Quotes of the Day

They didn't have much in common. those who welcomed the rejection of the European constitution by France and the Netherlands last week included Roman Giertych, leader of the archconservative League of Polish Families, who thinks the document isn't Christian enough; Arlette Laguiller, France's perennial Trotskyite presidential candidate, who suggests that European workers should now rise up in a general insurrection against exploitative bosses; Serb ultranationalist Tomislav Nikolic, whose Radical Party is led by an indicted war criminal, Vojislav Seselj, who said the vote was proof that Serbia should "not jump every time Brussels tells them to"; French Socialist Henri Emmanuelli, who hailed the "power of popular sovereignty" that prevailed against his own party leadership; and Marianne Thieme of the Dutch Party for Animals, who claimed that the Dutch vote left "animal-rights organizations standing stronger in negotiating a better treaty."

At least the animal lovers know what they want to do now; it's not clear anyone else does. The votes in France and the Netherlands last week brought to a screeching halt the movement toward an "ever closer union," one to which European nations have supposedly been committed since the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. French and Dutch voters flocked to the polling booths to reject the constitution with stunning clarity: the no camp had majorities of 55% in France and 62% in the Netherlands; turnout was 69% and 63%, respectively. "It's a fundamental revolution," says Charles Grant, director of the London-based Centre for European Reform. "Nothing has changed, but everything has changed, and no one knows what comes next."

That uncertainty is what happens when you let people vote on their future. For years, those who care most about the European Union have been worried about its "democratic deficit" — the sense that decisions that affect millions of lives are taken in closed-door meetings bereft of clear lines of accountability. Now the Dutch and the French have had their say. Fearful of globalization, tired of paying into a Brussels bureaucracy to which they never really warmed, unsure of the European Union's purpose and extent, voters spurned their major parties and turned their backs on the grand designs of their political leaders. At the weekend in Berlin, a hastily arranged summit between French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder ended with the declaration that ratification in other states must continue, "so that the views of each country are represented," according to a spokesman for the German government. But this flies in the face of reality. It may be a cliché, but the people have spoken. To pretend that they said yes when they really said no — or to hope that, if given enough chances, they will say yes one day — would be to court even more popular disdain for Europe's political leaders than is already there.

Those leaders now have to make sense of a vote that had no coherence. Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende concluded that "we need to put the project [of the constitution] on hold as far as the Netherlands is concerned," and vowed to slow the pace of integration, reduce the relatively large Dutch contribution to the E.U. budget, and put greater emphasis on the sovereignty of the Union's 25 member states.

But those who claimed victory in France had a very different agenda. Emmanuelli saw the result as a revolt by people "not willing to accord their destiny to the market alone," and would like the E.U. to intervene with greater vigor in the economy. "We need a Marshall Plan to construct prosperity in Eastern Europe," said Emmanuelli, arguing that hiking wages in the east would protect jobs in France and allow French-style worker protection to take hold across the Union. As for Balkenende's desire to ease up on integration, Emmanuelli's party colleague Arnaud Montebourg had other ideas. "We need an inner circle of nations accustomed to interacting closely with one another," he said. "The nations that want to integrate more, faster and upward toward a more socially minded system, not downward to merely unrestrained markets and trade."

Where did this mess come from? In the eyes of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the president of the convention that hammered out the first draft of the constitution, the European document was supposed to make the E.U. better able to assert its values in the world; values such as "respect for human dignity, liberty, democracy, equality ... pluralism, nondiscrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity, equality of the sexes."

And some bought it. Elderly voters, perhaps with sharper memories of the bitter and bloody divisions that a united Europe was meant to heal, supported the constitution. So did the more affluent and better educated. All 20 arrondissements of Paris backed the constitution. But outside the "Europe of the Rotary Club," as the newspaper of Italy's Euro-skeptic Northern League put it, the constitution was scorned. French manual laborers voted no at a rate of 79%, polls indicated, and low-paid employees at 67%. Exit polls in both France and the Netherlands showed that it was the baby boomers, aged from 35 to around 65, who most strongly opposed the constitution. So did the young, despite being weaned on the ideal of European integration. In the Netherlands, 55% of voters between 18 and 24 voted against the constitution, as did 56% of their French counterparts.

Why the rejection? Part of the explanation lies in a grassroots alienation from the degree of integration championed by Brussels and national governments. "People aren't anti-European, but they think the project has gone too far," says former French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine. He added that the "brutal and massive" enlargement that added 10 countries, most from Central and Eastern Europe, last year, was presented as if it was a moral obligation — but when belatedly given a chance to endorse it, voters decided that it wasn't such a great deal. "We have to abandon the idea that European integration is like a bicycle that will fall over unless it keeps moving forward," says Védrine. "People want to know where the journey ends."

