Muddling Through, Take 2; The new Europe soldiers through its first tough week-- the so-called Acrimony Summit. It won't be the last.

Byline: Stryker McGuire, With Steven Paulikas in Vilnius, Eric Pape and Marie Valla in Paris, Stefan Theil in Berlin and Barbie Nadeau in Rome

By the old rules, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is a bad European. Britain is not a member of the single currency. It hasn't signed up to the Schengen open-borders treaty. On foreign policy, it goes to war when other Europeans don't, tilting more toward America than the Paris-Berlin axis. On economic policy, it taxes less than its European Union partners. On social policy, it provides a flimsier safety net.

The old rules are changing, though, and the EU itself is in transition, with its levers of power up for grabs. So it was that at a rancorous EU summit in Brussels last week Blair gained the upper hand against France and Germany, the philosophical progenitor and economic locomotive, respectively, of postwar European integration. He deprived them of their choice for a key EU job--head of the powerful European Commission--and edited their cherished draft Constitution to suit his purposes. How did this come to pass?

Welcome to the new EU. Blair's lukewarm Europeanism, as much as it chafes his Labour Party's Europhiles, strikes a chord with many in Europe these days. Witness the June 10-13 European Parliament elections, which saw a record low turnout all across Europe and the stunning rise of Euroskeptic parties from Warsaw to London. In Central and Eastern Europe, where eight former Soviet satellites joined the EU just six weeks ago amid fireworks and street parties, voter turnout was 10 percent below what it was across Europe as a whole--which was, in turn, the lowest it's been since Europeans began voting in Europewide elections in the 1970s. Cool Europeanism sells better these days than the hot stuff peddled by France and Germany.

Is that bad news or good? It's worth taking another look at the newest EU members. How could apathy have set in so quickly after the hoopla of May 1? An embarrassed Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski called it "a disease." In Lithuania, Vytautas Dumbliauskas of Vilnius University's Institute of International Relations and Political Science had a simpler explanation: "The European Parliament seems very far away for Lithuanians, and especially from their everyday problems. People don't know what, who, or where the EP is all about."

The rest of the EU's 450 million people feel pretty much the same way. Germany, France, Britain and six other "old EU" states had turnouts below Lithuania's. Apathy is nothing new in the EU. But these days there's so much that the EU is looking like the proverbial "sick man of Europe." Even as the EU has proliferated bureaucracies and extended political and economic integration, it has done too little to make Europeans feel they have a say in the Union's affairs, according to John Palmer of the European Policy Centre in Brussels. As a result, says the Oxford historian Vernon Bogdanor, EU politicians and bureaucrats live in "a house without windows," sealed off from popular pressures.

Last week's summit seemed determined to prove the skeptics right. It quickly became known as the Acrimony Summit--not so ...