European leaders gathered in Rome Friday to celebrate this weekend's 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, stressing the need to revive the European Constitution.
Addressing a Senate packed with delegations from the EU's 27 members, Italian Premier Romano Prodi said "we want a strong and efficient EU, able to tackle global challenges".
The EU constitution, containing working rules judged essential after the EU's recent enlargement, was rejected in French and Dutch referendums two years ago.
On Sunday, the anniversary of the Rome treaty signing, EU leaders will adopt a Declaration of Berlin to renew the basis on which the EU is built.
Germany, the current EU president, hopes that the next big meeting of EU chiefs in June will approve plans to revive much of the Constitution - though the new framework will now probably be called a treaty.
Prodi said the Declaration of Berlin would be "brief but ambitious," aiming to "bring to fruition the greatest experiment in peace, democracy and prosperity in the contemporary world".
Prodi stressed the importance of agreeing on the new arrangements before the next European elections in 2009.
"It would be unthinkable to vote without building a clear, functional institutional framework," he told an audience containing some of the leading lights of European integration such as Jacques Delors and Valery Giscard d'Estaing.
Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema stressed the importance of the EU speaking with a single voice on international issues and playing a bigger role in world security.
"A stronger Europe, with unity on foreign and defence policy, is a fundamental instrument of global equilibrium.
"The last few years have shown that you cannot entrust a single power, even a great one like the United States, with global security".
German Chancellor Angela Merkel the EU duty chief, did not attend the Rome celebrations but was here this week to confer with Prodi ahead will lead the anniversary ceremony on Sunday in Berlin.
She said in a German newspaper interview Friday that the time had come for the EU to equip itself with an army.
In other statements in Rome Friday, European Commission President Jose' Manuel Barroso said a new treaty would have to "inspire its citizens with a new vision" while EP chief Hans-Gert Poettering said the EU needed new tools to "make our work more transparent and democratic".
At a separate ceremony, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said the continued political unity of the EU was "imperative".
The landmark Treaty of Rome established the European Economic Community (EEC) - the nucleus of today's EU.
The Rome Treaty founding the EEC and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) were signed on March 25, 1957 at Rome's Campidoglio by six countries (France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg). The six had previously signed an agreement in 1951 for a European Coal and Steel Community, ECSC, in Paris.