Trouble is, if anyone knows that destination, they aren't telling. In Brussels, there is still a reluctance to admit the obvious: that the constitution is dead. In Washington, Luxembourg's Foreign Affairs Minister Jean Asselborn said that by means of a July 10 referendum in his tiny country, "We will reverse the situation, then we will have the next referendums in autumn and you will see that the cause is not yet lost." Grant of the Centre for European Reform says that's a fantasy: "We've got the only treaties we're going to have for the next decade." And the same goes for E.U. membership, too. Forget that grand scheme to extend the benefits of the Union to the Balkans and the old Soviet borderlands. "Romania and Bulgaria will squeak through, but too bad for Ukraine," says Grant. "Turkey may start negotiations this fall, but they'll never finish."

Carl Bildt, a former Swedish Prime Minister and U.N. envoy to the Balkans, thinks enlargement has been unfairly blamed for voter animosity toward the constitution. "We've been very bad at selling [enlargement] to our respective electorates," he says. "Enlargement is the foreign-policy success story of the European Union. Our economies are getting a great boost from this process. This is the first time ever in the Balkans that all these countries have started to look in the same direction and say, 'Yes, that is where we want to go.'" The danger, Bildt argues, is that "without leadership from the E.U., nationalist forces will get fresh wind in their sails."

Some optimists insist that flotsam can be salvaged from the wreckage. French political commentator Alain Duhamel advocates adopting just those parts of the constitution that put into place different structures for voting and decision making, and that call for an elected European Council President and an E.U. Foreign Minister. But it's hard to see how the political élites can pick and choose which bits of the constitution the voters did and didn't like. "To do anything now would be mad," says Grant, arguing that if leaders played such a game, it would be said that "they'd defied the will of the people."

And after the French and Dutch votes, the people may be much more vocal about making their will known. True, last week's referendums mingled anger over domestic issues with broader questions on Europe. But it may prove hard for governments to resist demands for more polls, and a tough — but perhaps salutary — task for the E.U. to figure out how to win them. "We are dead if we say we haven't learned something from this," says E.U. Commission Vice President Margot Wallström, who's in charge of institutional relations and communications. "And the one thing we've learned is that people ask for participation, they ask to be listened to, and they ask for policy delivery. They want us to make sure we can create new jobs and growth in Europe."

There's no sign that Chirac has learned that lesson. Fresh from his humiliation, he announced that he would "give a new impulse to French politics." Then he promptly named as Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, 51, a longtime Chirac acolyte who has never held elective office, and who epitomizes almost perfectly, in manner, looks and language, the very mandarin class against which the referendum could reasonably be taken to have been in revolt.

Polls showed that the popular choice for the Matignon would have been Nicolas Sarkozy, Chirac's presumed rival as the conservative candidate for President in 2007. Sarkozy at least spent the referendum campaign talking about how Europe could help reform France instead of how France could preserve its ideal of social welfare and worker protections. De Villepin merely said that when attempting to deal with France's intractable unemployment problem, he would remain "deeply attached to the French model." So no change there.

The British — for so long the awkward squad in Europe — at least recognized that the votes mean that that things can't go on as they were. The bugaboo of "Anglo-Saxon liberalism" may have been one of the spurs that French opponents of the constitution used to get voters to the polls, but Britain's comparatively healthy economy gives Prime Minister Tony Blair an authority that can't be ignored. He's likely to use it to get Europe thinking. Beneath the votes, Blair said last week, "there is a more profound question which is about ... the future of the European economy and how we deal with the modern questions of globalization and technological change. We have got to have this bigger debate."

A debate would be nice, if Blair can find anyone who wants to join him in it. And in truth, a period of yet more introspection, however necessary, may be a luxury Europe cannot afford. Speaking with E.U. officials in Washington last week, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Washington prefers "a Europe that is outward-looking, not inward-looking."

That's tough, since an inward-looking Europe is what the world now seems likely to get. It isn't just Turks and Ukrainians who may yet rue that development. So may Europeans themselves. For Pierre Haas, 85, a French financier, who fought with the Americans all the way to Prague in 1945, the current vacuum conjures up troubling memories. "The old divisions could be back again," he says. "We'll have Germany looking to the East, Britain looking to America, and France looking at its navel. I fear that kind of Europe, for the sake of my children." But at least the animal lovers are happy.

• JAMES GRAFF / Paris
• French and Dutch voters derailed the E.U. by rejecting the constitution. But what were they really voting against?