Europe’s new constitution is just a step in the march towards a political Europe, one of its architects said this afternoon.

Jean-Luc Dehaene, vice-chairman of the Convention which drew up the draft document, made clear more integration will be needed in the next few years.

Mr Dehaene was vetoed by then Prime Minister John Major in 1994 as too federalist to be president of the European Commission.

Coincidentally, he is again emerging as a candidate for the job and this time the British government does not have a veto.

He will hardly win Prime Minister Tony Blair’s backing after signalling his view that the constitution is far from the end of the drive towards increasing EU harmonisation.

Mr Dehaene was speaking in Brussels in response to the final version of the constitution approved by EU leaders last Friday.

He said the Maastricht Treaty, with its social laws and single currency, had delivered a "socio-economic" Europe in the early 1990s.

Now the constitution was delivering a political Europe.

Mr Dehaene said: "This constitution marks the passage of the European Union from a socio-economic Europe under Maastricht to a more political Europe, which will need to be further fleshed out in the years ahead. This is a step along the road."

Earlier, the chairman of the Convention, former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing, described the final outcome as close to the original proposals from the Convention.

Of the Convention's proposed 40,800 words of draft text, about 30,500 of those words had made it into the final version.

Mr Giscard d'Estaing said: "The (final) text makes it possible to organise Europe's future for some decades ahead."

Asked about the squabble between Britain on one side and France and Germany on the other, he said: "We have not had to go a long way out of our way to meet the concerns of the British".

He was unconcerned about the growing debate over whether the constitution would be ratified in all member states, as required before it can come into force.

"I have no undue fears, but there will be some local difficulties"

The former French president estimated it would take two years to complete ratification of the document, and he called for co-ordination between member states "so that ratification is not all over the place".

Meanwhile, the pressure was on the Irish government, in the EU presidency until the end of the month, to find a candidate for the job of EU Commission president.

The nominations presented to last week's summit failed to muster enough support and Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern is now sounding out his EU counterparts before calling a "mini-summit" to name the successor to Romano Prodi.

With Commissioner Chris Patten and Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt out of the running, names still in the frame include the centre-right Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, the French foreign minister Michel Barnier, the Irish president of the European Parliament Pat Cox and Portuguese EU Commissioner Antonio Vitorino.

The trouble is that none of them has sparked an enthusiastic consensus among EU leaders.

Hence the re-emergence of the name of Mr Dehaene, the pugnacious federalist Belgian who came so close to being Commission president more than a decade ago.

This afternoon he hedged suggestions that he could come through the middle as a compromise choice acceptable to most -- if not all -- EU governments.

Asked if he might turn out to be the consensus candidate he shrugged and replied: "I haven't heard anything".

An Irish government spokesman said that no date would be fixed for the necessary "mini-summit" to approve a nomination until it was clear that a consensus was emerging behind one name.

Likely dates are June 27 or June 30 -- the last day of the Irish presidency -- for a brief gathering of EU leaders in Brussels, probably over dinner, to fill the top Commission post.
 

The new EU constitution has been hailed by the Prime Minister as a "success for Britain" and the "new Europe that is is taking shape".

Mr Blair denied the document was a move towards a European superstate or a federal state.

He told MPs it made plain for the first time that the EU had only "the competencies conferred on it by member states".

Reporting back to the Commons on the outcome of last Friday's agreement, Mr Blair said the text of the treaty demolished "myths" like Britain being forced to join the Euro.

But Tory leader Michael Howard said the constitution was "bad for our democracy, bad for jobs and bad for Britain".

Mr Blair staked out the battleground over Europe in the months ahead, leading up to a referendum on the constitution.

He said the issue was not really about the treaty itself but whether Britain should or should not be a leading EU member.

The EU, he said, was "the most successful way anyone has yet devised of managing relations between European countries whose national rivalries had, until 60 years ago, only ever been settled in a series of bloody conflicts".

Opponents of the treaty were accused of pursuing a "narrow nationalism which no British Government has ever espoused or should ever espouse if it has the true interests of the British people at heart".

He insisted: "In the end, the final say will be with the British people in a referendum. But in the debate, we will argue this constitutional treaty represents a success for the new Europe that is taking shape, is a success for Britain today and I commend it to the House."