WHILE most media analysis of the failed European Union summit concentrated on the personal joust between Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac, the most astounding phenomenon was the collective self-delusion over the constitutional treaty.
In any other walk of life, the comments of Luxembourg Prime Minister and current EU president Jean-Claude Juncker to the effect that "I really believe that the French and Dutch did not vote No to the constitutional treaty" would have sparked calls for urgent professional help.
Hysteria and refusal to acknowledge reality are not unusual in enclosed communities of impressionable people and so it proved in Brussels.
A hall of about 150 people, all committed to the proposed EU constitution, simply could not accept that the voters in two Common Market founder states, France and the Netherlands, had turfed it out.
Britain was expected to be a problem, so its referendum was scheduled to take place after the 24 others had ratified it to aid a Yes campaign on the basis of not being the odd one out.
But France and the Netherlands are not the only founder members to be less than impressed by the prospect of a more centralised, unaccountable, neoliberal Europe.
Opinion polls suggest that 70 per cent of voters in Luxembourg and 90 per cent in Germany also want no part of a treaty that would set the EU on course to be an imperialist superstate to compete with the US.
Despite attempts to deceive voters that the treaty is simply a "tidying-up exercise" or that it actually repatriates political power from Brussels to member states, people have not been lulled into complacency.
Nor have the No votes been, as EU gravy train specialist Baron Kinnock claimed, "a triumph of ignorance."
In France, every home received a copy of the constitution and the French communist daily paper l’ Humanite sold 200,000 copies of its analysis of the treaty.
Giscard d’ Estaing, who chaired the EU convention that drew up the treaty blamed President Chirac for the No vote by making too much information available. Ignorant the French No voters certainly were not.
Apart from serial EU misinterpreters, such as Denis MacShane, there are some in Britain’s labour movement who are also in denial of the treaty’s neoliberal core.
They claim that there is nothing in the rejected constitution that would prevent a Labour government from renationalising the railways or repealing anti-union legislation.
Such points are red herrings. Renationalisation would be in words only unless EU directive 91/440/EEC, which orders the "liberalisation" of all passenger and rail freight services is dropped.
And the role of constitution on workplace rights is to wax lyrical on the subject before stating that rights must be in accordance with "national laws and practices."
So the constitution offers no short cut to rights denied to British workers by new Labour. It offers nothing to working people in Britain or anywhere else.
The constitution’s role remains to impose neoliberalism on the whole of Europe and the EU political, corporate and gravy-train elite is still determined to find a way of achieving this by hook or by crook.
