European Union leaders will on Thursday lock horns over whether to fix a deadline to revive parts of the club’s half-dead constitution, and over the pace of the union’s expansion to the east.

Wolfgang Schüssel, Austria’s chancellor and host of this week’s EU summit in Brussels, wants the union to draw a line under its constitutional trauma by 2009 at the latest. He believes the union must urgently update its creaking institutions and agree changes such as a new EU president, foreign minister, simplified voting system and a charter of fundamental rights.