Some things seem to go on forever. For half a century the British have been wrestling with the question of their relations with the rest of continental Europe and the struggle continues unabated and still unsolved.

The immediate issue is one of personalities, which always engages public interest and makes good media copy.

With the long debated Lisbon Treaty about to be finally signed by a reluctant Czech president, the treaty provisions become European law, and at the center of them is the requirement for appointment of a new semi-permanent president of the European Union Council of Ministers, who will inevitably be labeled the president of Europe, and a new EU foreign affairs representative, who will inevitably be labeled Europe's foreign minister.

Until recently a front-runner for the presidency role was Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. But with the United Kingdom's reputation of only cool commitment to "building a more integrated Europe," and with Blair's own track record of divisiveness over the Iraq war, his candidacy has become shaky despite his very considerable energy and charm.

And behind the debate about Blair and about the right person to fill the foreign affairs role there is a deeper "British" question that fills the most zealous Europe-builders with despair.

There is a strong possibility that by next May or June the U.K. will have a new Conservative government, and that government not only will be cooler still about increased EU integration (and opposed outright to Blair as president) but also will bring forward a whole new raft of proposals either for the U.K.'s relations with the EU bilaterally or for further reform of the EU as a whole, or both.

Had the Lisbon Treaty remained uncompleted by the time the Conservatives took office, they would have put that treaty to a national referendum straight away and, the British being British (although not anti-European as some claim), it would have been turned down by a large majority, thus scuppering the whole Lisbon Treaty project .

But with the treaty likely now in place and under implementation by next spring, the Conservative leadership has had to think about other ways of satisfying their generally skeptical supporters' strong desire for EU reform.

One means of reflecting unease about "too much Europe" has already been adopted by the Conservatives while still in opposition. This has been to detach the Conservative elected members of the European Parliament from the main center-right party group in Parliament and form a new and smaller grouping less committed to visions of a federal Europe, or at least a more centralized and unified EU structure (as implied by the Lisbon Treaty provisions).

This breakaway move, to which the Conservative leader, and possible prime minister-in-waiting, David Cameron, has long been personally committed, has attracted big media attention as a story, although in reality its impact is marginal. Even more attention is focused on a different Conservative concern. Conservative supporters feel as strongly as ever that they still want a referendum — if not on the Lisbon Treaty (assuming that is a done deal) then on other aspects of EU development. That is what they were promised.

For Conservative policymakers, who have said many times they "will not let matters rest," a number of avenues open out, none of them without difficulties.

One course is to seek specific new changes, or opt-outs, for the U.K. on matters such as fisheries policy, or social policy, where it is felt that too many powers have been given (some say "surrendered") to the EU high command and there is a need for some to be repatriated. There could then be a referendum on what had been secured and on a new a finally settled relationship between the U.K. and the rest of the EU.

Since this has been tried before with only limited success, and since the other 26 member states in the EU would either doggedly oppose such moves, or all begin demanding their own concessions and opt-outs as well, the chances of achievement on this front look slim, to say the best.

A more promising course might be to move away from purely bilateral considerations and open up the broader question of overall EU reform to meet modern conditions. The EU was, after all, born in a very different age and the Lisbon Treaty still reflects yesterday's world. A creative British approach, would be to argue in detail for a wholly revised, more flexible and decentralized EU structure, much more suited to the global network age and to the new realities in the pattern of world power.

Such an approach would be resisted by the euro-federalists and those still yearning for the EU to be a superpower and a single bloc. It would not be understood by the American officials, who even now under President Barack Obama, still think (somewhat naively) that there should be a United States of Europe, just like America, and have never really understood British hesitations, or why the U.K. does not just buckle down, join the euro, submit to Brussels and stop questioning.

Some major Japanese companies in the U.K. take the same view, although with the pound wonderfully competitive, and the euro grossly overvalued, they have fallen quieter over their doubts recently.

But at the grass roots the ordinary people of Europe would welcome such a new and distinctive British approach, as long as it was well articulated and deeply thought out. The British people themselves would almost certainly vote for that new kind of Europe and British leadership in the EU would again be positive and welcome. So that looks like the best bridge to the future in this complex and unending debate. We now wait to see whether it can be constructed and put in place.

David Howell is a former British Cabinet minister and former chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. He is now a member of the House of Lords. ([email protected] www.lordhowell.com)