were going to join soon anyway. It won't affect anyone's attitude to the negotiations on the constitution, except to encourage them to find a way to avoid referendums in future," said one EU diplomat yesterday.
The Commission yesterday proposed that, in future, changes to EU treaties should not necessarily require ratification from all member-states. Instead, five-sixths of the member-states should be able to change the treaty on issues such as extending qualified majority voting, as long as the proposal was approved by the Commission and the European Parliament.
Despite this fighting talk, more reflective elements in the Commission and elsewhere in Brussels recognise that the recent experience of referendums in Sweden, Ireland and Denmark indicate that something is wrong with the EU's relationship with its citizens. The EU's draft constitution seeks to improve matters by giving national parliaments a role in scrutinising EU measures and making the institutional structure easier for citizens to understand.
European think tanks ponder usefully on issues of national identity and the emergence of a European political culture.
Commissioners and politicians talk regularly about their failure "to get our message across" to the public.
But few in Brussels ever consider that the citizens' biggest problem with the European project may not be with its institutions or with the sharing of sovereignty but with the manifestation of European integration that affects them most directly - the EU's policies.
The Stability and Growth Pact, which limits the budget deficits of euro-zone governments, is now almost universally recognised as a blunt economic instrument designed at a time when strict fiscal rectitude was seen as the only path to healthy economic growth. Swedish voters looked at the pact's effect on euro-zone economies and decided that it was wiser to leave their national government to run public finances without a European straitjacket.
The failure of Germany and France to abide by the pact's rules has created some pressure for reform but countries such as Austria and the Netherlands, which have made big sacrifices to abide by the rules, are resisting change.
Sweden's referendum result also highlights growing differences between the aspirations of the member-states where the EU is concerned.
France, Germany and the Benelux countries, all founding members of the Common Market, want more integration and closer co-operation on foreign policy and defence.
Britain, Ireland and the Scandinavian countries tend to take a cooler view, although Finland has developed a thoughtfully integrationist approach.
The new member-states are cautious at present but it is too early to predict how their European policies will evolve after they join the EU.
Germany suggested this week that it was prepared to form a "core Europe" with like-minded countries, leaving behind those that are unwilling to integrate more closely. Mr Prodi appeared to endorse the concept yesterday, saying that Europe could not allow a few countries to impede its progress.
"I don't think we can conceive of always going at the speed of the slowest in the convoy," he said.