Before the revolution: Europe's governors refuse to listen to the governed.

THE Irish are making big waves. They have voted in a referendum to reject something called the Lisbon Treaty. This may sound like a technicality of interest only to those hooked on politics, but actually it bears vitally on the future of Europe, and the hopes and fears of those who live there.

These uncertain times all over Europe have a whiff of failure about them, a loss of confidence in democracy and identity reminiscent of the 1930s. The European Union is a project now 50 years old that is intended to recover lost power and prestige. The EU has the core belief that the nation-state is the cause of all contemporary ills, and it has been absorbing as many of them as it can, and hollowing out their identity in order to lay the foundations of nothing less than a new continent-wide empire. Politics, law, business, the economy, and even culture have already been harmonized and centralized. The Lisbon Treaty is supposed to be a final step, turning the European Union irrevocably into the United States of Europe, a legal entity with sovereign powers, and whose 27 constituent nation-states from now on would be mere regions.

It is safe to say that virtually nobody except specialists has read the Lisbon Treaty. The text is almost 500 pages, more easily available in French than in English, and drafted in Euro-jargon that should enrich generations of lawyers. Even Irish prime minister Brian Cowen admits that he did not manage to get through it, which did not stop him from recommending its acceptance sight unseen. Poor chap! He's only just come into office following the resignation of his predecessor, Bertie Ahern (who has to explain why sackfuls of cash were in his possession; when a tribunal cross-questioned an assistant who had handled some of the stuff, she just burst into tears).

The treaty's impenetrability is deliberate. Back in 2001 the unelected officials who run the EU in its capital of Brussels decided that a constitution was required to complete their work on the United States of Europe. Valery Giscard d'Estaing, a man supercilious even by the standards of French presidents, was appointed head of a convention to draft this constitution, and by 2005 it was ready to be submitted to the peoples designated to live under it. Rather to his credit, Giscard has always made a point of admitting that these constitutional texts should be unreadable for the layman, and kept secret too, so that people find out what they are signed up to only once they can do nothing about it.

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Horrors! Referendums on the constitution in France and Holland came up with massive No votes, and it was evident that Britain and other countries would do the same if or when they could. This might have been expected to kill the proposed constitution, but that is not how the political class in Brussels operates. The draft was simply rejigged under its new name as the Lisbon Treaty. Giscard again was one of numerous politicians to concede truthfully that the treaty contained over 90 percent of his proposed constitution. But the Eurocrats had learned from their mistake. Instead of referendums, presidential procedures and parliamentary majorities were now to ram the treaty through--and then guarantee its ratification--simply by virtue of their power to do so. Deprived of the chance to give their opinion on what was occurring above their heads, people would have to learn what was good for them. The Kremlin Politburo of old would have understood perfectly.

The French, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Italians, and others duly obliged. In Britain, the government of Tony Blair had promised a referendum. His successor, Gordon Brown, declared that this was superfluous as the treaty was quite different from Giscard's document--a deception hitherto more characteristic of Saddam Hussein's Baghdad than of the Mother of Parliaments. Ireland stood out as the one and only exception: Irish judges ruled that the treaty transferred national sovereignty elsewhere, and the law required a referendum.

Brian Cowen and the governing party, the opposition party, the influential financial community, almost the entire media, and the Catholic hierarchy united to bludgeon everyone into approving the treaty and to warn them that they would be bankrupt, isolated, and a laughingstock if they failed to do so. Behind the scenes the Brussels Eurocrats added their energies to rigging the outcome. Against the massed battalions of the establishment was Sinn Fein--the political wing of the IRA terrorist movement--which is so unpopular that its support was thought likely to be counterproductive, and someone nobody had ever heard of by the name of Declan Ganley, a 39-year-old maverick businessman and millionaire. The two sides could hardly have been less evenly matched.

Tall, with a high dome of a forehead, well able to project a strong personality, Ganley organized a pressure group, Libertas, consisting mostly of youthful enthusiasts. The reason Ireland voted No, some say, is that Ireland has been one of the main beneficiaries of EU subsidies, and is due to become instead a net contributor. Agriculture, as well as the country's neutrality, was said to be under threat. But there is no doubt that Ganley and Libertas were the major factor in convincing the public to reject what Ganley likes to call "this wretched treaty." When I heard him speak, he said, "The Irish people have smelled a rat." In the end, it came down to identity: The Irish have fought long and hard for their independence, and their vote expressed pride in being themselves.

Under the EU's own rules, the Lisbon Treaty has to be accepted by all 27 countries, and a single veto is enough for it to fall. The Irish have spoken, and one might think that would be that. Not a bit of it. As they recover from their shock, European leaders are preparing to disregard the Irish vote--with the solitary exception of Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic and a man of integrity. "The Lisbon project is finished," he said firmly, "and ratification will not continue." But already at the moment when the Irish vote was being announced, Jose Manuel Barroso, the Portuguese president of the European Commission and therefore chief Eurocrat, was telling a press conference that the Irish vote would be respected, but he spoke in so bitter and threatening a way that obviously he intended nothing of the kind. Within 24 hours, fellow Eurocrats were searching for means to invalidate the vote by hook or crook. The German foreign minister, Franz-Walter Steinmeier, was only one among several of his compatriots to start complaining to the effect that it was not truly democratic for 4 million Irish people to decide the fate of some 490 million other Europeans. One German politician explained that he was disappointed because the Irish had shown "real cheek."

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France began speculating about "legal arrangements" and "protocols" that might bypass the Irish problem and save the treaty. The vote, he said with condescension worthy of General de Gaulle, was "fascinating all the same," and he proposed to visit Dublin to help them out. French newspapers report that he called the Irish "bloody idiots" and other choice terms. Sarkozy further dropped hints that the EU might go ahead with a "two-speed Europe," in other words punishing the laggards. The British happen to be in the final stage of ratifying the treaty: Gordon Brown has used his parliamentary majority to bulldoze it through. Once before, in 2001, the Irish voted the wrong way on a treaty; they were bullied into doing it all over again so that they came up with the right answer. Now they have been given an ultimatum by the Eurocrats: They must sort out this mess by October. The European leadership appears willing to take a leaf out of the Robert Mugabe playbook when it comes to voting. When Declan Ganley was asked what would happen if the Irish referendum were somehow overridden, I heard him say, through gritted teeth, "We will not rest."

It would be comic to watch these Eurocrats squirming and intriguing except that the consequences are likely to be tragic. People do not give up their national identity because others order them to do so. This episode of the Irish and the Lisbon Treaty poses the following questions: What is the EU for? What will it do to obtain power? Is it arrogance, or cynicism, or mere lack of wisdom that is driving the leaders in Brussels to think it will be possible to rule an empire without the consent of the ruled?

It is a matter of historical record that everywhere in Europe the withholding of consent has always been the prelude to violence, and that is how its nations obtained their freedom in the past. "The leaders of the EU," in the words of a member of the public writing a letter to the Daily Telegraph , "look increasingly like the members of an overt conspiracy to subvert all democratic processes in Western Europe." Should European leaders continue to take no notice of the gap opening ever more widely between themselves and the ruled, mobs will one day close it.