In this interview with EurActiv Romania, Professor of European Politics Anand Menon, director of the European Research Institute at Birmingham University, talks about EU enlargement as something that won't happen again; shares his views on the British Presidency's track record and the French's "lack of courage of their convictions," and says that the Constitutional Treaty is "dead". But the EU "will struggle on".

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Let's talk about the 10+2 enlargement wave the EU has been going through. Was that a good decision? Is that working well? And where will that lead Europe?

The way I look at it is: you have to ask good for whom? The process has been good, I think, in terms of anchoring democracy and stability in the countries concerned. There have been benefits to the European Union in terms of increasing the markets and so on and so forth.

My fear is that an EU of 25 and then 27 won't work properly. That fear is rooted in two things, I suppose. One - the question of size is important: the more players there are around the table, the harder it is to reach agreement. A basic economic gain theory will teach you that. The more heterogeneous those players are, makes the problems even worse, and there's a very heterogeneous bunch of states now that you have in the European Union.

And enlargement is happening at the very time when the European Union is getting more and more involved in ever more sensitive aspects of policy. So it's a combination of the salience of the issues the European Union deals with and the size of the EU.

I'm quite pessimistic about its ability, given recent enlargement, to take decisions or be as effective as it once was. We've seen this recently over the Polish attitude towards takeovers. There's just more potential now for the EU decision making system not to work as effectively as it once did. It's a very hard thing to say in some ways, because in the West, when we created this kind of pseudo consensus that enlargement was good, if you were opposed to enlargement, then you were some kind of unreformed cold warrior who thought that these countries should be back in the Soviet Union.

The point I'm making is that the choices seem to me between enlarging and having an EU that doesn't work properly, or having found some other kind of solution and having an EU with very close relationships with Central and Eastern Europe that did work properly. And it strikes me that the second alternative was not considered carefully enough. For very good reasons. Though I have to say that there's a degree of hypocrisy in here, because the same reasons that mean we shouldn't reassess the last enlargement are very absent from the rhetoric of the politicians when talking about Turkey. It seems we made the same promises and weren't bound by the same things.

You recently said that there will be no more enlargement after Bulgaria and Romania join. How would you explain that?

The simple reason is that President Chirac in France passed a constitutional amendment requiring any future enlargement after the 2007 enlargement to be ratified in France by a referendum. I cannot conceive of a situation in which the French would vote for enlargement. Turkey is obviously the clearest case but not the only case where that might be true.

What about Croatia?

I can't see the French voting in favour of enlargement, full stop. Because the French attitude is partly a cultural one about Turkey, partly a religious one about Turkey, partly, although I hate to say it, a racial one about Turkey, but partly too, a general fear, which isn't confined to France, of what enlargement into the poor regions of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe means for Western European states.

You saw a nice example of this a few months ago just before the Dutch referendum. The Eurovision song contest became an issue in the Dutch referendum, because opinion polls that went out found a huge degree of resentment amongst the Dutch population that the new member states had all voted for each other in the Eurovision song contest. And the Dutch took this as a parallel to what would happen in the European Union. It would mean that the centre of gravity in the European integration would shift. Married to that is the French concern about undercutting their labour market with cheap labour from Central and Eastern Europe. That fear is very real even if it's misplaced.

Will Romania be ready in 2007? Or maybe 2008? Should the EU wait until the country is ready or just take Romania on, hoping that it will catch up on the way?

The problem with "ready" is what you want it to mean. It's a bit like Gordon Brown's five tests for the British membership of the euro. You decide when it suits you, whether they are passed or not. That'll be the case with saying Romania isn't ready and you could probably keep that going for ten years if you tried hard enough.

"Ready" is when the European Union says they're ready, effectively. Let's not kid ourselves: many of the states of Central and Eastern Europe that joined - the Greeks, the Portuguese - weren't ready. They hadn't fulfilled the whole of the acquis. Many of the original member states still haven't fulfilled the acquis. France isn't ready for EU membership given the frequency with which it breaks the EU law.

It's a subjective rather than an objective judgement, that's the point. So yes and no, I suppose, is the answer.

My feeling about future enlargement is that actually the decision making situation within the European Union couldn't get much worse. And actually the relative loss if you compare again relative outcomes, one outcome is saying "we should keep these states out because decision making is bad", which wouldn't really make much difference: 25, 27 - I don't see it to matter much. The flip side is you lead to a lot of resentment at your periphery by making a promise and breaking it.

