The European Union Constitution, now gussied up as the Lisbon Treaty, is a remarkable document. Napoleon famously remarked that constitutions should be short and obscure. On that count, the Constitution scores one out of two: it is not short, but it is definitely obscure. What Napoleon curiously failed to appreciate was that length, if carried on for long enough, has an obscurity all its own. At 246 pages in its original form, and a svelte 248 pages as the Lisbon Treaty, the Constitution achieves a comprehensive triumph over comprehensibility.

That is one reason why the Constitution, when the EU has deigned to consult Europeans about its acceptability, has had such a hard road. Never was a fundamental redesign and expansion of an institution that directly affects the lives of tens of millions carried out with such palpable lack of enthusiasm on the part of the citizenry. The Constitution did manage to win referenda in 2005 in Spain and Luxembourg. But, famously, it lost crucial votes in France and Holland. That sent the Constitution back to the drawing board, to emerge as the Lisbon Treaty.

The lesson the EU learned from the French and Dutch rejections, however, was not that the Constitution was fundamentally unwelcome, and that it was time to reduce the EU to proportions that were acceptable to the populations of Europe. It was that referendums were dangerous and best avoided. Thus, the Treaty was adopted through a process that required only a single popular national vote, in Ireland, even though then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and seven other nations, had pledged to hold a referendum on the Constitution.

In the end, the French ‘no’ that necessitated the Treaty served the interests of the EU very nicely: by claiming that the Treaty was only a revision of previous EU treaties, instead of a Constitution that created a fundamentally different institution, its supporters could justify abandoning their pledges. And, since the Treaty allows for further changes without resort to national ratification procedures, the EU is close to ensuring that the French and Dutch embarrassments will never recur. If the people want to vote no, the answer is simple: don’t let them vote.

The exception, of course, was the Irish vote, Ireland being required by a 1987 decision of the Irish Supreme Court to hold a referendum. The supposedly shocking result on June 12, 2008 was another no, by 53% to 47%. Quite why this result was so surprising is hard to say. True, the polls had predicted a safe yes, and true, the political establishment was united behind the Treaty. But that was the fundamental problem with the Treaty in the first place: the establishment liked it, and made it quite clear to the voters that it was designed to cut them out of the process.

Most infamous – and most delightful – was the observation of Irish EU commissioner Charlie McCreevy before the Irish vote that he himself hadn’t read the Treaty, and, furthermore, that no sane person would want to read it. McCreevy’s honesty undoubtedly played a part in the Treaty’s defeat – and led to the exposure of the fact that Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen had not read the Treaty either – but his admission was only different in that it was more attention-grabbing than a score of similar comments from EU officials.

There was Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the lead author of the original Constitution, who observed that “All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way.” Or Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht, who said that, “The aim of the Constitutional treaty was to be more readable; the aim of this treaty is to be unreadable. . . . It is a success.” Napoleon would be proud.

Before the first vote, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso had warned Ireland that “there is no plan B.” That, of course, was untrue: the plan, as always in the EU, was to have the Irish vote until they got it right. In light of the persistence of the EU, Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen’s statement that the second Irish vote would be “final,” and that there could be no third vote, is as hilarious as it is revealing. What additional illegitimacy could possibly mar a third vote?

The polls say it’s all over. The latest poll, by the Irish Times on September 25, puts the ‘yes’ vote on 48% and the no’s on 33%. That’s not as bad for the no vote as it seems: last time round, the nay-sayers were behind by almost two to one and ended up pulling it out. And Charlie McCreevy has intervened in the process again, this time with the admission that “all of the [political leaders] know quite well that if the similar question was put to their electorate by a referendum the answer in 95 per cent of the countries would probably have been ‘No’ as well.” As Tony Barber of the Financial Times has observed, the obvious implication of this statement is that “EU leaders are forcing the Lisbon treaty into law against the will of the overwhelming majority of the EU’s 27 countries.” And that is no more than the truth.

