Just two days before EU leaders gather for a tense Nice summit, Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson launched a pamphlet "The future shape of Europe" with an address to the Blairite Foreign Policy Centre on Tuesday. Hailing the treaty negotiations as a historical landmark that would draw "a clear line under the divisions and turmoil of the last century", Mandelson went on to address some the issues that divide the Europeans of today.

On the issue of re-weighting votes in the decisive council of the EU, and reducing the size of the commission, Peter Mandelson said: "The re-weighting of votes is necessary to retain a balance between big and small countries in an enlarged union that will include far more small countries... The size of the commission has to be addressed so that in an enlarged union it doesn't become a source of bureaucracy and inefficiency.''

On the vexed issue of the national veto, the europhile Mandelson said that "majority voting needs to be extended in areas where the present members agree it's required for faster decision making" with the veto "retained on fundamental questions of national sovereignty''.

Dismissing eurosceptics and the Tories, he said: "By saying they would refuse to ratify Nice, the Conservatives would sacrifice the national interest in the name of ideological anti-Europeanism.''

The Foreign Policy Centre's pamphlet, containing the perspectives of the prime minister, Tony Blair, Italian prime minister, Giuliano Amato, and the French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, sounds the "death-knell" of a European superstate in stark contrast to the more federalist vision of German foreign minister, Joshka Fischer. The disagreements over Europe's future mirror divisions already emerging between Germany and the rest of the EU in the pressurised run up to the Inter-Governmental Conference on Thursday.

In a development that will surely please the UK government the Swedish foreign minister, Anna Lindh, criticises federalism in terms very similar to the reprinted text of Tony Blair's Warsaw speech. The Swedes will hold the presidency of the union for the six months from January, during a period when the UK enters a general election where Europe will be a key issue.

Tony Blair, in his Warsaw speech, said: "I suspect that, given the sheer diversity ands complexity of the EU, its constitution... will continue to be found in a number of different treaties, laws and precedents.. the constitutional debate must not necessarily end with a single binding document for an entity as dynamic as the EU."

Writing in the pamphlet, Sweden's foreign minister Anna Lindh says: "A federal Europe is not the right approach. Federalist ideas will not work so long as people's identities are basically national... We do wish to see new divisions in Europe forming with some countries forming a hard-core while others are left behind."