EUROPEAN UNION: IGC TO BE LAUNCHED IN AN ATMOSPHERE OF DOUBT.

European Council President Silvio Berlusconi will seek to convince Heads of State and Government to moderate their Ministers' demands but the task is likely to be a difficult one given that the tone has often risen over recent weeks at the highest level. Thus on October 2, on the initiative of Finland's Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, his Austrian, Czech, Hungarian, Slovenian, Lithuanian and Maltese colleagues Wolfgang Schussel, Vladimir Spidla, Peter Medgyessy, Anton Rop, Algirdas Brasauskas and Fenech Adami, signed a joint letter challenging the list of subjects opened up for discussion by the Presidency (see European Report 2807 for details of the timetable for work). They are demanding in particular a debate on the status of the European Council, the role of the stable President of the European Council and the allocation of seats within the European Parliament. They are also insisting on the complete reopening of Part III of the proposal and not only defence and the extension of qualified majority voting. The signatories are also continuing to press for the staging of preparatory technical meetings, not being content with meetings of Ministers' personal representatives.

Heads of State and Government should settle the final procedural points in Rome before their general policy debate on the future Constitution and it already seems certain that the addition of new subjects for negotiation and the multiplication of expert meetings will be ill-received by Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and France's President Jacques Chirac, who would like to see a short IGC yielding results not deviating far from Convention text.

Paradoxically, and if Ministers hold to the proposed work programme, the first IGC session...