The interesting question is why the polls show the yes vote in the lead. The quick, often-given answer is that Ireland’s economic circumstances have changed dramatically in the sixteen months since the last referendum. Then, Ireland was the Celtic Tiger. Now, the IMF projects that by 2010, Ireland’s GDP will have fallen by 14%, one of the biggest declines in the industrialized world.

That is indeed an answer, but it is not a very satisfactory one, for the simple reason that integrating more fully into the EU is no answer to a financial crisis. There is a clear and obvious gain in having duty-free access to the European market, but Ireland has that already, and even if Ireland left the Union entirely and took up European Economic Area membership, it would retain that privilege. By signing on to Lisbon, Ireland only guarantees that it will bear its full share of the costs of the EU. And those costs are substantial – so substantial, indeed, that as Matthew Elliott of the TaxPayers’ Alliance (UK) has pointed out, “no Government has yet demonstrated in a fully detailed assessment that the EU is of overall benefit to its members.”

The economic argument, therefore, is no argument at all. But it is nonetheless true that the financial crisis has been very good for the EU. I confess that I did not think it would be: twelve months ago, I thought it would likely be the end of the Euro. But the fact is that the EU exists, ultimately, for a very simple reason, the same reason that brought the original EEC into being: to make history go away. The EU is not about doing things: it is about preserving the socialist, bureaucratic, and fundamentally Franco-German dominated status quo.

The more the world changes, the faster the EU has to run to stay in place, which is why it has grown apace institutionally since the end of the Cold War. The financial crisis was another change, and the EU exists to try to prevent change. Its response to changes – see, for instance, its reaction to Russia’s invasion of Georgia last summer – will always be to try to minimize them by blaming the victim, by doing as little as possible of substance by way of a response, and by integrating into an even tighter defense crouch. Or, to put it another way, while the EU exists to promote stasis, the EU paradoxically benefits from an occasional modest crisis, because crises create fear among the public and provide a built-in excuse for the EU to expand. The EU thrives on the public’s anxiety.

And that is why the Treaty is now ahead in the Irish polls. Sixteen months ago, the Irish people, by a narrow margin, felt more confident of their national destiny inside the EU as it was than in the EU as the Treaty promised to make it. But as Irish confidence has waned, the public perception has grown that Ireland had better accept its fate and dissolve itself more fully into the European future. It’s not much, but at least it offers the veneer of safety.

This is the same logic that made Britain a late applicant to the EEC, and the same logic that has kept it reluctantly inside since 1975: the decline of the British Empire, and the narrative of British decline, created a crisis of national confidence that made Europe seem first acceptable and then dully inevitable. And it is the same logic that brought Eastern Europe into the EU: no part of Europe has greater cause to want to escape from history.

The only weakness in the EU’s case is that it seeks stasis, and this is impossible. The Lisbon Treaty is one more step – a long one – on the road to the extinction of national, sovereign democracy in Europe. Underlying the argument for the European Union is the fear that the rise of democracy and nationalism in Europe caused the world wars that lost Europe its world leadership. That is why the EU has never been about democracy: democracy, being a dynamic and changeful force, is the problem the EU seeks to solve, not the solution it seeks to advance.

But never before has the EU been able to look forward to a future free of any direct consultation with the peoples of Europe. Today, that seems to the EU like a tremendous success. In the short run, for Brussels, it is. But as McCreevy has admitted, the Treaty is being foisted on a public that is basically opposed to the entire affair. The EU is ahead in the polls – at the cost of abandoning any pretense to speak for the peoples of Europe. And now that there will be no more referenda, there is nothing at all to keep the EU even marginally honest.

The EU wants the ability to govern without the fundamental restraints essential to democratic government. Nothing looks more stable than a bureaucratic empire. But restraints on government, as Napoleon found to his cost, exist for a reason: sooner or later, government without restraint stumbles into a crisis beyond its power to master. And when that clarifying moment arrives, the obscurity of the EU’s new 248 page constitution will be no defense against reality. Today, the Irish people are a problem for the EU to overcome. But tomorrow, the EU will find that their obstinacy, their refusal to simply let it have its way, was the best service they could offer it.

Dr. Ted R. Bromund is the Margaret Thatcher Senior Research Fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom in the Heritage Foundation.