EUROPEAN DIARY: Over dinner in Luxembourg this evening, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, and the leaders of six other small European states will turn their minds away from the conflict in Iraq and towards the debate over Europe's future.
The meeting, hosted by Luxembourg's Prime Minister, Mr Jean-Claude Juncker, is the initiative of the Benelux countries and is aimed at forging a common strategy at the Convention on the Future of Europe.
Since it started engaging more seriously with the convention late last year, the Government has been energetic in pursuing alliances, particularly with smaller member-states and the candidate countries.
Indeed, the Minister for Europe, Mr Roche, who represents the Government at the convention, has been dining, lunching and breakfasting for Ireland so assiduously that he has started complaining about the toll it is all taking on his waistline.
Most small countries are members of the Friends of the Community Method, a group that aims to prevent a shift of power away from the European Commission towards the Council of Ministers. The group is particularly concerned about a proposal by the bigger countries to abolish the six-month, rotating presidency and to appoint a president of the council who would co-ordinate the council's work and represent the EU abroad for up to five years.
Small countries fear that such a figure would draw influence away from the Commission, long regarded as the guarantor of equal status between all member-states.
They argue that the rotating presidency helps to bring the EU closer to European citizens and claim that its deficiencies are primarily administrative rather than political.
The nations represented in Luxembourg this evening, which include Austria, Finland and Portugal as well as the Benelux countries and Ireland, agree on much where institutional reform is concerned.
But they remain divided over other matters, such as the abolition of national vetoes in many policy areas and the division of responsibilities between the EU and national governments.
Larger member-states are divided on many key issues, too, and even where they agree, such as on the appointment of a president of the council, there are different interpretations that could lead to sharp differences over the coming months.
With only three months to go before the convention is due to submit its draft constitution to EU leaders, there is little sign of consensus among its 105 members. Some members of the convention's agenda-setting praesidium fear that it will be impossible to produce a document that commands the support of an adequate number of convention members.
If they fail to achieve consensus at the convention, the praesidium may present the leaders with their own draft constitution but such a document would inevitably lack the authority of a text endorsed by the convention as a whole.
The convention's president, Mr Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, wants the convention to produce a treaty that will settle the constitutional argument in Europe for half a century.
But a growing number of opinion-formers in Europe now believe that the treaty that emerges from the convention and the inter-governmental conference that follows it is more likely to be a staging post on the road to European integration rather than a definitive settlement.
Asked last week how long the new treaty would last, a senior German official replied: "How long did Maastricht last? How long did Amsterdam last?" The answer, in both cases, is about five years.
One reason to doubt the new treaty's longevity is that, while agreement is likely on such questions as the election of the Commission president and the reform of the council presidency, major questions look certain to remain unresolved.
Chief among these is the future of Europe's common foreign and security policy and the EU's emerging defence identity.
The crisis over Iraq could not have come at a less opportune moment for the convention, highlighting fundamental differences on foreign policy and defence among Europe's most powerful governments.
The new treaty is likely to merge the positions currently held by Mr Chris Patten and Mr Javier Solana but there is little appetite for the creation of a strong institutional structure that could shape a coherent European foreign policy.
Some of the draft articles being discussed at the convention appear to anticipate constitutional change by putting in place mechanisms that can only be activated with the unanimous approval of all member-states.
For example, proposals to create a European public prosecutor or to expel member-states that fail to ratify EU treaties would require unanimity under the new treaty.
