Leading article: The wrong way to conduct business

Two years ago most people in this county thought the Franco-German plans for a European constitution had been finished off. Tony Blair had - reluctantly - promised us a referendum, but in the event the French and Dutch voters saved us the bother.

But now it has become clear that the beast was not killed but merely stunned. At this week's European Union summit in Brussels much the same proposals, albeit repackaged, will be back on the table. The planned EU foreign minister may have been renamed an "international spokesman" and there is no longer talk of European anthems and flags. But the creation of an EU president to replace the old rotating presidency, and the introduction of majority voting, are key items of the 2004 constitution.

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To describe such substantive changes as amendments to the existing process is dishonest. Indeed, the differences between the present package and the old constitutional proposals are often cosmetic, and appear to have been made for semantic reasons. This is because if the document is no longer called "a constitution" but a treaty, several governments will no longer feel obliged to put the proposals to a popular vote but can safely leave the decision to their parliaments.

This is absolutely the wrong way to conduct business in Europe. It is not transparent, and it threatens to revive the cry that the European Union has a serious democratic deficit at its heart - with justification, in this instance. Such sentiments have already undermined faith in the European project, playing into the hands of all those Eurosceptics who are still struggling to come to terms with the modern world.

It would be nice to think that Tony Blair, as he prepares for his encounter with Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy in Brussels and on his last major foreign outing as prime minister, could be relied on to point out these truths. Nice but naive, for Downing Street has made it clear Mr Blair looks favourably on the not-quite constitution and like his partners in Paris and Berlin, sees no need for a "mini-treaty" to go to the people, despite any promises in the past.

It has been claimed that one reason why Mr Blair is now keen on an EU president and foreign minister as well as the new system of majority voting is because he wants to stitch up his successor literally hours before he leaves office. That does not seem credible. The real worry is that Gordon Brown is complicit with this week's arrangements, happy for an outgoing, unpopular Blair to take all the flak for the summit's outcome and thus save him from having to weather a crisis over Europe in his first week as prime minister.

We hope this is not the case. It would, after all, be depressing if Mr Brown were to start his premiership by ducking a challenge to the reactionaries on the right. We must hope that when whatever is agreed in Brussels goes to an intergovernmental conference later this autumn, Mr Brown points out the folly of trying to smuggle major changes to the way Europe is run through the back door and without any democratic legitimacy.

What is at stake here is not really whether the changes that Mrs Merkel wants - and which Mr Sarkozy seems happy to go along with - are desirable or not. This remains a moot point, though some would argue that a Europe of 27 has functioned reasonably well under the existing system, and not, as the constitutionalists once predicted, collapsed under the weight of enlargement. The question is whether or not a package of fairly weighty changes that will undoubtedly affect Europe's shape and destiny should - in this country at any rate - be decided in a referendum. The answer is simple: it should and it must.