Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

But on May 29, 2005, the constitution was rejected by popular referenda in France and then, in June, in the Netherlands. Left-wing hostility to the promarket character of the EU and nationalist hostility to Brussels united to deliver solid majorities against it. It was a profound shock. The permissive consensus was dead. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the constitution, popular democracy had asserted itself and Europe’s elite were left in disarray.54 Given the reality of increasingly close economic and financial integration and the extension of the EU to Eastern Europe, the project of reorganizing Europe could not simply be abandoned. A substitute had to be found. If a true constitution was no longer a viable proposition, Europe would have to proceed by the tried-and-tested formula of intergovernmental treaty. This gave a key role to Germany, and from November 2005 this meant Chancellor Angela Merkel.