It is right that this French vote be taken very seriously. Of course, French electors have long been trying to send unequivocal messages to President Chirac: the massive vote against the Constitutional Treaty is undoubtedly, first and foremost, a vote against the President. And here the French electors would seem to be in line with the majority of (continental) Europeans coming to grips with “alternation out of despair”. But that’s not all. There is not only a very clear reason of domestic policy behind the French vote. The French electors, who found, as is only right and proper, a text of the Constitutional Treaty, being put through their letterbox, probably found themselves confronted by a very different object than the European Constitution of which there had been so much talk. It is, in fact, a real Treaty, more the competence of the chanceries and bureaucratic summits of Europe than of a popular referendum. The electors found themselves confronted by a text, very technical on the one hand and, as was inevitable, rather general and vague on the other. Thus, each was able to find in it his own bêtes noirs, from free trade to globalization, from competition between the poor to the loss of acquired social rights. It was therefore relatively easy to cement a coalition of malcontents with a coalition of the fearful, and to express with a “no” the ever more nagging doubts about an uncertain future, in which a large part of the population of the advanced countries of the Union fears to be worse off than it is at the present time. That’s why this French vote needs to be taken seriously. For it spells out loudly and clearly that the constitutional process, though given such emphasis, failed to indicate any great ethical, cultural, moral and political goal for Europe: it was limited to an institutional facelift, something that is undoubtedly commendable, but devoid of appeal. The chanceries of Europe are now at work to understand how it will be possible to ‘turn around’ the French “no”, to which will probably be added that of the Dutch and the Olympian British “abstention”. Probably the institutional facelift provided by the Treaty (whose practical implementation had been deferred, not without farsightedness, to towards the middle of the next decade) will be saved, in some measure. But at this point two priorities arise. The first is to return to a serious constitutional reflection. What Europe do we want, what rights and what duties, what relation with the past and, consequently, what project for the future, what definition of democracy? We must have no fear of speaking on these great issues rather more “in the American style”. And at the same time we must have no fear of looking to the great European model of the social market economy, of the great systems of social protection, in order to revive it with renewed consciousness. If this courage is lacking, if it is stifled by obstacles and fears, the future will remain clouded in uncertainty.
