As an army of shell-shocked Eurocrats and hawkers of constitutions ponder in full the meaning of the Irish No, perhaps they should do well to remember how this self-inflicted wound came upon them.
The Lisbon Treaty is the rebranded EU Constitution; and that, the child of the Constitutional Convention. The process began with the Laeken Declaration. Heads of Government gathered in Belgium in December 2001 specifically to reflect on why people were turning away from the EU, and what made the project keep hitting the referendum buffers.
The irony is therefore precious.
Laeken said that the Union was "behaving too bureaucratically". It said that the EU needed to be "brought closer to its citizens". It talked of the need that "the division of competences be made more transparent". It called for "European institutions to be less unwieldy and rigid". It highlighted the importance of a greater role for national parliaments, more transparency and efficiency, and for simplification. These were the areas that led to loss of public confidence, and radical reform was needed, including the restoration of competences back to national control.
Those of us in town at the time saw the arrogance that the constitutional dream soon evoked, and how that reforming agenda lasted for a matter of days - until opportunism overtook realism, and the prospect of power grabs blinded the self-selected delegates of the common man.
What a lost opportunity. The EU, quite simply, has wasted the last seven years. It's time to go right back to the starting blocks.
