COLUMN ONE : Europe’s Parliament on the Move : Long seen as a gravy train for second-rate politicians, the European Union’s assembly is newly powerful. But with its business base spread over three countries, scrambling delegates wish it would settle on one home.

David Hallam’s new life isn’t easy. Since June, the 46-year-old father of three has been commuting among four offices in three countries. He works amid a cacophony of 11 languages and juggles a bewildering array of subjects, ranging from nitrate-vulnerable zones in rural areas to Europe’s relations with Israel.

He lives out of a suitcase and carries his work around in a foot locker. How he makes it home to the west of England at the end of the week occasionally depends on how fast he manages a sprint through the airport in Frankfurt, Germany.

“I’m not certain where I am sometimes,” admitted Hallam, a member of what is arguably the world’s most unusual elected assembly: the European Parliament.

With the assembly’s committees in Belgium, the majority of its support staff in Luxembourg and most of its plenary sessions in France, much of Europe also finds it hard to know exactly where the Parliament is at any given time.

For most of its 44-year existence, few even cared. Remote from voters and with little real power, it was dismissed as an irrelevant talk shop, an expensive traveling circus or an unabashed gravy train whose members’ principal mission seemed to be to drink and dine well on taxpayer money.

But times are changing in Europe. To the delight of some and the horror of others, the European Parliament is becoming important. Strengthened by an influx of new, more serious members, headed by a strong president and armed since November with important new powers emanating from the Maastricht Treaty on political and economic union, the Parliament suddenly enjoys new status.

It now can veto international treaties, block nations aspiring to join the European Union and reject en masse those individuals nominated to the EU’s powerful Executive Commission. For the first time, it also has gained a real voice in shaping laws in important areas such as education, health and consumer affairs. And it could gain still more power out of a major reform of EU institutions scheduled for next year.

“There’s been a shift of power in the direction of Parliament,” said Karel van Miert, a veteran EU commissioner. “You can’t continue work pretending that this hasn’t happened.”

Today, the Parliament is also increasingly seen as an important vehicle for rekindling flagging public enthusiasm for the dream of uniting Europe and as an antidote to a “democracy deficit” that has plagued the 15-nation European Union in recent years.

For the growing group of serious Parliament members, this new responsibility translates into grueling schedules and an unending struggle to stay in touch at home yet also keep up with their traveling assembly.

Hallam, for example, who ran a small British public relations firm before winning election in June as the Labor Party’s member representing the English Midlands counties of Hertfordshire and Shropshire, works out of his home near Birmingham. He has a constituency office three-quarters of an hour away in the town of Telford. His commute to Brussels takes about three hours, while the one to Strasbourg runs five or more, including a switch from plane to bus in Frankfurt.

And that’s just the start.

As a member of a committee that monitor’s EU-Israeli ties, Hallam went to Washington to represent the Parliament at a Feb. 2 congressional prayer breakfast; he will travel to Israel next week, and in March he will be in Barcelona, Spain, where his fellow socialist members of the European Parliament plan to meet on their own.

The issues he deals with are complex. He often can’t converse with his colleagues except through an interpreter. And at the end of most days, it’s back to a hotel room.

“The job is more demanding than I thought,” he said. “I never thought I’d groan at the idea of a winter week in Barcelona.”

With their children ages 4, 3 and 6 months, Hallam’s time away from home places added burdens on his wife. He says the hardest thing about the job is sitting at the other end of a telephone hearing his 3-year-old crying for her daddy. “That’s when I really want to go home,” he said.

But the Parliament’s hard work has begun to show. In January, its stock jumped sharply as television cameras captured members quizzing nominees to the Executive Commission in the assembly’s first-ever committee hearings on confirmation. They then engaged in a lively debate before voting by a 4-1 margin to accept the nominees. “It’s a sign the public image no longer fits the realities,” says Klaus Haensch, a German and the body’s president.

If true, it’s a good thing. Created in 1951 as a part-time advisory assembly whose members were appointed by their national parliaments, the European Parliament became a haven for second-rate politicians or a neglected accouterment for the ambitious. One colleague, for example, noted that during a three-year period, the leading French Socialist Laurent Fabius showed up only twice.

For many years, the majority of those who did show up seemed more intent on living well than on working hard. Old-timers still recall the devastating effect of a 1981 CBS television documentary titled “The Gravy Train.” It contrasted the Parliament’s empty seats and boring debates with scenes of members stuffing themselves at expensive Strasbourg restaurants.

“It was awful,” recalled Guido Naets, a Belgian and the Parliament’s chief spokesman for 14 years. “It was mean, it was selective, but it was real.”

