Leading article: The constitution is dead. Long live the treaty

On the face of it, the agreement reached at the European summit looks like a characteristic EU fudge. Hammered out in the early hours of Saturday morning, presented by bleary-eyed national leaders at dawn, it seemed to offer a little of something to everyone.

The French downgraded the EU's formal commitment to an economic system of "undistorted competition", without it being completely excised. The Poles postponed the date at which a new voting system comes into force that is less advantageous for them. The British defended their "red lines". And the Germans, with the increasingly impressive Angela Merkel at the helm, kept the whole creaking, rattling Euro-train on track.

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As at the G8, success in Brussels this weekend was in part the avoidance of failure - except that at this summit substantial progress was made. It just suited some of the key participants to play down the collective achievement, while playing up the attainment of their own sectional objectives. Wisely, Ms Merkel allowed this to happen.

There was real success at Brussels, however, that went beyond the scoring of individual national points. It was that the leaders of 27 countries managed to agree a framework for a new, and limited, reform treaty that facilitates necessary institutional and procedural change, while consigning the doomed constitutional treaty to the past.

According to the guidelines now accepted, there will be a long-term EU President. There will be a single individual to represent EU foreign policy, but he or she will not be styled a minister. There will be a phased-in change to the voting system, more opt-ins and opt-outs, and nothing formal or informal that would implies a European super-state. It is not a particularly elegant solution, but it is a solution that has proved acceptable.

This is crucial because it means the protracted wrangling over the so-called "constitution" should now be at an end. There may still be pitfalls. The 18 states that ratified the discarded treaty may feel the new arrangements do not go far enough. There is also an element of artifice: some of the substance of the constitutional treaty lives on, but none of the form. Any blame, however, should attach to those whose ambitions led them to oversell the old treaty as a full-blown constitution.

The timetable provides for an inter-governmental conference to be held before the end of the year and the treaty to be ratified by mid-2009. Having dangled the prospect of a referendum last week, Mr Brown was right to bat it smartly away. The European Union can finally start to look beyond the small print of how it functions.