Here we go again. Two years ago the French and Dutch public demolished Europe’s plans for a new constitution. Now the German presidency of Angela Merkel wants to resurrect it in the guise of a new treaty. Europe is on the verge of repeating history rather than learning from it.

As a pro-European I fear the consequences for the already strained relationship between Europe and its citizens.

It is true, of course, that Europe has grown topsy-turvy as successive countries have clamoured to share in its remarkable success. As the world’s biggest economic market, the European Union is a magnet for new entrants. The challenges of the modern world — global warming, global terror, mass migration, organised crime — require more cooperation between nation states, so if the EU didn’t exist we would have to invent it.

While modern Europe is geographically wide, however, its public support is shallow. People agree with the EU in principle but feel alienated from the practice. Turnouts at European elections are a joke.

The EU speaks a bureaucratic language that is foreign to the public.

Too often it seems as if an unaccountable elite takes decisions behind closed doors. Scepticism isn’t peculiar to Britain. Elsewhere in Europe public antipathy is common place. The results of the 2005 constitution referendums gave it voice.

Pro-Europeans usually point the finger of blame for such public ambivalence at external influences. The media are a favourite target — and of course sections of the press have waged an unrelentingly negative campaign against Europe. The blame game also fingers governments for failing to win over public opinion — and in the UK members of Tony Blair’s Government could have done more to make a consistent case for Europe. But these explanations are excuses: a soft comfort blanket that merely induces complacency.

It reminds me of how parts of the Labour Party, faced with successive election defeats in the 1980s, heaped blame on the public for voting the wrong way. The public was mistaken, not Labour. Eventually we cottoned on that since there were many more members of the public than there were of us, it was we who needed to change.

So it is with Europe. The EU needs to stop pointing and start examining its own part in the gulf that exists between public and Europe. There have been two principal failures: to demonstrate that both its relevance and its governance are in touch with the modern world.

With the best will in the world it is hard for people to see the EU as relevant when it is too concerned with changing its institutions and not enough with modernising its policies. The valiant efforts over recent years by the European Commission of President José Manuel Barroso to shift that focus are undermined by Chancellor Merkel’s decision to make a new treaty the centrepiece of the German presidency.

And yet the public mood across Europe is crying out for coordinated and effective action on security and terror, the environment and immigration. This is the territory that the EU should make its own and the priority for the new presidency.

Instead, Chancellor Merkel warns of “historic failure” without a new treaty, even though new accessions, new membership negotiations, a new budget and new peacekeeping operations have all proceeded happily without one. Of course some reform is needed but far better to make piecemeal change that is focused on securing greater external public participation than on grand internal institutional redesign.

It is not just what Europe does but how it does it that has failed to keep pace with the times. Europe's institutions were born out of postwar adversity. People expected little say and experienced precious little choice. Then deference was higher, expectations were lower. Now it is the other way round.

Unaccountable decision-making no longer works in an era when the public is far more informed and inquiring. The new democratic thirst that exists among citizens requires from the EU a more modern modus operandi.

So Tony Blair is right to demand a rethink about what Europe is for and to reorientate its spending and policy priorities accordingly. But that is just one side of the reform coin. The other side is to find ways of bringing the public into Europe's decision-making tent.

The European Parliament in particular needs to think about how the public’s voice can be better heard in its deliberations. For example, by better linking the results of consultation to decision-making, especially budget setting. Or by introducing a citizen’s right to initiate new laws, giving the people of Europe a direct say in place of the European Commission’s monopoly over initiating legislation. Or by revisiting the 2001 Laeken Declaration’s presumption towards subsidiarity by identifying powers that could be delegated to nation states, local government or even local communities.

None of this implies that Europe’s nations can or should go it alone. Quite the reverse. Europe can build a knowledge economy faster in concert. Europe can better defend itself against crime, terror and global warming by pooling sovereignty. Europe can more effectively shape the world order if it acts in unison on trade, defence and foreign policy. But cooperation between nations nowadays relies on the active cooperation of citizens.

Unless the EU is prepared to address the gulf between rulers and governed we risk a bureaucrats’ Europe, not a peoples’ Europe. It is time for Europe to face outwards not inwards, to empower the public not the politicians. Elitism is out. Engagement is in. Europe needs to learn the lesson.

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