KEY POINTS:
At 50, the European Union suddenly finds itself in a troubled middle age where the future is uncertain, friends are few and the critics and mischief-makers are many.
Since Irish voters on June 12 rejected the Lisbon Treaty aimed at boosting the EU's powers, it has been a
de facto open season for attacking European institutions.
Leading the charge is the newly ascendant camp of eurosceptics, which portrays the EU's executive commission as smug, over-powerful and unaccountable, the European Parliament as a money-gobbling talking shop and European integration as an assault on national sovereignty.
But, for the first time, the pro-EU camp is making some eerily similar noises. These voices say that if the European project has lost its attraction to the people, the fault lies with an arrogant and aloof European Commission.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy last week blamed Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson for torpedoing the Lisbon pact. He accused Mandelson of stoking fears among Ireland's farming community by offering concessions on EU agriculture subsidies at the World Trade Organisation talks.
French Fisheries Minister Michel Barnier - himself a former commissioner - said "there is a problem of transparency and trust and of working together" with Brussels. His anger was sparked by an EU ban on tuna fishing in the Mediterranean that took effect just as French fishermen were struggling with higher fuel prices.
In Brussels, officials say such attacks are hypocritical and demagogic. They say the commission simply administers the laws approved by member states and that each commissioner is approved by the European Parliament, whose members in turn are democratically elected in the 27 EU nations.
"It's not with populist slogans that we will succeed in renewing confidence among European citizens," commission President Jose Manuel Barroso retorted. "It is not possible to criticise Brussels from Monday to Saturday and then on Sunday ask your citizens to give a favourable vote for Europe."
Some analysts say this sniping by the EU's traditional fans is not a passing phase but a symptom of a deeper malaise traceable to the "Big Bang" enlargement in May 2004.
That expansion added 10 new members to the club and shifted the bloc's political focus from Western Europe to Central Europe, leaving the Franco-German motor that had once driven European integration to sputter and misfire. Without this vital propulsion from the EU's core founder states, the EU has been adrift. It lacks the bright, popular ideas such as monetary union and a single market that pushed it through the 1980s and 1990s, and there is a clear sensation of a void. Many citizens have only a nebulous idea as to what the EU does, and a common complaint is that they feel alienated and powerless within it.
Against this backdrop, there was a clear risk that Ireland - the only country to stage a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty - would reject it.
The European Policy Centre thinktank says the institutional crisis, the political bitching and public disenchantment with the EU are intertwined. In an era of globalisation, security threats and energy dependence, it argues, European countries need to make more and more decisions at EU level in order to defend their interests.
But political careers are still made at national level. Thus, at a time of EU weakness, leaders are tempted to play to a domestic audience. There is no mileage to be gained in defending the EU, but plenty in denigrating it and in grandstanding.
This vicious circle will only stop once grass-roots faith is restored in the European project, by strengthening interest in the 2009 elections to the European Parliament and in boosting accountability, the EPC says.