Europeans have spent a lot of time in recent years asking Americans how they could be dumb enough to make the same mistake twice in electing George W. Bush. But when it comes to sheer electoral crassness, it’s hard to beat what the Irish have just done.

absolutely
too many of my fellow Europeans don't have a clue about how important European union is for prosperity and for having influence in a global environment
nobody sells the advantages -- a good friend of mine who works in IT, an intelligent chap and I've never noticed that he's a raving nationalist, just an ordinary well educated and reasonably well paid bloke, just the sort of person who should understand the benefits of European integration and be trying to convince tabloid readers (fed a diet of Euro-sceptic misinformation for nearly 20-30 years) but no his status on Facebook was that he wished he had £10 million so he could buy everyone in Ireland a drink for voting no to the treaty

the Irish No vote was a victory for lies, bigotry, small minded nationalism, provincialism, insularity and anti-imigration and supported by intelligent decent people and I'm sure that a significant number of those who voted no are intelligent decent people -- it just seems that the contary case makes all the noise and drowns out and frightens those who should be making the case for being cosmopolitan, tolerant, open and richer (it's bizare that although Europe clearly makes us as Europeans more proserous as a whole that simple point gets lost -- the one point that should be easiest to sell, even to the more bigoted members of society) -- it all seems in the end to come down to the fact that it's easier to sell nationalism that cosmopolitanism -- I'm reminded of what Obama said about small towns and god, guns etc although I don't think it's all to do with economic hardship but rather people like to cling to certain traditional identities and when threatened; economically, by larger different cosmopolitan identities, threatened by the new and to them the strange (the outsider, the gay, the black, the garlic eater, the muslim), they retreat into tradional identities and sometimes those identies become even narrower. And if that process becomes too magnified demagogues arise.

The EU is politically flawed, it needs to be more democratic and more participatory. But the idea is good and the people who support the project have to be less afraid of making the case. Openness, tolerance, prosperity. Economic openness, social openness, embrace and adapt to change.

Op-Ed Columnist - Roger Cohen - The Muck of the Irish - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com