The drizzle that shrouded Brussels all day on Saturday was fitting for an EU summit that turned into a damp squib with no constitution to show for two years' hard work.
Polish intransigence was blamed by many, as was the high-stakes negotiating style of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who dropped many hints of having an ace up his sleeve but in the end produced only a joker.
The failure of the Brussels summit leaves the EU lumbered with the unloved compromises hammered out over five nights of tortuous talks on the French riviera in December 2000.
And it revived talk by France and Germany of a "two-speed" Europe with a core of member states going their own way.
The time scale makes it highly unlikely that a new constitution -- which must be ratified in all 25 present and future member states -- will be in place before next year's enlargement deep into eastern Europe.
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern will have to pick up the pieces when he assumes the EU presidency from Berlusconi on Jan. 1.
But Ahern says he is not planning to touch the issue at least until March, to give time for tempers to cool and new compromises to be teased out.
The Brussels talks foundered on the same issue that so convulsed the EU at its Nice summit three years ago -- national voting rights.
Poland and Spain fought tooth-and-nail to retain the Nice voting system, which assigned them 27 votes each -- just two less than Germany whose population is as large as both of them put together.
The draft constitution proposes to introduce a new "double majority" system requiring decisions to have the support of 50 percent of member states representing 60 percent of the EU's total population.
Germany, the EU's paymaster, was said by diplomats to be ready to compromise on the 50-60 percentages to give smaller member states more weight in EU affairs. But it was not willing to budge on the double majority concept itself.
Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller, for his part, refused to shift on his demands to retain the Nice system, mindful of the storm of protest that would have greeted him on his return home if he had caved in.
But for Kirsty Hughes, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies, the Polish government made a fundamental mistake in encouraging its public to believe Nice was a matter of life or death.
"The Polish electorate has been highly sensitized to an issue that has been presented as if they're replaying the Second World War or the defeat of communism," she said.
"They've been completely black and white about this, and the EU doesn't work like that," she said.
Berlusconi tabled four proposals on the voting rights issue on Saturday morning, according to participants. They were:
? agreement on the draft constitution's "double majority" -- the option refused by Poland and Spain;
? agreeing to decide in 2008 when that draft would come into force;
? agreeing to decide in 2008 on new voting arrangements;
? changing the terms of the "double majority" system, raising the population bar to 70 percent instead of 60 percent.
"One can very well imagine that Germany would have been able to give way in one of these directions," said an EU diplomat.
"But it was impossible to sell the logic of the constitution to the Poles. They were insisting on the Nice Treaty," the diplomat said.
The EU must now take stock of the bruising Brussels encounter. Some at least will be glad to fall under the guidance of the emollient Ahern rather than the maverick Italian leader.
"Berlusconi is the best advertisement yet for ending the rotating presidency," another EU diplomat said, evoking one of the main innovations in a draft constitution that now returns to the EU's "to do" list.
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