The most striking thing about the Irish vote on the Nice Treaty is its ambiguity. What was being rejected? Was it the enlargement of the EU and its implications for current member-states, especially those, like Ireland, that have done so well out of membership? Or was it the "meddling" of a remote, even if usually well-meaning Brussels bureaucracy - something dramatised recently by Brussels's criticism of Irish fiscal policy? Or was it something more principled? That is, was it the voice of a self-governing nation making itself heard against an ad-hoc process of "constructing Europe" which plays down constitutional issues in favour of an economic agenda?
Doubtless it was a mixture of these things. But I hope the third motive was not the least important. For it is that motive which must come to the fore in the next year or two, if Europe is to surmount what can be called the crisis of European integration.
The acceleration of European integration since the late 1980s has not been accompanied by an adequate debate about the nature of the political project involved. What are its constitutional implications for member-states? Will the European Union remain a loose confederation, become a tight federation, or find an outcome in between - a political form which does not yet have a name?
It may well be the latter. But if so, that makes worries about democratic legitimacy both more urgent and more problematic. The lack of any clear constitutional identity has certainly contributed to the rapidly increasing democratic deficit across Europe. The Irish and Danish referendums are obvious symptoms. But opinion polls in Germany, Austria, France, Italy and Britain - whether about the introduction of the euro or enlargement - arouse suspicion that the construction of Europe has come to be perceived as an elitist adventure. Even membership of the European Union has become contentious in some countries.
The poor quality of public debate about European integration has contributed to this development. Argument has been impaled on a dilemma. Supporters of further integration make their case on economic grounds. They appeal to the prospect of getting richer together. Opponents, on the other hand, fall back on the defence of national sovereignty, a narrowly legal category.
But argument conducted in these terms soon becomes sterile. It misses the most important issue, which is self-government. What is the future of self-government in Europe? What are the conditions of self-government in a democratic society on a continental scale?
Those who favour a federal outcome for Europe are often guilty of not taking these questions seriously enough. Federalism is a fragile plant, which depends upon informal cultural conditions as well as a formal constitutional settlement. These are conditions which cannot be satisfied overnight.
When the argument is rephrased in these terms, it becomes clear why Europe cannot afford to ignore American federalism. Not because it can or should be imitated slavishly, but because the American federal example draws attention to the conditions of achieving self-government on a continental scale. These go beyond the matter of formally allocating authority between the centre and periphery. One condition is a rights-based political culture, which can establish the limits of legitimate state action and constrain the majority principle. Another condition is an open political class across the continent, a class which is desperately needed if Europe is not to be run by bureaucrats.
In the United States these informal conditions have created a culture of consent. But that is precisely what the European Union has so far failed to create.
It may be that some countries and even some members of the Commission privately welcome the outcome of the Irish referendum. These are voices that have urged the rapid deepening of political integration - described at times by the French as an "economic government" to match the common currency - and have been far more reserved (if not distinctly hostile) towards enlargement, which may become an obstacle to deeper integration.
The recent Gothenburg summit apparently strengthened the commitment to enlargement. But, following the Irish referendum, the drawback of such a commitment is that it can be presented only too easily as anti-democratic - as further evidence of the European Union's managerial potential and its "manipulation" of democratic consultations. For why should Yes votes be deemed irreversible, if No votes are merely obstacles to be circumvented?
The ambivalence of the French political class to referendum results can be traced to the French referendum on the Maastricht Treaty. It was won by such a tiny margin - prompting some of the more cynical French to wonder if it was won at all - that it may have strengthened the elitist bias of what has been, by and large, the most determined and influential political class in the European Union.
Will European integration now proceed at the expense of self-government? It is not impossible. Of course, the European project, which dates from the early post-war period, is a noble one. It has established new ways for European nations to deal with each other, though the disciplines imposed by the Cold War also played a part. But European founders such as Spaak, de Gasperi and Schumann - who were often convinced federalists - could not at the outset champion a federal outcome for Europe. The pariah status of Germany after the war made that impossible. By contrast, appealing to the prospect of economic growth was uncontroversial. So the habit grew up of justifying further measures of integration on economic grounds, while leaving the political consequences to become gradually apparent.
That pattern of development reached its apogee in the early 1990s, when the French political class reacted to German reunification by accelerating the process of integration. Monetary union was widely understood by its champions as the prelude to European federalism - both requiring and justifying something like a central European government.
