Has Europe become a sideshow? Perhaps this town of haunting but also melancholy beauty is not a bad place to pose that question, for it offers at every corner some reminder of the way that great power and wealth may pass, leaving nothing but their golden shell. It is now just over 200 years since the 118th and last Doge of Venice, Lodovico Manin, surrendered to the slogan-touting revolutionary army of Napoleon Bonaparte, so putting an end to the Most Serene Republic in the fastness of its lagoon, a power whose often enlightened commercial sway had stretched for centuries across the eastern Mediterranean. "Take this, I shall not be needing it again," Manin said on Friday, May 12, 1797, as he handed the Doge's close-fitting white linen cap to his valet. Sometimes it is clear when things come to an end. At others, the lines of history are blurred, less demarcations than smudges.

So it is in a Europe today that does not know if the dominant and fruitful postwar idea of "ever closer union" is now dead. When European Union leaders meet this week in Brussels, they will face for the first time the fact that tens of millions of Europeans have turned their back on a Union whose geography, identity and ambition seemed murky. How they will respond to the French and Dutch rejection of a proposed European constitution is unclear, but it is a safe bet that muddling through will be the favored course. The 25-member Union will not unravel. Still, as any visitor to Venice is reminded, a power that has lost the elixir of ambition is a power condemned to inexorable decline.

Already, Europe is viewed with a cynicism often bordering on contempt in some American circles. The neoconservative view of the Continent - feckless, wimpy, legalistic, aging, tired - is well known. But even among more mainstream Republicans, and within the Democratic Party, there are those for whom Europe poses one question above all: Why bother? At a recent meeting here of the Council for the United States and Italy, a group that brings together influential folk from both sides of the Atlantic, America's often withering view of Europe was as clear as the light on the lagoon.

That view may be summarized as follows: a Continent reluctant to spend on defense, offering only "postmodernist" armies useful enough as peacekeepers but next to useless as warriors, given to earnest blah-blah about the pre-eminence of international law, inhabited by a declining and evermore aged citizenry living in overregulated economies that have not shown significant growth for at least five years.

Contrast that image with another offered at the meeting: that of an India growing at over 7 percent a year, inhabited by more than 500 million people under the age of 25, busy buying hundreds of advanced aircraft, convinced that armies are still created to fight, churning out English-speaking high-tech graduates by the million each year, and persuaded by Islamic terrorism that its strategic goals and America's are often identical or at least complementary.

So, which of these parts of the world is more worthy of the attention of the United States? Which is a compelling affair: the intensifying and fast-changing relationship with India, or the largely stagnant alliance with Europe that served above all a cold-war strategic challenge now overcome? Beyond India, of course, lie other issues demanding of U.S. attention.

China, with its own growth story and welter of staggering statistics that suggest its challenge to American supremacy must be taken seriously. A low-intensity Iraqi war that has already taken a significant toll. The attempt to ignite and manage a democratic transformation of the Middle East that is portrayed as central to long-term American security.

In this world, Europe slips down the list. It often looks more complicated than compelling. It is sufficiently split, sufficiently stable, and sufficiently stalled for back-burner treatment to seem most appropriate. The fact is that the French and Dutch votes have left the European Union in an awkward halfway house that hardly seems a credible basis for any revitalization. With a shared currency, the euro, but an interrupted process of political integration, the Continent finds itself with one foot in transnational federalism and another outside it.

Already, the strains of this situation are showing, not least in Italy, where the economy has contracted in recent quarters. In a country that used to be able to offset its structural weaknesses through a steady devaluation of the lira, the constraints of a single euro currency placing Italy on the same playing field as Germany have proved damaging.
Italy is an extreme case, but throughout the stagnant euro zone, reforms to render the economies more flexible, dynamic and effective appear urgent, because only growth and the creation of jobs will rekindle belief in the European Union. How that will be achieved when the new French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, declares that, for France, "globalization cannot be our destiny" is unclear.

Such comments suggest that sideshow may not be an inappropriate tag for Europe these days. Any country or area holding itself aloof from the technology-driven demands of global competitiveness and integration can only be a sideshow to the main currents of early 21st century history.

In this light, it is interesting to note John Julius Norwich's description of the once all-conquering Venice that surrendered to Napoleon: "The fact of the matter was that Venice was utterly demoralized. It was so long since she had been obliged to make a serious military effort that she had lost the will that makes such efforts possible. Peace, the pursuit of pleasure, the love of luxury, the whole spirit of dolce far niente has sapped her strength. She was old and tired; she was also spoilt."