Four years on, another failure to deliver

Commentary feature. Leaders at the Brussels European summit in 2001 hailed it as a 'defining moment'. There would be a full and intense debate with Europe's citizens to reconnect the Brussels elite to an increasingly sceptical population. Europe would become 'more democratic, transparent and efficient'. It should reach out to all sectors of society, to find a consensus on what mattered to ordinary citizens. The 2001 summit spawned the European constitution, a treaty so unpopular that it has been withdrawn from any further public scrutiny. Now in 2005 European leaders were at it again: telling themselves that people would come to love their project if only they understood it better.