Protesters Besiege the Opening of a Crucial EU Summit

Protesters ran amok in the chic, palm-lined streets of the Riviera’s main resort city and police fought back with tear gas and stun grenades Thursday as the European Union opened its most important meeting in a decade.

For the rioters, an assorted collection of leftist revolutionaries, anarchists and separatists, the 15-nation EU, which began as a customs union fostering greater intra-European trade, is a cog in the process of globalization that they blame for many of the modern world’s ills.

As the trade bloc’s leaders gathered at a squat downtown conference center aptly nicknamed “The Bunker” by Nice residents, an estimated 4,000 demonstrators set upon the site and got within 100 yards.

Young men, many of whom wore cowls or kerchiefs to hide their faces, hurled rocks, set fire to a bank branch, tossed fire extinguishers through shop windows and painted slogans such as “Death to Money” on storefronts.

French officials, hosts for the Nice summit, had vowed that there would be none of the embarrassing mayhem here that disturbed last year’s World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle or the International Monetary Fund’s gathering in September in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic.

Choking clouds of smoke wafted in the direction of the convention center, making French President Jacques Chirac sneeze as he stood outside to greet foreign leaders. Some arriving dignitaries, including leaders of other European countries that want to join the EU, coughed and mopped their eyes.

“These acts are radically contrary to the democratic traditions of all European countries,” Chirac later said in disgust. Authorities said 20 police officers were hurt in the fracas on Nice’s rain-slicked streets, one seriously. Forty-five protesters were arrested.

The Nice summit is considered the EU’s most crucial since the 1991 gathering in the Netherlands that produced the Maastricht Treaty, which laid the basis for a common European currency, the euro, and serious consideration of common policies in fields including defense, citizenship and the environment.

The ambitious agenda here calls for the European Union to reform its inner mechanisms so that it can function after absorbing new members, chiefly ex-communist lands in Eastern and Central Europe. At present, 12 nations are negotiating to join, including the three former Baltic republics of the Soviet Union.

Interests of EU member states are often in conflict, however, and the meeting of heads of state and government here may turn out to be the longest ever. “The Nice summit will be one of the toughest in the history of Europe,” European Commissioner Michel Barnier of France predicted.

As one of their first items of business, the 15 EU leaders on Thursday adopted a nonbinding charter on the rights of all Europeans. Across town, outside an abandoned train station, about 10,000 demonstrators from throughout the continent assembled peacefully to demand even quicker and greater integration, leading to a single European constitution and government.

“We too have a dream,” said Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a member of the French Greens party in the European Parliament. “Soon, before the end of the decade . . . we want to be able to hear the following announcement on television: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States of Europe.’ ”

After the morning melee, news reports said scores of the leftists traveled to the small Mediterranean principality of Monaco, where they showered police with coins to protest the enclave’s alleged role as an international money-laundering haven.