Politicians in office, and particularly British politicians, love Europe. It allows them to fly, with briefcase-carrying entourages, to glamorous locations. It offers them unlimited photo opportunities. Its complexities allow them to talk down to journalists and, through them, to the voters at home. It permits them to pose, at their convenience, as doughty patriots, fighting dastardly foreigners, or as far-sighted international statesmen, steering the future of a continent. Once, politicians could draft treaties that redrew the map of Europe, slicing off a bit of Poland here, a bit of Hungary there. Millions of people could be shunted from one nationality to another at the stroke of a foreign minister's pen. Now, they are preoccupied by red lines, voting strengths and numbers of commissioners. But Talleyrand would have been perfectly at home at the Nice summit, among the back-stairs deals and intrigues. In the new style of international diplomacy, as in the old, the big countries - notably Germany, France and Britain - call the shots; the small countries do as they are told. The eastern European countries that are due to join the European Union in 2003 will have no more choice about whether to stay in or out, or more influence over important decisions, than Czechoslovakia had in 1938. If they want markets, jobs and investment, the former communist countries will have to join the EU and obey its rules.

Most British debate about Europe is preposterous. The Brussels Commission is portrayed as a monster of bureaucratic control. Yet it has fewer employees than Birmingham City Council and no real means of enforcing its will. A veto over as many policy areas as possible is portrayed as essential to British interests. Yet, as Tony Blair said in the Commons on 11 December, once the EU is enlarged, the veto would allow Estonia or Slovakia to block a move - on, say, cross-border crime control - for which there would be overwhelming British support. None of this gets close to the real story about the EU. It has become a vehicle for power politics, and possibly for a new imperialism in which the former colonial powers will again boss around lesser races. Having escaped the Soviet bear, eastern Europe is about to fall into the EU's softer embrace. To reduce all this to a question of Britain v the rest is a breath- taking category error: only a very incompetent British leader (William Hague, perhaps) could fail to reap advantage from what is, first and foremost, a club for big, rich capitalist countries.

The important issue about Europe - and one that scarcely surfaced in Nice - is that it lacks any kind of democratic or popular dimension. This is not just a problem for the EU; it is a problem for the liberal democracies at every level, as shown by growing public cynicism about politics and declining voter turnout. As Anthony Giddens, guru of the Third Way, has argued, we need a "democratising of democracy". In a recent Foreign Policy Centre pamphlet, he argues: "Existing political structures . . . even the most democratic of them, are not democratic enough . . . Poor transparency of public institutions, the undue influence of corporate power . . . old-boy networks, straightforward corruption, lack of representation of women and ethnic minorities - these are found even in the most democratic of countries." Professor Giddens sees the EU as "a bridgehead towards global governance". But what characterises the global governance we have - the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, etc - is that it is even more remote and impermeable than the EU. Nobody outside the political elites has the faintest idea of how these bodies can be influenced or effectively lobbied. That is why so many disparate interests take to the streets of Seattle, Prague or Nice. Lacking any common objectives (indeed, their aims are often in conflict with one another), the protesters are united in their sense of exclusion.

The Europeans have it all the wrong way round. The architects of the United States started from "we, the people". The architects of the EU habitually start from "we, the rulers". No private business would expect to survive if it had marketed itself so badly. The next European summit should be devoted exclusively to how EU institutions and procedures can be brought closer to the people. Then, and only then, can it make sense of all the arguments about vetos, national voting rights, subsidiarity and federalism. Democracy in the nation states has become sclerotic, narrow and ineffective; Europe, with imagination, could give it new vitality. So far, the opportunity has been utterly wasted.

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