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With the ink barely dry on an outline for a new EU treaty, Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi on Sunday became the first European head of state to question just what it is European leaders agreed to at their marathon summit in Brussels, Belgium. Prodi criticized the deal, telling Italian daily La Repubblica that states like the United Kingdom and Poland put national interests ahead of European goals. Europe, he said, no longer has a "shared spirit" for moving ahead.
The deal on what no longer will be called an EU constitution came at the last hour of the last EU heads-of-state summit to be held during German Chancellor Angela Merkel's term as EU president. Merkel set an ambitious agenda for her EU presidency -- and has been relatively successful in meeting her goals. As she prepared to begin her six-month term as EU president, however, Merkel clearly stated one of her prime objectives. Not achieving a common EU constitution, she said, would be "a historic failure."
The problem, Merkel knew, was that if she could not break the years-long deadlock over the controversial constitution, then it would be close to impossible for anyone else to see a deal through. Now that Merkel seems to have done the impossible -- even though it is now a treaty -- many are scratching their heads and asking what exactly she achieved.
Certainly, the conditions are the best they ever have been for an agreement: Germany is the rising power in Europe; France, which held out against a constitution in the past, now has a new government that is more open to an EU overhaul; while British Prime Minister Tony Blair demonstrated that he was at least open to a compromise before he leaves office this week. If Merkel had failed to get at least a preliminary agreement by the end of the summit, there is only one more heavyweight power coming into the EU presidency that could have pushed it through within the next decade.
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