Amsterdam was supposed to be the people-friendly treaty, the one which turned the tide of Euroscepticism by addressing the concerns of the man in the street, jobs, crime, the environment. The truth is that neither the man on the Copenhagen omnibus nor his counterpart on the 46A has been convinced. The gap between the EU and its citizens remains very wide.
Denmark's vote yesterday more or less confirms the reality that we knew, from Dublin's half-hearted endorsement of the treaty, that on this fundamental objective of its drafters the treaty has failed; just as it also failed to meet its other key objective of preparing the ground institutionally for EU enlargement by reducing the scope of veto voting.
Instead, the battle lines of the pros and antis are still deeply entrenched. Parties whose parliamentary representation is in single or barely double figures gave handsome majorities a run for their money. The opposition defies straight forward categorisation. It is drawn fairly uniformly from all sections of the community. A recent opinion poll here finds that more women than men vote No, while the wealthy are more likely to vote Yes. But there is precious little urban-rural difference, while all age groups have a roughly similar one-third No component.
Party loyalty means little at referendum time. Hence the apparent boon to the anti-establishment parties, most notably the far-right anti-immigrant Danish People's Party (DPP), the far-left RedGreen Alliance, and the Democratic Left-linked Socialist People's Party. They make strange but effective bedfellows in the No camp.
Vote No, said the DPP, if you feel the treaty will bring down borders and allow the flow of illegal immigrants to become a flood. In reality only 2 per cent of Denmark's population is of non-EU origin.
Vote No, said the left, if you believe that the treaty is likely to impede accession to the EU by the countries of eastern Europe turning the EU into Fortress Europe.
Their common ground is a resolute defence of Danish sovereignty in the face of undemocratic Brussels. "We don't mind if there are to be more immigrants, " the DPP spokesman, Mr Soren Espersen, told The Irish Times disingenuously, "as long as Danes make the decision." On that issue he can make common cause with the left.
The appeal to Danish democratic traditions is much more than rhetoric, the SPP deputy, Ms Christine Antinori, argues. It goes back to the rural high school movement which brought adults together in local co-operative efforts at self-improvement and which still forms an important part of the folk memory of this country.
And one can only be impressed by the genuine popular engagement in the debate reflected in figures from Mr Peter Juul Larssen, who heads the Folketing EU information office. Some 70,000 people wrote or phoned in for free copies of the Amsterdam Treaty, and letters have been coming into his office at a rate of 500 a day for the last four months.
If the public here still complains, as it does, that it does not understand the treaty, that is clearly as much a reflection on the treaty itself as on their efforts to understand it. Their sense of powerlessness against the Brussels machine, however exaggerated, is precisely the democratic deficit this treaty was supposed to address. The Prime Minister, Mr Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, stressed that Amsterdam "is better than Maastricht". The treaty "defends the values that Danes support, such as a unified Europe working for a cleaner environment, more jobs, increased transparency, democracy and peace". And he warned that Denmark would be isolated if it rejected the treaty.
His failure to persuade voters in significant numbers that the treaty is indeed better than Maastricht means Europe's leaders will have to go back to the drawing board to come up with another version of the Citizen's Europe.