BRUSSELS - The European Union's new constitution, which could face a death blow next week if French voters reject it in a referendum, is the product of three years of intense and often stormy wrangling.
The idea of a constitutional treaty was launched almost immediately after an EU summit on the Cote D'Azur in December 2000, which itself is remembered as a four-day mega-haggle which produced the Nice Treaty.
That document, aimed at providing the framework for the bloc's expansion from 15 to 25 members last year, was almost immediately lambasted as a botch-job by most EU governments.
A year later at a summit in Belgium the EU leaders therefore launched an unprecedented "convention for the future of Europe" to agree the biggest shake-up of the EU's decision-making architecture in its half-century history.
The convention was headed by former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing, flanked by former Belgian and Italian premiers Jean-Luc Dehaene and Giuliano Amato, with over 200 delegates drawn from all 25 states, as well as Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey, which are waiting in line for EU entry.
The convention was formally launched in February 2002, and over the next 16 months it spent endless Brussels hours haggling over everything from a Charter of Fundamental Rights to replacing the EU's musical chairs rotating presidency.
"Give Nice a chance," convention member and Ireland's Europe minister Dick Roche said at one stage, expressing the frustrations of trying to reach a compromise to satisfy all the competing demands.
Giscard finally trumpeted success on June 13, 2003, and celebrated with champagne and the EU's Ode to Joy anthem in the European Parliament.
But even as the corks popped one could hear the Spanish and Polish foreign ministers, Ana Palacio and Danuta Hubner, voicing "fundamental reservations" about the new voting system.
Their doubts surged to the surface once the draft constitution was put on the EU governments' negotiating table in an Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) launched in October of the same year.
"Red lines" abounded, including euroskeptic Britain's demands to retain sovereignty in key areas and other similar reservations, leading Germany's Joschka Fischer to denounce "salami tactics" designed to slice up the new pact.
But the real stumbling block turned out to be the crunch issue of voting rights, with Spain and Poland refusing to surrender generous powers given to them at Nice.
At a December 2003 summit -- aimed at agreeing the constitution ahead of the May 1 "big bang" EU expansion -- Italy's Silvio Berlusconi famously claimed to have a "compromise in my pocket."
But it turned out to have nothing satisfactory written on it, and the EU -- still smarting from the deep divisions of the Iraq war -- agreed to disagree for a little bit longer.
It took the quiet diplomatic skills of Irish premier Bertie Ahern -- who took over the EU's presidency from Rome in January last year -- to finally tease out a compromise.
He was helped, ironically, by the March 11 bombings in Madrid, which precipitated a change of government in Spain. The new Madrid team was more flexible, leaving Poland effectively isolated.
The constitution was finally agreed at a summit on June 17, a month and a half after the EU's expansion.
Four months later it was signed by EU leaders amid much fanfare in Rome, symbolically echoing the 1957 Rome Treaty which founded the EU's predecessor institution.
But those celebrations were immediately clouded by the knowledge that it faced an uphill struggle to be ratified in all EU states, including up to half of them by referendum.

05/20/2005 02:23 GMT