Shanghai Daily | 上海日报 -- English Window to China News

POLITICAL leaders across Europe are shaking their heads in frustration and disbelief last weekend at Irish voters' veto of the latest European Union treaty. But many of their citizens aren't.

Ordinary Spaniards, Dutch, French and Britons who wished they could get the same chance to vote might also say "no" to the distant heart of the European Union.

"Spaniards feel Spanish, the French feel French, and the Dutch feel Dutch. We will never all be in the same boat," said Eduardo Herranz, a 41-year-old from Madrid, Spain.

Herranz said Europeans were right to feel alienated from bureaucrats in the EU base of Brussels, Belgium.

"You don't decide on anything, and you don't get to vote on anything they are talking about," he said of the average voter. "In day-to-day life, out on the street, the European Union is something very distant."

The emotional disconnection between EU commissioners and their 495 million citizens has never been more evident than in the rejection of the so-called Lisbon Treaty last Thursday by Ireland - long considered one of the most pro-European Union voices in the 27-nation bloc.

The complex treaty, a product of years of back-room negotiations, was meant to change EU powers and institutions in line with its rapid expansion into Eastern Europe. But like all EU documents, it requires unanimous approval to be ratified.

All other EU members are ratifying it only through their national governments, but Ireland is constitutionally obliged to subject all EU treaties to a popular vote. The unexpectedly strong "no" result announced last Friday should act as a veto.

But the EU's political establishment is already calling on all other member nations to keep ratifying the treaty through their governments alone - and calculating what it will take to make Ireland vote again.

Ireland's government played along with such a maneuver in 2002, when it staged a second referendum after narrowly rejecting a previous EU treaty. It haggled then for an appendix that emphasized Ireland's military neutrality, which was used to justify a second vote.