Those in Europe both for and against Nice will be closely watching the referendum result, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris
The professor of Irish studies at the Sorbonne, Mr Paul Brennan, will be explaining on French radio and television over the next few days why he hopes Ireland will vote Yes in the Nice Treaty referendum.
"The last vote provoked a surprised, negative reaction here," he says. "It was a crack in the mirror, in the image the French have of Ireland . . . if that crack grows wider, the danger is that the warmth will go out of our relations and it would be very difficult to re-establish."
Prof Brennan stressed the similar rooting of Irish and French culture in history, tradition and Catholicism. In the Imaginaire Irlandais festival in 1996, "for the first time, France invited a foreign country to occupy its national cultural scene for six months".
Since the 1970s, Irish studies have expanded to more than a dozen French universities. Fifty French graduate students are writing doctoral theses about Ireland, half of them with Prof Brennan. French demand for exchange programmes with Ireland, under the EU's Erasmus programme, is so great that it cannot be met.
Many of the sentiments expressed by the No camp - opposition to war, racism, poverty and support for a strong United Nations - resonate in France and across the continent, Prof Brennan says. By voting No, Ireland would decrease its ability to influence European policies. "It is essential that alliances be formed within Europe," he says.
He admits the Treaty itself is a compromise, not fully understood by the majority of voters. "The basic issue is how Ireland situates itself in relation to Europe," he adds. "If we want to achieve things, we cannot do it alone."
Mr Jean Quatremer, the Brussels correspondent for Libération newspaper for the past 10 years, disagrees. He yesterday published a half-page article exhorting the Irish to reject the Nice Treaty. "Ireland is the last hope of true Europhiles," he says. "What is this argument that every referendum has to result in a Yes vote, because otherwise you risk giving the wrong impression? We have to stop making people feel guilty."
Mr Quatremer says he is chilling champagne to drink on Sunday if the Irish No is repeated. He has received telephone calls and e-mails from MEPs and civil servants at the EU Commission thanking him "for telling the truth" about the Nice Treaty, which he says represents "a serious regression in European integration".
"Far from facilitating decision-making," he says, "the Nice Treaty maintains present bottlenecks [the veto\] and . . . adds new requirements for achieving a qualified majority in the Council of Ministers [notably by raising the (required) population and percentage of votes\]." Worse yet, he adds, it has "broken the original balance between Germany and France which is the sine qua non condition of mutual confidence between these two countries."
Ireland would do Europe a favour if it buried the Nice Treaty, Mr Quatremer believes. Enlargement would only be delayed by six months to a year, since it could take place under the Convention, which is to complete its work at the end of 2003. The Convention signifies "the real Europe, of representatives elected by the people who discuss things openly", he says, "not diplomats behind closed doors."
Le Monde's correspondent Mr Jean-Pierre Langellier, reporting from Dublin, seems to feel sorry for confused Irish voters.
The Yes and No camps "promise the Irish the same advantages - jobs, more democracy and more control over their own fate". The Irish all support enlargement, he writes, but the Treaty has been portrayed as a question of sovereignty, national interests and big countries versus little ones.
Like the 19th-century British Prime Minister William Gladstone, Mr Langellier concludes that "the Irish keep changing the question".