Yet a deep uncertainty entered at this point. The French political class had previously been associated with the Gaullist goal of a Europe des nations. In accelerating integration in the 1990s, however, they apparently changed the goal - even at times appearing to accept federalism as the logical outcome. Yet French instincts remain those shaped by a unitary form of the state, a state traditionally noted for its consecration of bureaucratic power. And that is at least part of the explanation of why the problem of European government has latterly been treated almost as a technical question rather than the fundamental issue it rightly is.
The consequence is a kind of bewilderment in Europe. Europeans understand that they are on a new political road, but where does it lead? Such bewilderment is accompanied by a vague recognition that important transfers of power from the nation-states to Brussels have taken place. But the question of Brussels's authority - its constitutional status - has not been adequately addressed.
Power without authority is dangerous, both for those who exercise it and for those who are subject to it. Do Europeans understand how much of the economic and social regulation they are subject to comes not from national legislatures but from Brussels? Large corporations and trades unions know.
In any case, the danger of this mixture of bewilderment and a sense of power shifting is that national political life may be de-legitimised, without anything like an adequate focus of legitimacy being created at the centre of the European Union.
In the absence of a Europe-wide public opinion and open political class, the appeal to democracy can become self-serving. Decisions taken in Brussels are often opaque, the result of bureaucratic in-fighting and a lobbying process which puts a premium on special access and money. National identities and the civic traditions associated with them are being held of little account compared to the advantages of economic integration and rationalisation. In that way, alas, the market has begun to usurp its function in Europe.
But when the market usurps its function it also calls into question its own justification. For there is an important sense in which the final, decisive justification of the market system is itself democratic - that it empowers individuals, dispersing rationality, choice and responsibility, in contrast to a command economy.
A democratic state and a free market system ought to serve the same ends. But that classical liberal alliance of state and market can be corrupted in two different ways. It can be corrupted through an exaggeration of the claims of politics - as both the fascist and the communist experiences of mid-twentieth-century Europe reveal. When that happens, economic relations become a mere appendage of the state and its ideology, the means by which those who exercise state power impose their preferences.
But the classical liberal alliance can also be corrupted when the claims of politics are minimised while those of the market are inflated - when the "freeing" of market forces and economic rationalisation contribute to a playing down of constitutional safeguards and thereby open the way to a centralisation of political power. For the neo-capitalist habit of invoking the "laws" of the market place can undoubtedly serve to draw attention away from such centralisation. Britain experienced a minor version of that phenomenon under Thatcherism. But today it is Europe which is in danger of seeing that perversion of a market system become a major perversion.
To the extent that European liberal democracy is perceived as acquiescing in this tyranny of economic categories - and becoming the "fellow traveller" of centralisation - it will put its own credentials at risk. It will begin to resemble the thin veneer for other more sinister forces that Marxism has always claimed it was. Then the way will be open for more extreme movements of the right and left to seize the label "democratic" and use it for their own purposes.
For that is the great political danger posed by the rush to monetary union and political integration. Over-rapid integration risks discrediting the liberal democratic centre of European politics, both the centre-right and the centre-left. In nearly all European countries, the parties for the centre have presented a common front over the project for monetary union and further integration. But in doing so, they have deprived centrist voters of any real choice, leaving opposition to the single currency, for example, as a vote winner, real or potential, for the extremes. How tempting, then, for voters in a referendum to strike back.
Of course, it is the duty of a democratic political class to give a lead. But it also has a responsibility to carry opinion with it. When it does not take the latter duty seriously enough, it finds itself exposed to challenges from movements which put "nation" or "class" above the claims of liberal democracy. Worse still, nationalist xenophobia and class resentments may coalesce, and a kind of unholy alliance of the right and left may begin to nibble away at the recent liberal democratic consensus in Europe, which the fall of communism at first seemed to make impregnable.
By allowing an elitist strategy for rapid European integration to shape the image of liberal democracy in Europe, to the point almost of constituting it, Europe's centrist politicians could unwittingly be fostering the things that are most antithetical to liberal democracy - xenophobic nationalism and economic autarky.
It would be tragic if the Irish referendum result increased the elitist surplus and the democratic deficit in Europe.
Larry Siedentop is a Fellow at Keble College, Oxford. His book Democracy in Europe, now available in paperback, is published by Penguin
