Almost all the innovations

The Action Committee for European Democracy has produced an explanatory memorandum on the new treaty and supplementary protocols. Reproduced on the European University Institute website (the EU's university), under the aegis of the Robert Schuman Institute for Advanced Studies, it declares:

The proposed new treaty and supplementary protocols take over almost all the innovations contained in the constitutional treaty. They only leave aside the symbolic changes which were introduced by the constitutional treaty – such as the title of the treaty or the symbols of the union – which are peculiarly linked to the constitutional character of the treaty signed in Rome on 29 October 2004.

The Action Committee for European Democracy describes itself as "a private and independent initiative by European citizens aiming at overcoming the present stalemate in the EU after the two no-votes on the Constitutional Treaty".

But its members are very far from mere "European citizens". Sixteen in all, they include Giuliano Amato, Michel Barnier, Jean-Luc Dehaene, Danuta Hübner, Sandra Kalniete, Wim Kok, Paavo Lipponen, Inigo Mendez de Vigo, Chris Patten, Otto Schily, Costas Simitis, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, António Vitorino and Margot Wallström.

I guess the "reform" treaty and the EU constitution are pretty similar then.

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