The sharpest comment on the result of the French referendum on the EU constitution came from a French columnist writing days before the vote: "The answer is No. Now, what was the question?" Fintan O'Toole writes.
The current mood of the electorate across most of the western world is that of a harassed parent who is just about to serve a meal to some obstreperous, ungrateful kids when the phone rings and a dalek-voiced telemarketer, full of forced good cheer, comes on the line. Whatever you bloody people are trying to sell us, we don't want it.
We know there is some possibility that if we listen to your tedious, insincere blather, you might actually be offering us a good deal. But who needs the strain of trying to work that out when it is far more satisfying to slam down the phone. It may not achieve anything, and the rudeness might occasion some remorse later, but at that moment it makes us feel better.
It does so because it offers the temporary illusion of power. In the disconnected state of contemporary politics, where trust and admiration are all but gone, saying Yes means letting the powers that be get on with whatever they have in mind for the future. It feels, not like active consent but like passive acquiescence. Saying No, rather paradoxically, feels like a positive act. It creates the temporary sensation that we are taking our collective destiny in our own hands.
The problem, of course, is that there is no collective statement being made. Saying No is like saying nothing at all. Some people vote No because the EU constitution goes too far, others because it does not go far enough.
Some think the constitution's values are too left wing, others that they are too right wing. And many invent their own questions to which they can give a negative answer: No to Turkey, No to Chirac, No to straight bananas, No to Germans hogging the swimming pool.
The EU is a perfect target for every kind of disgruntlement because it is at an awkward age. These are its adolescent years, when it is no longer indulged as a lovely child but not yet respected as a venerable parent. Its institutions are powerful enough to be blamed for the things that go wrong, but not powerful enough to be able to fix them. Stanley Baldwin famously claimed that press barons had "power without responsibility - the prerogative of the harlot". The EU has the prerogative of the babysitter - responsibility without power. Or at least not enough power to escape the slow, tedious mechanisms of compromise that make even its most epic achievements seem boring.
And yet the silliest conclusion from the debacle of the EU constitution is that the European project is dead. The Irish experience is surely instructive. At an institutional level, it is obvious that we have fallen out of love with the EU.
The Nice Treaty was passed at the second attempt on a very low turnout. But what does every group in civil society that feels it has had a raw deal from the State do? It look to Brussels for justice. If the new sewage plant is smelly, the residents' association digs out the EU environmental directives. If the N86 between Tralee and Dingle is in a shocking state, the West Kerry Roads Action Group is off to the European Parliament. Issues from taxi drivers looking for compensation after deregulation to poor water quality in Kilkenny to illegal dumps in Wicklow to aquaculture licensing in Lough Swilly end up in Brussels.
They do so, not because officious Eurocrats are throwing their weight around, but because Irish communities demand that the Eurocrats come to their aid. At the simple, everyday level of local politics, there is already an established belief that the EU will act more fairly, more transparently and with higher standards than the State does.
The big question is why that instinct fails to translate into respect for the EU's institutions. Why, if asked whether European rules should override local political decisions, will the same people who want the European Parliament to give them better roads reply with a resounding No? Why do we simultaneously embrace EU laws and dismiss the people who create and implement them as faceless bureaucrats?
I don't know the answer, but, in the context of referendums, it surely has something to do with the fact that the question is being put, not by the EU itself, but by the very national governments we so distrust. We are not asked to vote for a transnational power that can keep our national governments in line, but to agree with those very governments.
In the short term the only sensible response to what has happened in France, and will happen again this week in the Netherlands, is the one that always applies when you're in a hole: stop digging. To go ahead with referendums on the constitution here and elsewhere would be to perform a more tedious version of Monty Python's dead parrot sketch, with our dodgy political salesmen trying to flog us a defunct bird. All it will achieve will be to bring a noble project into greater contempt.