Remember how Secretary Rumsfeld set the American cat among the pigeons of the European Union by dismissing France and Germany as “Old Europe” and predicting that the new member states of central and eastern Europe would increasingly call the shots? That was back in January 2003, when President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder were whipping up anti-Americanism in a last-ditch bid to stop the American-led coalition from toppling Saddam Hussein.

Since then, not only have the new member states become more confident and assertive, but even “Old Europe” has acquired two leaders who are both seen at home as interlopers from “New Europe.” President Sarkozy’s father fled the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, while his mother’s family were leading Greek Zionists. Chancellor Merkel was raised under communism in East Germany. Their pro-American and pro-Israel views have cleared the atmosphere in transatlantic relations. The balance of power in Europe is swinging back towards the Atlanticists.

Does this mean that the European Union’s summit, which starts in Brussels today, will finally vindicate Mr. Rumsfeld? Well, not overnight for sure. Old Europe may have changed the corporate management, but it hasn’t changed the project. That remains what it always was: the creation of a European superpower. Though superficially modeled on the United States, the European Union owes more to Napoleon than to Madison, and the way things are going at least a part of the debt will be claimed by Karl Marx.

Today Frau Merkel, who holds the rotating presidency of the EU, will tell the 26 other leaders that they still need a substitute for the constitution that was spectacularly rejected two years ago by French and Dutch voters in what we don’t mind calling a decidedly satisfying vote. The 500 million Europeans must speak with a single voice on global issues, Frau Merkel will insist, which means resurrecting the content of the constitution, but calling it a treaty instead.

What this means will become clearer at the summit, but at a minimum it would give the EU a “legal personality,” with a European foreign minister negotiating with above the heads of its member states. This would have made it harder for dissidents such as Prime Minister Blair to defy their partners by sending troops to Iraq.

The Germans know that such a huge new centralization of power won’t go unchallenged, but they are banking on the support of Monsieur Sarkozy, who is backed by a parliamentary as well as a presidential mandate. Berlin is also counting on the British, who are in the throes of a political interregnum, making less trouble than usual. Mr. Blair, for whom this Brussels summit is his final curtain call, hands over as Downing Street next week to Gordon Brown. Right now, neither is fully focused on the European Union.

That leaves Poland as the only major European country that has openly threatened to veto plans for the new treaty. With the Kaczynski twins, Lech and Jaroslaw, as president and prime minister respectively, the Poles have in charge two conservatives who have no desire to give up the sovereignty regained so recently from Russia and now again threatened from the same quarter.

The real issue at stake in Brussels may not prove to be the precise wording of the treaty, nor even whether it is unanimously agreed, but whether the people get to vote on it. What the Old Europeans dread is the shock of rejection that they experienced two years ago when Monsieur Chirac lost the French referendum, leaving him a lame duck and the constitution in tatters.

So every effort is being made in Brussels to present the new treaty as a “tidying-up exercise,” which may be ratified by parliaments without a referendum. In Britain, Mr. Brown will still be bound by Mr. Blair’s promise of a referendum that was contained in their last election manifesto. But no government wants to risk losing a popular vote. So there will be a concerted attempt to avoid any repetition of the referenda of 2005 by playing down the constitutional significance of the new treaty.

Given half a chance, the EU always reverts to its default position of bureaucracy rather than democracy. Yet once European electorates realize that the new treaty is but the old constitution writ large, voters may yet revolt against whatever late-night deal their elites cook up over cognac and coffee in Brussels. That the Old Europeans now sing some of the same tunes as the New is but a sign of the way in which the wind has shifted. By our lights it all ads up to an opportunity for President Bush to end his term with an entente with Europe in which he declares victory on exactly the terms Mr. Rumsfeld threw into such sharp relief to so much outrage and ridicule but a few years ago.