It is an accepted fact in Brussels that the Council of Ministers

It is an accepted fact in Brussels that the Council of Ministers, by way of a dizzying array of Committees and working groups, has tightened its grip on EU decision-making This might be a welcome development to some observers In truth, the practice is altogether less edifying. Member states now interfere in the nooks and crannies of Commission business, not least in internal personnel appointments and the administration of EU funding programmes - exactly the areas in which mismanagement and wrongdoing have been uncovered in recent months. At the same time, in the areas in which it is essential that the Commission should act with authority and autonomy - the policing of the Single Market, clamping down on Government subsidies or the conduct of international trade policy - member states do not hesitate to subject an increasingly tame Commission to their special pleading. The persistent and unacceptably high levels of state aids in the EU and the hamstrung way in which the Commission is forced to conduct international trade disputes illustrate the point.Thus Mr Prodi would do well to set out some ground rules to his political mentors: first, he should insist on implementing his own administrative and managerial reforms free from the nit-picking preferences of EU capitals. Second, he should simply close down a number of EU spending programmes altogether, especially where EU funds have sprung up without much objective justification and without adequate human resources, such as in the areas of development assistance or social and environmental policy.

Where expenditure is justified, serious thought should be given to establishing new, specialised spending agencies entirely separate from the Commission. Third, he must set about reasserting the political authority of the Commission so that it can properly execute its responsibilities in "core" policy areas such as the internal market, trade and competition policy This is by no means a defence of the Commission. It is a constitutional bastard, a bizarre hybrid of legislative, executive and even judicial powers. It is difficult to think of any other institution that so comprehensively transgresses the accepted principles of a division of powers. Its creation in this form was no accident, and had its own rationale. Such a concentration of overlapping authority was a deliberate and far-sighted ploy by the EU's founding fathers to place an engine of integration at the heart of Europe.But that was 40 years ago. The question that needs to be asked now is whether the Commission, as designed for the launch of the European Community in the Fifties, is suitable to the needs of the European Union in the 21st century.

In an age in which public probity and transparency have come to fill the political vacuum left by the collapse of old political ideologies, is it conceivable that the Commission can continue to wield such formidable powers in the same way as before?The European Parliament has rightly forced the issue of the Commission's political accountability onto the public agenda It will not go away. But many of the senior mandarins in Brussels still do not understand this.It is ultimately the responsibility of the EU's political leaders to tackle the challenge to the EU's credibility and reflect on the constitutional structures that they have inherited. EU heads of government should have the courage to make ambitious constitutional and institutional changes to the European Union. The fact that they have been unwilling to do so, preferring to dwell upon the micro-management of the Brussels bureaucracy, is an expression of short sighted self-interest. For the sake of Europe's long-term future, Mr Prodi cannot afford to let them get away with it.The author was formerly a senior Commission official in Sir Leon Brittan's office.

He is a prospective European Parliament candidate for the Liberal Democrats in the East Midlands. ONE OF the catastrophes that no one succeeds in predicting or wants to predict, until it strikes, is war. Apart from a few hotheads no one wants it, but many consider themselves capable of playing with the eventuality, keeping it under control, to pick and poke at it with the certainty of being able to stop in time. Arrigo Levi recently recalled how, at the start of this century, Winston Churchill, who certainly wasn't slow to understand things, was convinced, when he was a soldier, that he was dedicated to a profession overtaken by the times, that they would never again know war - and this just a few years before the terrible massacre of 1914-18. Even today we have managed to convince ourselves arrogantly that flashpoints and geographically limited conflicts couldn't get away from us and are always under control. This blithe supposition shows that perhaps we are coming to the end of a long era in which the world - still physically aware of the frightful bloodbath of the Second World War - feared war, knew at first hand what it meant, had antennas to capture the signs of its arrival and did everything possible to avoid it - even in the moments of maximum tension between East and West.You get the impression that this sensitivity to the dangers of war has weakened, and along with it the concern to avoid such a peril We are starting to play with fire, often with arrogance. The complacent tone with which some political war commentators pronounce reassuring and optimistic explanations is a reminder of the comic satisfaction with which the cuckolded husbands in comedy sketches boast about their marital harmony.The century that is drawing to a close, observed the ambassador Sergio Vento recently, has been characterised not so much by totalitarianisms, but by the World Wars - especially the First, of which the Second was a continuation - that created them.In Dresden, razed to the ground in 1945 by air raids that caused no fewer victims than an atomic explosion, the Frauenkirche has still not been rebuilt.