They'd Rather Be in Philly.(political necrophilia)

Byline: DENIS MACSHANE (MACSHANE, a Labour M.P., was Tony Blair's Europe minister from 2002 to 2005.)

Europe has a new fetish--political necrophilia. You might have thought that France and the Netherlands killed off the European constitution a year ago. But no. A startling number of EU leaders have lately taken to saying the stillborn document can be resuscitated. They are wrong. The thing is as dead as Monty Python's famous parrot.

So what's going on? As if the people had not spoken, the constitution's author, former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing, travels from capital to capital insisting his baby is alive and well. Against all reason, he is joined in the charade by luminaries ranging from Jacques Chirac and Angela Merkel to Romano Prodi. You can only ask why, and the answer is cowardice--or, more politely, weak leadership. For what Europe really needs is a wholesale political rewiring. As Bill Clinton put it, it's the economy, stupid. But because dealing with real issues and real people's material needs is difficult, and therefore a hazard to one's career, European politicians prefer cosmetics like the constitution.

For most of the past decade, Europe has obsessed about treaties--Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice and, of course, Giscard's pet project. This has come at the cost of neglecting a vastly more serious challenge--freeing up business to create work, and reforming economies to increase growth and generate the tax revenue needed to finance greater investment in social programs, education, public health and pensions. Every opinion poll shows this is what Europe's citizens care most about. They are fed up with their leaders' talk about constitutional conventions, draft projects and utopian Pan-European futures. Give us a vision we can (literally) buy into, say the people--a new material Europe of jobs and social investment. Satisfy our life's needs.

Yet perversely, European leaders continue to seek their Philadelphia moment, dreaming about how Europe's 500 million citizens can live in quasi-federal harmony. Eyes on the stars, they ignore earthly evidence that Europe is trending in the opposite direction. Tiny Montenegro's independence will soon be followed by Kosovo's, ushering in eight new U.N. (eventually to be EU) members in place of a single Yugoslavia. Spain is struggling to contain the separatist ambitions of Catalonia, ...