A couple of days before the French referendum on the EU constitution, your correspondent was travelling home on the Brussels metro and found himself sitting next to the spokeswoman for Joaquín Almunia, the EU commissioner from Spain. What, I asked, were the commissioner's thoughts on the prospect of a French "no"? "He refuses to believe that France will vote no," was the reply. Even after the French and Dutch had indeed rejected the constitution, many people in Brussels still seemed unable to adjust to the news. This state of denial was, in some ways, understandable. The French and Dutch rejections raise such big questions about the popular legitimacy of the EU project, as well as the common Brussels assumption that further European integration is an historical inevitability, that it might be asking a bit much for highly committed people to ditch their whole worldview in a matter of days. A certain amount of clinging to the wreckage is to be expected.
A French nervous breakdown
Still, it should really have been no surprise that France did indeed vote "no." After all, the French referendum on Maastricht was only won by the "yes" campaign by the narrowest of margins—less than 1 per cent. And yet back in 1992, France had far more reason to feel positive about the EU. At that stage there were only 12 members of the EU and the "Franco-German couple" was clearly still running the show; Jacques Delors, a powerful Frenchman, was in charge of the commission; the French economy was in better shape; there was no apparent threat of the perfidious Brits and their nasty liberal ideas taking over the French-created union. Why should one be surprised if—13 years later, when so many French assumptions about the EU have been shaken—public opinion about European integration had taken a negative turn?
Indeed, in retrospect, much of the last five years of the European story was dominated by an extended French nervous breakdown. The first signs came at the Nice summit of December 2000, which was comprehensively mishandled by Jacques Chirac. At the time, France was still clinging to the idea that an absolute parity of power between France and Germany was fundamental to the EU. This French refusal to accept that voting weights should reflect population hamstrung the whole Nice summit, and resulted in the adoption of an illogical and bizarrely complicated voting system, which—in the wake of the rejection of the constitution—the EU is still saddled with. France's refusal to come to terms with the implications of EU enlargement was also evidenced at that EU summit. In transcripts of the leaders' discussions at Nice (later leaked to the Economist and El Pais), Chirac could be seen arguing that it was legitimate to bias the voting system a little against the new members, because the older members like France deserved some reward for the sacrifices and effort they had made in creating the EU in the first place. This French refusal to accept that the newcomers really would have to be treated as equals burst disastrously into the open in the run-up to the Iraq war, when Chirac famously told the east and central Europeans that in backing the Bush administration they had "missed a good opportunity to shut up." The disastrous impact of this comment on France's image and influence within the EU cannot be underestimated. Before the Chirac comments, the Poles were much more inclined to try to align themselves with France and Germany, the traditional power brokers within the EU—and were very wary of appearing to leap into bed with the Brits, since this might confirm suspicions that the Poles were going to be "bad Europeans." After Chirac's unfriendly advice, a kind of cold fury settled over the Polish political class, and Chirac was openly likened to Brezhnev. And yet while Chirac's comments did untold damage to France's position within the EU, they absolutely hit the spot back home. Your correspondent watched a replay of the offending press conference on closed-circuit television at the EU summit at which they were made, and noticed that the French journalists in the crowd roared with laughter and clapped when Chirac made his now infamous comments. Ever since enlargement, French policy has degenerated into a succession of rearguard actions—whether it is trying to destroy the services directive because it is too "liberal," block the adoption of a common EU patent because it privileges English, find a way around the constraints of the stability pact, or plead with the European commission to be allowed to continue subsidising companies like Alstom. Under the circumstances, is it really so surprising that the French voted "no"?
Dutch defeatism
The Dutch referendum was lost even more resoundingly than the one in France. Indeed, the margin was so large that any recriminations about the mishandling of the "yes" campaign seem beside the point. And yet the pro-referendum campaign was amazingly casual. Two weeks before the vote, Jan Peter Balkenende, the prime minister, went to Malta for the weekend. And when your correspondent tried to find the "yes" campaign office opposite the parliament in The Hague, it was so invisible that I had to ring on several buzzers before finding it.
