EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso told a German newspaper that the deal had made it possible "to avoid a crisis."

"Uncertainty about our future treaty cast the show of doubt about our ability to act. These doubts have been removed," he told Bild am Sonntag.

Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, whose country had blocked an agreement until the final stages, claimed victory.

"Poland really won. I have no doubt that during the night the position of Poland inside the EU was considerably strengthened," he told reporters in Warsaw.

But the country's far-right Deputy Prime Minister Roman Giertych lambasted German Chancellor Angela Merkel for threatening to exclude Poland from a EU summit agreement.

"It is a situation in which someone tells someone else 'Haende hoch' politically speaking" Giertych told the Polish news agency PAP, using the German for "hands up".

British prime-minister-in waiting Gordon Brown praised the incumbent Tony Blair for his role at the summit.

Brown was reported to have contacted Blair several times to object to French attempts to water down a commitment to free trade.

Interviewed by the BBC, he praised Blair's "skills" in securing a deal that protected Britain's national interest in key areas such as the Charter of Rights.

"On that basis, like every other treaty that has been negotiated -- Nice, Amsterdam, Maastricht -- while many other people will call for a referendum, it seems to me that we have met our negotiating position," Brown said.

"Thanks to the negotiating skill of Tony (the four red lines) have been achieved and I think people when they look at the small print will see that we did what we set out to do, and that was to make sure that in these areas we were properly protected as a country to make our own decisions when we want to do so."

Political parties in Sweden and Denmark, including the far-right Danish People's Party which is part of the governing coalition, called for referendums. In Sweden the demand came from the Greens and former communists.

The major Dutch opposition parties said the Netherlands had not protected its own interests.

Although Dutch Christian Democrat Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende told journalists in Brussels the Netherlands had got most of its demands met, the opposition remained critical.

The euro-sceptical far left Socialist Party (SP), the biggest Dutch opposition bloc with 25 of the 150 seats in parliament, insisted Yesterday that the treaty be put to a referendum.

"I understand that the reference to striving for free and undistorted competition in the EU will be taken out. That would be bad for the Dutch prosperity," Han ten Broeke of the VVD told ANP.

The far-right anti-immigrant and euro-sceptical Freedom Party of Geert Wilders called the deal "a shamefully bad result."

In Portugal which takes over the six-monthly presidency of the EU on July 1 opposition parties on the right and left also demanded a referendum.

Leaders of the Czech Republic's main government party, the right-wing Civic Democrats, praised their leader's success in "turning around moves towards the creation of a European super state and towards European federalism" at the summit.

The Civic Democrats' executive council welcomed summit decisions to dump the idea of a European constitution, maintain the current voting system and allow national parliaments greater powers to supervise EU legislation as a "breakthrough" in a statement following its meeting yesterday.