Add to this generous income levels and the picture was complete. (Members of the EU assembly are paid the same as members of their national parliaments--monthly levels that today range from $10,500 for the Italians to $4,362.50 for Hallam and his British colleagues down to $2,525 for their Spanish counterparts.)

With little real power, the Parliament was also quickly distracted by esoteric issues. For example, during a single morning in October, 1993, the assembly busied itself with resolutions that supported democracy in Equatorial Guinea, called on authorities in western India to distribute aid to earthquake victims on the basis of need, demanded information on the fate of 24 political prisoners in China and urged a boycott of British Airways because it segregated cabins by gender on flights into and out of Saudi Arabia.

It was against this backdrop that Haensch turned his inaugural address as president of the new Parliament in July into a stern lecture. “If we wish to exploit all the opportunities offered by Maastricht, we must change our own method of working,” he warned. “Let’s stop trying to produce resolutions from the latest reports in the morning papers. We must find time for discussions on the great issues of European politics.”

In an interview, Haensch elaborated on this theme. “Until Maastricht, the European Parliament was largely an advisory body and had little real power, so bad habits developed that now have to be corrected,” he said.

Haensch said he wants higher attendance, more streamlined procedures, but above all the full use of the Parliament’s new powers. “Before we had the right to advise. Now we can have a voice in the decisions themselves,” Haensch said. “For me, the task is to assure the full and effective use of these new powers. I want the European Parliament’s public image to be that of the true representatives of the citizens of Europe, against whose wishes political decisions about Europe can’t be made.”

But many are convinced that the Parliament will find it hard to shake its old image until it finds a permanent home. Certainly, for outsiders, the present setup is hard to take seriously.

While the Parliament’s 19 standing committees meet in Brussels, the Belgian capital, for two weeks each month, most of the 12 full, one-week sessions are held 300 miles south in Strasbourg, which forces members to have offices and lodgings in both cities.

To further complicate matters, roughly two-thirds of the parliamentary staff is based in Luxembourg--from which staffers either commute to Strasbourg or Brussels or work mainly by phone or computer.

This transient existence has generated some bizarre rituals.

In both Brussels and Strasbourg, for example, the halls of parliamentary office buildings are lined with metal foot lockers, packed faithfully every few Fridays with files and other paraphernalia, then unpacked the following Monday.

In the 1960s, when the EU had six member states and the Parliament had 143 members with a few hundred other people in support, moving around was somehow manageable. But with a 15-nation EU, a Parliament with 626 members and a staff of almost 4,000, each move is cumbersome--and costly. Travel and hotel bills alone this year are expected to eat up 15% to 20% of the Parliament’s $930-million budget--much of which, like the EU’s entire budget, comes from sales levies (actually, value-added taxes) on Europe’s consumers. And that’s just the visible costs.

Friday afternoons are often devoted to packing; crucial hours on Monday are wasted on travel. “The whole thing is a shame,” Naets said. “Families are disrupted, it’s expensive, the Parliament is perceived as a traveling circus, and it’s inefficient. You pack your trunk and find you’ve forgotten something important when you get there. I’m fed up.”

But since none of the three countries seems willing to give up its claim to a share of the Parliament, the nomadic life goes on.

Indeed, about the only thing more absurd than the current arrangement is the attempt to end it--by building separate parliaments, one in Brussels, one in Strasbourg, to lure the assembly to a single location. The $1.1-billion structure in Brussels is expected to be completed in 1997, while a $500-million Strasbourg building is scheduled to be finished in late 1998.

With the Executive Commission already based in Brussels, Belgium would seem to be the obvious location. But because logic doesn’t always prevail in the effort to unite Europe, French President Francois Mitterrand squeezed a commitment from the EU heads of government two years ago to acknowledge Strasbourg as the Parliament’s permanent home.

Few see any end soon to the travel.

And in one respect, the train journey between Brussels and Strasbourg serves as a reminder that a less-than-perfect Parliament is a vast improvement on Europe’s history.

The trip passes first through the Ardennes Forest, where thousands of Americans died in World War II fighting, then along remnants of the Maginot Line built by France between the world wars in a farcical attempt to stop Germany’s military might.

“The European Union is frequently criticized and this European Parliament held up to ridicule, often despised and misrepresented almost everywhere,” Haensch told his fellow members in July. “One thing, however, is certain. What would our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers have given, in their time, to have a European Parliament . . . to air their disagreements instead of sending their nations’ young people to their deaths in the trenches?”