So in balance I'd be in favour of allowing these countries in. Again being asked the question of "ready", there are member states that use the euro who should never have been allowed to because they fiddled their accounts and everyone knew that. It was a political decision.

What is interesting about the whole enlargement issue to me is that there is, of course, a fourth criterion that no-one ever mentioned which is if the EU is ready for enlargement. But we don't seem to take much notice of that and I imagine we won't in the future.

The British presidency was criticized a lot and had little to boast about. Dead Constitution, dead Lisbon agenda and a tormented - now questioned - budget deal, paid dearly with part of the rebate and that wouldn't have happened without Merkel. Was it a disastrous presidency?

Again, for whom; in what context? The cynical view is that no, it wasn't a disaster because Tony Blair managed to keep Euro off the agenda in British domestic politics throughout the six months and that's always a triumph for British prime ministers, so for him no! And bear in mind that the European Union isn't the most important thing on Tony Blair's plate. As long as what he does doesn't act contagiously onto other aspects of politics that can be seen as a success in itself.

For the European Union it's hard to say. Big countries tend to have bad presidencies. That tends to be the historical record. The Germans are no good at it, the French are no good at it, the Brits are no good at it. It tends to be small countries that do well in presidencies. Partly, I suspect, because big countries don't understand the presidency. They try to use it to further their own ambitions which is always a hard thing to do. Disastrous? I'm not so sure. Enlargement was agreed upon, the budget deal was arrived at, so in that sense we did better than Luxembourg did. Lisbon agenda dead? Lisbon agenda very sleepy, not very active but no more or less than before the British presidency. REACH directive was agreed upon... The problem with the Lisbon agenda isn't that it's dead, it's that it's stupid. The objectives set out were unrealistic. No presidency would achieve them because they're not achievable by the European Union. In a sense, the European Union only makes serious progress towards the Lisbon agenda when France is pushing it. Because Britain is seen as on a certain side on the arguments about the Lisbon agenda and finds it hard to convince anyone. If you had a Sarkozy presidency arguing in favour of it that would be a different thing. It's kind of... only Nixon could go to China. It's only when a state that is seen as opposed to the Lisbon agenda starts to embrace it that we'll see real progress.

And what presidency could have succeeded in the context of the second half of 2005? With the Constitutional Treaty dead, with the budget issue alive, with the presidency being the crucial player in the budgetary negotiation... It was a nightmare structural situation. And I think if you're going to try and look at if it was a success or otherwise, you need to look at "relative to what" and "what could you reasonably have expected from any presidency at that period?" In a way it was good for all that it was the British presidency because no one expects much of the British.

Mr. Blair's speech a couple of weeks ago sounded like he was celebrating a victory of Britain's view of Europe: more economics, less politics. Yet, the Tories were fast to say that he is deluding himself: that in fact he lost the battle for a more integrated Britain, they said. What's your view on that?

The Conservatives lost the battle for a more integrated Britain, not Blair. Because the problem is the Tory euro scepticism rather than Blair's euro enthusiasm. Blair's right. He probably shouldn't have said it, would be my answer. Europe is very British. I'd say there's a very strong case to be made that next to a statue of Jean Monet should go a statue of Margaret Thatcher, in terms of the great architects of what the European Union is. Because the single market is the single most solid and noticeable accomplishment. Arguably, next to the currency.

It's a paradox of the British position with regard to Europe. That on the one hand Europe suits Britain more than it suits any other member state in terms of the nature of its policies. But the Brits act like it's something that's imposed on them from without. It's partly a function of the political rhetoric. What I always say to people is, if people say that broad support for the European Union in Britain hovers at around 45-48%, we should be amazed that it's so high rather than moaning about the fact that it's so low. And the reason we should be amazed that it's so high is the fact that we've had thirty years of negative political rhetoric about he European Union in this country and still support remained relatively strong. Politicians, by their nature, want to have their cake and eat it. That's to say that if you can create an institution that furthers your objectives whilst allowing it, rather than yourself, to take the blame for everything that goes wrong, that's a good situation. The problem is it doesn't lead to that institution being loved.

