French voters, going to the polls in today's referendum on the proposed European Constitution, have been told that their vote is crucial.
All the other national votes in Holland, Poland and Britain are allegedly expendable. Whether the French vote Oui or Non will supposedly either save or scupper the Euro-constitution.
Legally, this is false. According to the European Union's founding treaties, the proposed constitution cannot go into effect if any one of the 25 member-states rejects it.
But the conventional wisdom in the media and the Brussels bureaucracy is that there are national gradations of power when it comes to referendum votes:
First level: if France, a founding member of the European Union and one of Europe's "Big Three", rejects the constitution by a clear margin, then the constitution really is finished.
Second level: if Britain, one of Europe's "Big Three" but not a founding EU member, votes against it, then there would have to be re-negotiations on minor points to make the Treaty more palatable to the British electorate in a second vote.
Third level: if Holland, a founding member of the European Union but one of Europe's smaller nations, votes against it then the Dutch will have to keep voting until they get it right as the Irish and Danes were forced to eat their No votes in earlier referendums.
If all this sounds suspiciously neat and tidy, that's because it is. In fact, this ranking is just a form of bullying but less a bullying of small states by large ones than a bullying of the voters by the European political elites.
That became crystal clear when Brussels realised that the French might vote No and leaked the news that a arrow No vote would be insufficient to scupper the Treaty. Only a landslide would count.
Taking their cue from this, the politicians in Holland, France and Britain have all gone overboard in warning of the horrendous consequences of voting No.
It would allegedly lead to famine, war, pestilence and another Holocaust no, I'm not joking, both the Dutch Prime Minister, Jan-Peter Balkenende, and Sweden's EU Commissioner, Margot Walstrom, declared that the alternative to the Constitution was the death camps of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.
In the past this brutal hectoring has worked the Irish and the Danes tamely reversed their votes when instructed to do so.
Undemocratic nature
But the French seem likely to reject the constitution narrowly today and the Dutch to follow suit a few days later perhaps by a margin as high as 2-1.
If both were to happen, the comforting Brussels scenarios of getting everyone to vote right a second time would have to be discarded. It would make the undemocratic nature of the European Union too obvious.
Even if the French vote Yes by a narrow margin, a massive Dutch No might still block the constitution. It would certainly lead to some very interesting complications.
Asking Holland to reverse a landslide would invite a rejection. And what then? Blatant bullying of the popular Dutch would be risky for one thing, it would have a negative effect on the British referendum likely to be held next year.
Nations such as Germany which refused to hold a referendum vote at all would be nervous of berating the Dutch for getting their vote wrong. And so on.
In these circumstances, the entire Euro-constitutional process would have either to be abandoned or started again from scratch. Which would it be?
Conventional wisdom once again suggests that the EU status quo could continue as before. That would certainly be true for a while.
But the European governments embarked on the constitutional process precisely because they found the existing arrangements unsatisfactory in various ways.
The snag here is that different nations have different and opposite doubts about the current constitution and about any future constitution.
Neo-liberalism
The French may vote No because they believe it threatens to impose an Anglo-American "neo-liberalism" (i.e., free markets and free trade) on a protected and centralised French economy. They fear that Brussels would take away their long lunches and short shop-opening hours.
British Euro-sceptics, on the other hand, fear that the constitution will give the Brussels bureaucracy greater powers to impose regulations and restrictions á la francaise on their more flexible and efficient labour market.
Even the pro-constitution Tony Blair government is at present resisting an EU directive that would remove the right of workers to work overtime.
Both cannot be right and they're not. What the French dislike in the current constitution is its high-minded idealistic rhetoric about free trade.
Such language, however, has been in every EU treaty since the founding Treaty of Rome. It has not prevented the massive transfer of power to Brussels over economic and social regulation.
The constitution now before the voters would codify, expand and entrench this accretion of power to Brussels to the point where all member-states would be fastened inside the straitjacket of a French-style "European social model" including the "ultra-liberal" Brits, Balts and central Europeans who would find it increasingly constricting.
It is because the French government realises this as clearly as British Euro-sceptics that it is fighting desperately for a Yes result.
If the constitution falls, therefore, any new constitutional debate would have to negotiate afresh a compromise between these two contrasting visions.
Washington has a clear long-term interest in a prosperous free-trade Europe that is also a reliable military and diplomatic ally.
It has to avoid any direct intervention in EU affairs, of course, but a new Euro-constitutional debate now could be helpful to its interests.
Neither France nor Germany exercises its previous weight in EU councils and America's friends there are growing in influence.
In particular the new democracies which favour a close Euro-American friendship are now full European Union members rather than anxious applicants.
They have already flexed their muscles during the Ukraine crisis to push EU policy in a more anti-Russian direction than Brussels wanted.
By provoking a new constitutional debate, they would create an opportunity for the United States for influence the development of the European Union in ways favourable to itself not directly but acting through its European friends.
Does Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice realise this? Adhering to the traditional State Department line of endorsing anything marketed as "European integration", she has let slip a number of remarks that seem to praise the constitution.
That will probably not influence the referendum results in either direction. But it may signify that America is about to miss its last great opportunity to salvage an Atlantic alliance that is slowly cracking up.
John O'Sullivan, former adviser to Lady Thatcher and former editorial page editor of The Post, is editor-at-large of the National Review and a member of Benador Associates.
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