WHEN the constitution finally dies, the best of the European Union will still survive. Its achievements will be left standing more clearly, as the dust of that most recent, misguided project settles around it.

It is fashionable this week to jump from the death of the constitution (which we can now presume) to the death of the European project. That is ridiculous. Opposition to the constitution reflects, among many other things, hostility to enlargement. That project may now have to slow down, even stop.

But the EU’s other achievements have been huge, and have changed life permanently.

THE SINGLE MARKET

This is perhaps the greatest single achievement of the Union, which did start as a purely commercial regional arrangement.

There is now something like a single market in goods across the borders of EU countries, which has reduced prices and boosted growth, as well as helping cultural integration.

True, doing the same for services has proved much harder than the EU foresaw. There is some progress on thrashing out a deal for financial services, but none on services generally.

This is a prospect which has aroused deep alarm in France, and may now get nowhere.

COMPETITION

Again, the economic front is where the achievements of the EU are easiest to demonstrate. It has had great success in reducing the payment of state aid — state subsidies to “national champions”. “That has been particularly valuable as many of the ten new members (who joined last year) and some of Mediterranean Europe did not really have competition regimes until they joined,” Alasdair Murray, of the Centre for European Reform, says.

MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE

Tourists now find it much easier to cross the EU’s internal borders. There has, however, been some disappointment in easing the way for people moving country for work. The lack of harmony in professional qualifications remains a barrier. But the figures of the growing traffic do not quite capture the imaginative change, as many people have come to regard themselves as part of one continent.

The programmes on television following people as they try to set up a new life abroad are a better guide to the sudden new sense of mobility.

ENLARGEMENT

Here we move into more disputable territory. Foreign policy achievements are outclassed by the economic ones — with the possible exception of enlargement. In the 1990s, the EU offered Central and Eastern European countries emerging from the Soviet Union the chance to join a club with a rival ideology and economic principles.

It is hard to overstate the importance that the hopes of joining the EU played in persuading those countries quickly to turn their backs on the old empire. Enlargement may have raised fears in the oldest members of the EU that the club is now too big. But the project remains hugely popular in most new member countries.

Those who are now championing further expansion, to include Romania and Bulgaria (hard to derail at this point) and Turkey, make the same arguments: those countries will become alienated from Europe and find other sponsors if the EU does not let them in. It is a strong argument, but one that may now be trumped by public fear of further enlargement.

Even as anxieties have grown, during the EU’s extraordinarily ambitious past few years, the rate of new projects has speeded up. The constitution was started before the euro had really bedded down; talks on Romania and Bulgaria were well under way before last year’s ten had joined.

Even if public fears — and a sense of too much, too fast — now puts a brake on the EU’s ambitions, that does not undermine the achievements so far.

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