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Only a lawyer could love its 148 arid pages. When the draft European Constitution was released last week by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and his 105-member Convention on the Future of Europe, the Continental press just yawned. Across the English Channel, however, the world looked very different. Many London headlines were of a size normally reserved for nuclear war, and not much calmer. the end of our nation, screamed the Sun; the eu bonfire of our freedoms, thundered the Daily Mail, which is campaigning to force Tony Blair to call a referendum on the constitution. Some of this was a familiar populist show to sell tabloids: bash those foreigners. But as Blair jetted to Poland, Russia and the G-8 summit in Evian last week, trying to stitch up the wounds of the Atlantic alliance and reintroduce Britain as a good member of the European family, the commentary was a sign of something deeper: the return of Europe as the third rail of British politics, with awkward consequences not just for Blair, but for Britain and the rest of Europe too.

Next week the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, will announce his long-awaited verdict on joining the euro: Not yet. No one expects a referendum before the next parliament. Polls show about two-thirds of Britons want to stay out this signature project of European integration. There are good economic arguments against, but they aren't driving the opposition. Nick Sparrow, managing director of the polling company ICM, puts it bluntly: "The immediate gut reaction of British people to Europe is 'They hate us, therefore we hate them.'"

The bitter debate over Iraq didn't create this outlook. It has old, deep roots: the instinct of an island nation whose empire forged enduring ties with countries beyond its immediate neighbors; a history whose climactic moments were seeing off the French dictator Napoleon and the German dictator Hitler. World War II in particular still tugs on national identity. "People in this country still think, and in many ways they're right, that they had a rather glorious Second World War, and most European countries had a rather shameful one," says Charles Grant, Director of the Centre for European Reform in London. "It makes them rather reluctant to mingle." Michael Ancram, the Conservative Shadow Foreign Secretary, says that because of the Commonwealth and the special relationship with the U.S., "we've never felt like we've only had one home." Continental countries "feel more comfortable with fortress Europe than we do because we want to continue to move within those associations. We've always felt ourselves European, but slightly different European."

Both the euro and Giscard's Convention are amplifying this ambivalence. For France and Germany, founders of the European Union, the progressive growth of its institutions is not only uncontroversial, but inherently popular: a bulwark against future carnage and an instrument to magnify their national power. But for that very reason, a good chunk of British voters distrust the E.U. as basically a French-German cabal. Especially because Britain's economy for several years has been chugging along nicely compared to the Continent's, Sparrow says British opinion sees the E.U. as a vehicle for Continentals "sneakily trying to get what they didn't get in World War II. The feeling is very strong that they actually want to come over and rule Britannia," by harmonizing taxes, imposing labor regulations that will sap competitiveness, and lumping the Continent's underfunded pensions with Britain's relatively healthy ones. "Any harmonization tends to be perceived as a downward harmonization, to the lowest common denominator, or as contrary to the interests of [Britain]," observes a survey prepared in 2001 for the European Commission. France's refusal to reform the Common Agricultural Policy, its ongoing boycott of British beef long after the E.U. declared it free of mad-cow disease, and of course Iraq have all added to the sense that Europe is a one-way street. According to an April MORI poll, 55% of British voters consider France, fulcrum of the E.U., "our least reliable ally."

These animosities are compounded by ignorance about how Europe functions. According to a 2002 Eurobarometer survey, the British know less than any other member country about the workings of the E.U. Trust in all political institutions has sagged in the U.K. in the last 20 years, and Brussels seems particularly remote and unaccountable. According to the 2001 study for the European Commission, there's a perception in Britain of "a sprawling, inefficient, spendthrift bureaucracy, and a general suspicion of the existence of illegal benefits and payments, and corruption." A main aim of the new constitution is precisely to make Europe more transparent and comprehensible, but it's hard to keep this big picture in mind amidst the blizzard of clauses tinkering with qualified majority voting and rebalancing the powers of the Commission and the Council. Grant believes that no matter how the wrangling over the constitution turns out, the E.U. "will remain complicated and very hard to love."

And that creates an opportunity for the Conservatives to use Europe as a hammer against Labour. The Tories will strenuously oppose the constitution. Ancram calls it a "Rubicon issue," because he sees in its fine print a collection of assaults on national independence "that move Europe across the line from being an association of sovereign states to being what we call a superstate." Blair will try to paint this stance as a stalking horse for what he insists is the Tories' real ambition, to pull out of the E.U. altogether — a charge that Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith calls "a big lie." The Conservatives have walked into the trap before of letting their distrust of the E.U. look more theological than rational. But British voters distrust Brussels too, and more importantly, they distrust what their government tells them about it. Robert Worcester, chairman of the polling firm mori, says "They fear the government is going to sell them out on Europe and thus will try to do it stealthily." Blair is playing right into that sentiment by rejecting a referendum on the constitution, especially when nine other countries so far say they definitely will hold one. Statements from government ministers that the constitution is merely a "tidying-up exercise" haven't helped. Dominic Cummings, the former director of strategy for the Tories, suggests the party has a big opportunity to build on voters' skepticism about the E.U. by arguing it is Blair, not the Tories, who is out of touch and antidemocratic because he is sticking up for an old-fashioned, ossified bureaucracy in Brussels against the popular will. "If the Conservatives took the position that they were the modern party engaged with Europe to solve its real problems, they could make real progress with voters and the business community, which is not pleased with the way Europe is developing," he says.

For many on the Continent, the perpetual furor in Britain over Europe is baffling. Brussels does not seem a threat. They see the constitution as a useful but small development that already reflects too many concessions to mollify Blair. "Every time Europe makes an effort to go further, the British block or destroy it — that's a fact," says a Commission official. "They basically want a free trade alliance and nothing more."

In Warsaw last week, Blair certainly sounded like he wanted a vigorous Britain to play a full role in a thriving Europe. "Anti-Europeanism is not British patriotism," he said. "It is an out-of-date delusion ... and a symptom not of national pride but a lack of confidence about just how strong Britain can and should be." But that's an old line, and bracing language cannot mask a fundamental weakness: that he comes to Europe unable to persuade his people to enter the euro, or to trust their vote on the constitution. Grant goes so far as to say that Blair's European strategy "risks falling apart." Relations with Paris "are frightful" and entrenched. According to a new TIME/CNN poll, voters in France, Germany and the U.K. think Chirac better represents European views on relations with the U.S., 37% to 18%. Even German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder fared better than Blair, with 19%. Blair's closeness to Bush has meant that Britain's influence in many European countries has shrunk in the last nine months, because he's not seen as a trustworthy European — jeopardizing his strategy of trying to bridge the Atlantic. Today he is stranded on the bridge, stymied by a europhobia he does not know how to cure.

• J.F.O. McALLISTER | London
• British reaction to the draft E.U. constitution is colored by old fears