You've studied France's stance in the European Union quite extensively. How do you think the French manage to lose friends so easily, especially in Eastern Europe? For example, Jacques Chirac told the candidate countries to keep their mouths shut about Iraq in 2003. And in 2004, when taking office, the president of Romania, supposedly a francophone country, first talked about a Bucharest-London-Washington axis -only to be accused by the French minister of external affairs that he doesn't have European reflexes.

The French have been losing friends for a long time in Central and Eastern Europe. If you go back to 1990 in his New Year's address to the French people, Francois Mitterrand talked about a European confederation. He was immediately slapped out by Vaclav Havel and all over the Central and Eastern Europe because it was clear that what he was proposing was second class citizenship in the European Community for those countries. The French have always had this view.

Curiously enough, enlargement is one of the few areas I can think of where the French have failed to have the courage of their convictions. They have always been, if not opposed to, then reluctant concerning Eastern Enlargement. Their attitude hasn't changed. What is remarkable is that they didn't feel able to wield a veto. The French have found it hard to adapt to the new European Union. They used not to need friends. They used not to need to lobby. They used to either... for the first few years of European integration the system in Europe was the French system. They didn't need to do much to make it work, they had already done it since the inception. They'd struck a deal with the Germans in the fifties about how the EC would work and it would work like France. In the late 1980s the illusion of French influence was maintained because of the very, very strong Delors-Mitterrand axis. It wasn't Delors who reshaped Europe in the 1980s, it was Delors acting with France and Germany.

The French have been very slow to respond to a situation in which they no longer enjoy that sort of influence. They've been slow to accept that they cannot shape Europe by themselves, but need allies and friendships. That realisation will come slowly I imagine, but it has to come if they want to keep influence in Europe at all.

The Austrian presidency, the Constitution and the future of integration. Where are we going in the short term? Mr Blair suggested we should concentrate on practicalities...

Mr Blair is absolutely right. One of the interesting things about the British policy is how consistent it has been. You compare Blair's speech in Oxford to Blair's speech in the European Parliament to a speech John Major gave in March 1997 just before Blair's election victory, to Margaret Thatcher's Bruges speech of 1988: they are virtually identical. Something that's often overlooked.

The Constitutional Treaty is dead. It cannot be revived. The Austrians like to say it can because it allows them to talk about something other than practicalities and they're not comfortable talking about practicalities because there are hard choices involved. If I were a president of the European Union I'd talk about the Constitutional Treaty now because it's a good diversion from the business ahead. It's dead simply because two original member states voted against it and neither of them will vote again in a referendum. It might be possible to initiate some of its reforms on a piece by piece basis after the French presidential elections of 2007.

The issue is which bits, because here the interesting question is that the member states disagree among themselves about which bits they want. We're in a danger situation. By talking about the Constitutional treaty as if it were not dead, the Austrians are simply wasting our time. They are distracting from the real practical challenges facing Europe. In that Tony Blair was quite right. They also serve to paralyse the EU institutions themselves because as long as there is the prospect of a referendum anywhere on the Treaty, institutions like the Commission and the Court have to be intrinsically cautious about what they're doing. If there's a prospect of the French voting again, the Commission can't come down on them as hard as they should about some of their dodgy practices with regard to privatizations and maintaining national control over key industries, which are in breach of EU law.

The EU won't die, the EU is not in the sort of crisis that some of the more dramatic analyses say it is, the EU is simply hamstrung by the fact that it's finding it hard to take decisions and even harder to take decisions on reforming its decision making. It will struggle on. It will struggle on in a way that possibly suits Britain. The problem of course, that people like Blair overlook is that to make a market you need strong institutions. Strong institutions aren't only necessary for regulation. They're necessary for insuring, for instance, competition. There's no doubt in my mind that the EU as an actor, as a market, is less effective now than it was ten years ago.

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Anand Menon is currently the Director of the European Research Institute at Birmingham University and Professor of European Politics. Prior to his arrival at Birmingham, he spent ten years as Lecturer in European Politics at Oxford University, and five as Fellow of St. Antony's College. His major research interests are: British and French foreign policy; the institutions of the European Union and European security (particularly NATO and the European Security and Defence Policy). Professor Menon also works closely with policy makers on these issues: he has co-ordinated five working groups for the European Secretariat of the UK Cabinet Office on the Future of Europe, and was part of a group providing advice to the Greek Foreign Minister on the Greek Presidency. He has published widely, both in academic journals and national newspapers such as the Financial Times. He also has a column in the Brussels bimonthly E!Sharp.