With next month’s Gleneagles G8 looming, the host, Tony Blair, is almost literally flying by the seat of his pants.

Since last week’s sojourn in Washington, the British prime minister has been in perpetual motion, drumming up support for the gigantic package of aid, debt relief, and trade liberalization that he hopes will ensure that this G8 enters the history books as the summit for Africa. Yesterday, the Blair magic carpet landed in Moscow, by last night it had moved on to Berlin, and today he stops in Paris.

Hyperactivity, however, is no substitute for patient diplomacy, and relations between the G8 leaders have never before been so poisonous. If Mr. Blair was to prevent the summit ending in a fiasco, he needed a little help from his American friends. Last week, President Bush gave him the green light on debt relief, and another old comrade in arms from the Iraq campaign, Paul Wolfowitz, has emerged as a key ally in his new role at the World Bank. Without their support, Mr. Blair’s plan would sink without trace.

As if saving Africa from itself were not enough to test the stamina of a man who underwent heart surgery only last fall, Mr. Blair is also expected to do the same for Europe. On Thursday, he faces an E.U. summit in Brussels, which marks the beginning of the six-month British presidency of the European Union. Coming just after the French and Dutch voters shot down the European constitution, this ought to be Mr. Blair’s big opportunity to shift Europe back onto the Atlanticist track. Before he can do so, however, he may be forced to deploy the veto, the ultimate deterrent of E.U. politics, against a Franco-German ambush.

The veto, which was used by Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s but never before by a British leader, may be necessary in order to protect the British rebate. This is the $5 billion-a-year refund that was negotiated by Margaret Thatcher 20 years ago to compensate for the fact that the E.U. budget was mainly designed to subsidize French farmers. Even with this rebate, Britain remains the second biggest net contributor after Germany, while France receives more farm subsidies than all the 10 countries of “New Europe” put together.

No British statesman could survive caving in to the French on this issue. So we must assume that Mr. Blair, if cornered by Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, would indeed invoke Britain’s sovereign right to block an attempt to cut or freeze the rebate.

It would, however, be a grave decision, especially in the present context. The momentum that has carried Europe toward “ever closer union” since World War II has been lost, and centrifugal forces are now gaining the upper hand.

A reversion to national sovereignty need by no means trigger the kind of enmity that caused Europe to ignite two world wars. Mr. Blair’s task is to ease the transition from the project of a United States of Europe to the less ambitious goal of a European concert of nations, which would merely be one coalition of the willing among others on the global stage.

The truth is that ordinary Europeans are no longer interested in grand constitutional projects, if indeed they ever were. They are much more concerned about issues of morality, culture, race, and religion.

A referendum held over the past two days in Italy decided that the country will preserve its law on assisted fertility. The debate has been fascinating, pitting an alliance of the left and the far right (neo-Fascists) against a conservative coalition led by the Catholic Church. If the referendum had passed, it would have, for the first time, eliminated a provision that gives full legal status to the unborn child, and could therefore have had implications on Italy’s liberal abortion law. The law also stipulates that “spare” embryos created in the course of fertility treatment could not be used for stem-cell research.

The Vatican tacitly encouraged Catholics to abstain, having calculated that the best chance of preserving the status quo is to have the referendum declared null and void. To have legal force, a quorum of 50% is required – turnout was just 25.9%.

Still, it marked the first time that a law governing the earliest stages of human life was put to a democratic test. The result tells us more about Europe’s present preoccupations than any number of referendums on a constitution that only the political class ever wanted. It is the proper place in society of Islam or homosexuality, euthanasia or eugenics, ecology or history that arouses the passions of Europeans. They know that these are issues that can only be settled at the national level. Europe had become a Tower of Babel. And as they used to say: Vox populi, vox dei – the voice of the people is the voice of God.