Today, as the peoples of Europe blink with amazement at last week’s momentous referenda, the political elite of the continent are mulling over their options.  The bottom line takes just six words to summarise: don’t let the British change things.

In Berlin tonight Chirac and Shroeder – one who challenged his people to consent to the Constitution and lost, and the other who dare not challenge them at all – must contemplate the awful cost of political failure.

… it hardly helps that Britain, the awkward party in the EU’s ménage à trois of leading states, is the beneficiary of the French and Dutch “no” votes and takes over the six-month presidency from Luxembourg next month.

As seen from Paris, a prosperous Britain now lords it over an EU in which most of the 25 members subscribe to the “Anglo-Saxon” free-trade model and reject the protective “Gallo-Rhinish” system which hobbles France and Germany.

The two leaders of “old Europe” share one goal — to suppress the British in a post-constitution Europe.  Der Spiegel Online said, “If the Franco-German couple breaks up, Great Britain will be handed Europe on a platter.”

… with their economies in need of oxygen from the EU’s more prosperous members, Berlin and Paris are unlikely to try to resurrect “plan B”. This was the scheme to create an integrated inner core of founding states if Britain shot down the constitution.

No one dreamt that the culprit would be France. “It would be unthinkable to try to lock ourselves into a fortress while keeping Britain, the most prosperous big nation, on the outside,” a French centre-right party leader told The Times.

“Enlarged Europe can never again be run by a Franco-German directorate.”

Meanwhile, speaking in Messina, Sicily, EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso appealed to EU leaders to

… to regroup around European values, to seek to build a dynamic consensus for a Europe which is able to adapt to the new challenges of globalisation

… What I think is crucial is that, whatever they do, they react together and that they avoid unilateral decisions - I am convinced a consensus is achievable.

This is Barroso’s second warning in three days to Tony Blair and Jack Straw not to cancel a UK referendum.  On Thursday  he told reporters, “What I am asking for now is that political leaders, in particular government chiefs, not take individual or unilaterial decisions.  I ask political leaders to show responsibility, to show caution.”

There isn’t much chance he will be heeded in Downing Street.

Think for a moment what it is that a national leader prizes above all else as he contemplates stepping down from power?  Legacy, of course … heritage … a lasting mark on history.  There are few politicians of whom this is more cravenly true than of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.  And yet until just a few days ago it seemed that this, his towering desire to carve out a leading role for Britain in the development of “Europe”, was lost to an irredeemably Eurosceptic public.  They would never allow him to claim his rightful place, as he saw it, among Britain’s great statesmen.

In the space of three days a nee and a non have totally changed all that, and presented the possibility, with Britain’s Presidency of the EU passing into his hands on July 1st, of imparting a new and distinctively Anglo-Saxon direction to the Union.  History beckons for Blair after all.  Everything is to play for.

No surprise, then, Gordon Brown has doused his smouldering resentment of the Prime Minister and, for now anyway, called off the dogs in the hope of an early Blair departure from No.10, albeit wreathed in glory.  No surprise either that Europe Minister Denis MacShane, pontificating after the French vote, was already excitedly talking about new thinking and a new way forward.

It was always a mistake to call a Treaty a constitution. But a constitution needs the confidence of the people and powerful, united leadership. Europe lacks confidence and effective leadership today so it was not a propitious time to hold plebiscites on the new Treaty. There may be some who hope this Treaty can be made to fly but it would be an insult to France and her citizens to say the Treaty they reject will continue on as a dead man walking. We will have to begin again.

Political-constitutional advances have to be based on economic and social confidence. Until Europe accepts the need for reform it will be hard to move forward to our common wish to see Europe as a powerful actor for peace and democracy in the world.

Many governments of smaller countries did not like this constitution which eliminated the right of each country to have an EU Commissioner and brought in a powerful figurehead president of the European Council.  We must take a pause see if new ideas and leadership can emerge for the European ideal. The language of the 1980s and 1990s is now history. We need a new, younger generation of pro-European leaders to emerge from the shadows of yesterday’s men.

The French Non is a symptom of a deeper European crisis - the failure of adapt to the new economic and social and environmental order in the world since the end of communism and the arrival of open trade called globalization.

If these straws in the wind point to where they seem, British Euroscepticism – or, at least, that part of it built on enmity to a Federal Superstate under Franco-German domination – may have the wind taken out of its sails.  That will be a typically Blairite coup.  In response, a more substantial, political analysis of “Europe” may be required to replace the sceptics’ current reliance on jingoism and the survival of the nation state.  Judging from the complete failure of British Conservatives to formulate any kind of distinctive reply to New Labour in eight long years I don’t hold out much hope.