We woke yesterday and looked to the east, toward Old Europa. Where were the red skies? Where the thick black billows? Where the baleful NON shroud?

To our surprise Lord Nelson atop his column lorded over his square. Le Manneken-Pis pissed on the Rue de l’Etuve. And the Eiffel Tower towered in the mizzle. Thankfully the French NON had left the EU's foremost tourist attractions unscathed.

But make no mistake, the NON has done serious damage elsewhere. Giants of only a week ago have had their stilts knocked out from under them. Suddenly EU MEPs, bureaucrats, technocrats, hagiocrats, kakistocrats, clerks, and ministers-for-life found themselves eye level with the Europeans that they manage. Who were these beleaguered dispirited people? Ah, Madam, please, do not push. Oh, monsieur, those oxfords were freshly polished. Please, all, your attention. Adjust your strides to the EU standard 43-centimeter span. Transport yourselves properly. Like Europeans.

POLITICUS: AFTER FRENCH 'NO' VOTE, ALL BETS ARE OFF ON EU

PARIS May 31, 2005 (IHT) - In the end, democracy came and mocked the European mystique, its notions of ever-greater union, a European Us, its self-portrayal as the Righteous Power, its exalted but hollow pretensions to project to the world a will and a strength that is not yet and may never be its own.

France's no to this Europe...is not to be minimized. Rather, with the stakes perfectly clear - a French no would kill the European Constitution - French voters signaled that even at absolutely no real cost to them, when it came to matters of the heart, Europe doesn't matter enough to say yes to.

Bam! Pow! After all, think of the context: a united, integrated Europe, acting largely as one, had been a near spiritual conviction for the generation that grew up after the tragedy of World War II.

Now go and find that belief and sense of European mission today. France has laughed at it. Angry with Europe's refusal to adopt its questionable social model, and unwilling to meld French identity into a greater European whole, France said to hell with the noble undertaking stuff. Adding the rationale that it was all the elites' Big Fib anyway.

With the no vote, this brings Europe back to the necessity of a re-examination of its own ambitions. Built into the rejection of a referendum that Chirac proposed himself, and Schröder's big regional defeat and call for national elections in September, is a challenge to the two men's European presumptions.

The [Bush] administration and the rest of the world will not fail to notice that Europe's "peace front" of 2002, which turned resistance to the U.S. war in Iraq into a Genesis myth for a Europe defined in opposition to the United States, is in the process of self-delegitimization.

MERE DEMOCRACY WON'T STOP THE EU MACHINE

May 30, 2005 (Telegraph) - We may have seen it coming, but it is an awesome thing none the less. France, the most communautaire country in the EU, has had enough. Having laid down the principles on which the EU is run - the protectionist industrial policy, the agricultural subsidies, the Gaullist suspicion of America - the French have reviled their own creation. In defiance of a united media, a monolithically pro-Brussels political class and blizzards of propaganda, they have said a resounding Non to the Euro-elites who have governed them for half a century.

It is hard to think of a graver crisis of legitimacy for the EU. If even France, Europe's most loyal daughter, wants no more of the racket, then surely the time has come to go back to the drawing board. If Europe's leaders had an ounce - a gram, rather - of decency, they would accept the verdict and change direction. For this constitution did not merely propose some new extensions of EU power: it restated the entire acquis communautaire: the accumulated pile of EU jurisdiction.

On any normal measure, the EU has lost the confidence of its citizens. But the project was never meant to be democratic. From the first, the EU's founding fathers understood that it needed to be immune to public opinion.

The genius of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman was to design a system in which supreme power was wielded by unelected officials, and in which the peoples were presented with a series of faits accomplis. When, in 1992, they got their first No vote in Denmark's referendum on Maastricht, our masters were too set in their ways to consider respecting the result, and so pushed on regardless. They will do the same thing today.