The great debate.

Valéry Giscard d' Estaing, chairman of the European Union's (EU) constitutional convention, has proved that even at the age of 77 he is a master politician. Using a mixture of regal hauteur, bullying, negotiation and selective listening, he now looks likely to force the disputatious rabble on the convention floor to agree to a single text for an EU constitution, which will be presented at a grand summit meeting in Greece on June 20th. However, the convention is a failure in one crucial respect: it has failed to achieve its objective of sparking a wide public debate and making the EU more comprehensible to the public. A Spanish opinion poll found that a good 90% of Spaniards were unaware of the convention's existence and only 1% knew its goal was to write a constitution for the EU--and by extension for Spaniards. In Germany, a founder member of the Union whose serious papers devote acres of space to EU affairs, another recent poll found that 31% of the public had never heard of the European Commission, the EU's most important institution.