L'Europe, c'est moi?

Non!

Merde!

Poor Jacques Chirac. The French have rejected his beloved European Constitution. In today's referendum, the "No" side won over 55% of the vote, with turnout somewhere between 70 and 80%.

Am I happy about this? Yes and no.

Yes, because there's a lot about Europe (as a union) that I don't like. This may be my ancestral Englishness coming out, but there are serious problems with the proposed constitution as written. I favour some sort of economic union, one that allows for the free flow of labour and capital between and among member states, but I worry about further social and political integration. Indeed, what worries me most, and what concerns me about the constitution, is that Europe is more technocracy than democracy, a Brussels-run bureaucratic Leviathan that isn't democratically legitimate in any real way -- go check out the structure of the E.U. if you don't believe me. The U.S. Constitution has succeeded in part because the Framers took great care to focus on the political structure (and the democratic foundations of that structure) of their new republic, leaving specific issues, including controversial matters like slavery, for the new federal government (and state governments) to deal with (and to be addressed, if necessary, in Constitutional amendments). This apparent "failure" has been widely criticized by revisionists, but the U.S. Constitution's strength is precisely its "silence" on politics. For the E.U. to move forward, it needs the same kind of philosophical reflection on the nature of European democracy. And it needs a constitution that sticks to structural/institutional forms unsullied by transient political considerations.

No, because this was a victory of the extremes in French society, both left and right, both communists and fascists, both Popular Front and National Front. And those elsewhere who thoughtlessly celebrate the demise of the E.U. are similarly on the extremes (including many American conservatives who dislike Europe with knee-jerked glee). I may not want to see Europe integrate socially and politically (at least not to the extent that the technocrats do) -- what a massive, ungovernable monstrosity that would be! -- but nor do I want to see it dissolve back into what it once was, for much of its history: a collection of explicitly self-interested nation-states more or less in bloody competition with one another. Europe could do a lot better -- and maybe, just maybe, the result of the French referendum will prompt widespread reevaluation of the E.U. by its supporters -- but it could certainly do a lot worse.

Note: The E.U. Constitution has already been ratified (either by referendum or parliamentary vote) by Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain. The Netherlands will hold a referendum on June 1, Luxembourg on July 10, Denmark on September 27, and Ireland and Portugal later in the year. The U.K. will likely vote next year, along with the Czech Republic. There is no date set for a vote in Poland.

But France was a big one. As British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw (who personally supported the "Yes" side) put it: "The result raises profound question for all of us about the future direction of Europe, about the challenges to us from the rest of the world, about the ability of the European Union to respond to these challenges and to the demands of its citizens... And tonight's result properly deserves a period of reflection by all 25 member states." Where Europe goes from here is anyone's (educated) guess.