Brussels, 19/06/2005 (Agence Europe) - Peter Ludlow, chairman of EuroComment and founding director of CEPS, has published a new briefing note on 'Leadership in an Enlarged European Union - the European Council, the Presidency and the Commission' in which he analyses the role of the European Council from its origins at the December 1974 Summit in Paris chaired by Valery Giscard d'Estaing, to its golden age in the 1980s and early 1990s (the same time as the Delors period, Ed.). 'The European integration process has moved irresistibly forwards during the last ten years. This is not because the current leaders of the larger EU states have been better than they seemed, but because their deficiencies were largely compensated for by a remarkably effective system of collective' leadership in and through the European Council,' writes Ludlow. He continues: 'the Dutch and French referenda must, however, be seen in part at least as a protest against this system. Representing, as its members do, both the peoples and states of the European Union, the European Council's legitimacy is not in question. To be as effective in the future as it has in the past, it must, however, become more accountable to those in a position to scrutinise and if necessary discipline its members. This means in the first instance national parliaments and citizens rather than the European Parliament. The constitutional treaty, which must now be presumed dead, had remarkably little of use to say on these matters, largely because MEPs and national parliamentarians in the Convention either would not or did not acknowledge the European Council's status as the 'highest authority in the Union'. (http://www.eurocomment.be and the EU's electronic bookshop.)