If Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, is to be heeded, we must now begin a monk-like “period of reflection” about the future of Europe. The danger of calm contemplation is that it can become an excuse for a “period of inaction” that would serve no one in the region. Instead, Mr Straw and the Prime Minister have an opportunity to accentuate the positive of the negative.

The European “constitution” was a document doomed by the hubris of its drafters, who were supposed to bring the EU closer to its citizens, but created an incomprehensible, self-indulgent tome that has been mercifully put down by the people of France. The “constitution” is dead. Long live the constitution.

The next steps must prove more fruitful than the last if the EU is to recover any authority from the morass. A political disaster this may be for Jacques Chirac, but for Tony Blair it represents an opportunity. As Britain assumes the EU presidency in a month’s time, to Mr Blair will fall the task of trying to rescue a consensus from the current confusion. The Prime Minister has been saved by the French vote, which has released him from his obligation to hold an unwinnable referendum in Britain. Now he can “save” Europe, a task far easier for him to finesse than that British referendum would have been.

Mr Blair should begin by dumping the document rejected by the French on Sunday. Vast and vague, the very concept of the EU constitutional treaty was wrong. It should have been, and could still be, a brief and easily digestible statement containing a set of principles to which all the peoples of Europe could sign up. Mr Blair himself used to believe as much. In a speech in Warsaw in October 2000, he outlined his preference for a short “statement of principles” over a full-scale, cumbersome, formal constitution. The statement of principles would be expressly a political, not a legal, document, and would incorporate a “charter of competences” setting out what is best done nationally. It would end the gradual drift of powers towards Brussels and encourage what the bureaucrats like to call “subsidiarity” — in other words, national autonomy and identity.

An EU of 25 states, expanding to 27 in 2007 when Bulgaria and Romania join the throng, needs clarity and simplicity if it is to be workable. Only the broadest outline of principles is likely to prove equally acceptable to a City of London lawyer, a Czech DJ and a farmer in Corfu. And the new member states should be equally involved in drawing up the rules and principles as the old. An EU which treats Eastern Europeans as second-rate citizens — and a source of cheap, exploitable labour — is a Union only in name. The door must be left wide open for Turkey to join as well.

Mr Blair has the perfect opportunity to develop these concepts during the British presidency. He should return to the principles he emphasised when brandishing a paragraph from the Laeken declaration in the House of Commons three and a half years ago: what European citizens expect, it said, is “more results, better responses to practical issues, and not a European superstate or European institutions inveigling their way into every nook and cranny of life”. It did not require Val éry Giscard d’Estaing’s 65,000 words (and the same again in annexes) to enunciate this. Often, the solution to seemingly intractable and complex problems is the simplest one.