The European Union cannot go on like this. Whether the Lisbon treaty ultimately succeeds or fails, the Irish referendum will have taught us one thing: unanimity and uniformity are things of the past. The EU is now too diverse to expect all member states to ratify any given treaty or participate in all areas of union activity.

Member states have competing visions of the EU and are increasingly divided over what they are willing to sign up to. Is the EU to be mainly an ever-enlarging, borderless free market and security zone – as Britain, Scandinavia and much of central and eastern Europe would have it? Or is it to be more of a values-based community with identifiable borders that stop at Turkey, Georgia and Ukraine – as Germany, France, Austria and many other continental European countries would like?