EU is in crisis despite compromises-Polish official

BERLIN, July 11 (Reuters) The European Union is still in a crisis despite a compromise on a new treaty reached last month, a senior Polish official said.

European Union leaders last month clinched an agreement on a mandate to overhaul the 27-nation bloc after persuading Poland to end a stand-off that nearly torpedoed a marathon summit.

Poland's chief negotiator on EU issues, Marek Cichocki, praised the progress made during German Chancellor Angela Merkel's 6-month EU presidency which ended last month, but dismissed the idea that the compromises she achieved would lead to a definitive reform of the bloc.

''What the German presidency achieved was to revive the discussion about the reform of the European Union,'' Cichocki told an audience at the Polish Cultural Centre in Berlin yesterday.

But he said its success came at the price of abandoning the idea an EU constitution once and for all, along with the idea of finishing the process of reform the EU and integration of its member states. It was a price worth paying, he added.

''This means that the compromise we have is not the end of the process, rather a step in the process. The German presidency succeeded in bringing us into a new phase,'' Cichocki said.

''We are still in a crisis situation,'' he added.

Under the compromise, EU leaders agreed to negotiate a reform treaty by the end of this year, to be ratified by mid-2009, replacing the constitution rejected in 2005 by French and Dutch voters.

Poland had initially wanted to change the proposed EU voting system entirely because its voting weight decreases substantially. But it dropped a threatened veto after the EU members agreed to postpone its introduction until 2017 and to include the possibility of delaying decisions.

But Warsaw has since said it would push to get new concessions on the voting system written into the bloc's new treaty because it said EU members had already agreed to them verbally.

This threatens to reignite Warsaw's row with other EU members, who say the treaty mandate was clear and does not need to be revisited.

Cichocki said there were other issues that need to be resolved but gave no details.

Portugal is the current EU president and has vowed to try to get the new treaty drawn up by October.

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