World Watch

Lucky Real Madrid fans were given free copies of the new EU constitution at yesterday's big match, while TV ads - featuring the former Barcelona midfielder Johan Cruyff - have been singing the praises of the rewritten rulebook for a union of 25 countries. This is unlikely to be any more effective than the episode of the Spanish equivalent of Big Brother when participants had to memorise chunks of the 325-page text - covering such mind-numbing issues as qualified majority voting and enhanced cooperation - and then explain them to a monoglot Pole.

Even the keenest Europhiles know this is an uphill struggle, but with Jose Luis Zapatero's government holding the first referendum on the constitution next month there's no point delaying the kickoff of a campaign called "first with Europe".

Love it or loathe it, most people accept that the EU matters - for trade, the environment, doling out farm subsidies, standing up to America, or bringing down the price of air travel. But it is neither fun nor sexy, and very hard to identify with. It rarely gets the credit even when it performs well.

Take the Asian tsunami disaster. True, deep in midwinter slumber, Brussels was slow to respond. But the commission committed funds and its aid machine quietly got down to work. People looked, for good and bad, to their own governments to deal with a crisis in which Swedes, Germans and Brits died in their hundreds. Europe did OK - just as Europe, Romano Prodi boasted, "won" the 2004 Olympics. But it didn't manage to look anything like the global force it aspires to be, even when Javier Solana, the union's peripatetic foreign policy chief, dashed off to Washington to fly the flag.

Polls show that 90% of Spaniards know nothing at all about the constitution, though their European instincts mean they will still vote for it despite anxieties about cash from Brussels being diverted to the east. The Dutch vote in March is different: though non-binding on parliament, the plebiscite will reflect mounting disquiet about the benefits of integration -from a disillusioned founder member - because of French and German breaches of eurozone rules and continent-wide immigration policies. Ditto in Eurosceptic Denmark, where the centre-right government is popular because it has cracked down hard on foreigners.

The French, who are increasingly unhappy with a Europe they created in their own image and can now barely recognise, are likely to say yes, if by a narrow margin. But Jacques Chirac has covered his back by calling for a separate -potentially disastrous - vote on Turkish membership.

And what of our own offshore island? Tony Blair is now stuck with a referendum decision made under the taunts of the Tory and tabloid press. The only challenge to the well-organised "no" camp comes from occasional road shows by the enthusiastic Denis MacShane, the lonely Europe minister. The constitution, it is true, must be ratified by all 25 member states - but it is hardly a strategy simply to hope that someone else's rejection will get Britain off the hook. Perhaps a proper yes campaign here could be called "the last with Europe"? And maybe there could be a role for David Beckham? But we are likely to hear very little about it before the general election.

No one yet knows exactly what a British "no" would mean: pressure to leave, being consigned to an outer circle beyond the eurozone? But it is unlikely to be good news. It was fascinating in Brussels to watch the long process of writing a constitution whose noble ideals and peerless prose were supposed to emulate what America's founding fathers did in Philadelphia in 1787 - but didn't quite manage it. It was always hard then to create much interest or enthusiasm for it here in London. It's hard to detect any sign that this has changed at all.