Lisbon

Correction added to this post.

No I haven't been to Portugal.

I'm referring to the Lisbon reform treaty, an European Union treaty that was set to advance the development of the EU, giving it a permanent president, a more unified foreign policy, and less veto-power for individual countries.

In order for the treaty to pass it needed to pass referendums in all EU countries. The first country to hold one was Ireland.* Since coming into the EU the Irish have seen explosive economic growth--not solely because of EU membership, but certainly helped by it. Irish voters rejected the treaty.

(* A commenter below points out that this is not quite factually correct--all countries need to ratify the treaty, but not necessarily put it to a referendum. Ireland decided to go the route of referendum.)

This is enormously frustating for so-called Europhiles--those who would like to see the European Union become a more cohesive and strong leader in the world, a check on American power and a bulwark against authoritarian Russia and China. Two years ago a similar EU reform referendum was rejected by Dutch and French voters; Lisbon was supposed to be the answer.

I'm obviously just summing up the conventional wisdom on the topic, but I've learned a lot about the insanely complicated project of building a "United States of Europe" over the past year and it's a fascinating thing to watch.

Anyway, all of this as a set-up for a few paragraphs from Anne Applebaum on why the treaty rejection was pretty much inevitable, and will be for a while yet.

For as long as I've been paying attention to these things, Europe has been "in crisis," "in chaos," or "in despair" because yet another European country failed to ratify yet another European treaty. Invariably, something cataclysmically important was at stake, like the creation of a European currency. Often, the difficult country was a small one—Denmark , say, whose voters rejected the treaty that helped create the European currency in 1992. At that time, France and Germany bemoaned the fact that some tiny number of Danes were "holding up Europe." The Danes were duly sat upon, negotiated with, and granted "opt-outs" until they voted the right way a year later. Order was restored—until the French voted against the European constitution in a referendum in 2005.

[...]

But this, too, is now traditional: During doomed referendum campaigns, the political class, whether Irish or Danish or French, is always unable to sell some complicated institutional reform to the general public and is never able to explain to the voters why they should care. And perhaps this should no longer surprise anyone. Maybe someday there will be a country called Europe whose citizens feel as deeply about the institutions of Europe as they feel about their own national institutions, but there isn't yet. As a result, national referendums on European issues are easily hijacked by rumor, hearsay, and single-issue campaigners, however insane.

More to the point, they always will be, at least for the foreseeable future. So, perhaps it would be better all around if Europe's leaders accepted this, came to terms with it, and moved on. As it turned out, there was nothing wrong with a Europe in which some countries adopted a common currency and others did not. The same is doubtless true of "European" foreign policy, which is always at its most successful when several powerful nation-states—some combination of Germany, France, or Britain and two or three others—get together, make a decision, and stick to it. By contrast, "European" foreign policy is often at its weakest when it is carried out by functionaries who owe no allegiance to any particular electorate.

So, pay no attention to the wailing in Brussels: If the most enthusiastic Europeans in Europe didn't care enough to read the treaty they've just rejected, then maybe it's just as well that it didn't pass.