EU Constitution goes down in France... But why...?

a good friend with whom i reconnected yesterday after many years, someone who has always provided me with more than my minimum daily requirement of intellectual stimulation, offers some interesting and, i believe, pretty accurate thoughts regarding the defeat of the eu constitution in france and why it may well do so again in the netherlands... (bold and italics mine...)

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france says no, so will the dutch.........the undercurrent to all this is the reality of non christian members set to join the eu........i think the french were designated the "secular state" to undo things for awhile and create enough chaos to derail eu expansion to let the rest of the old europe figure out what to make of all the involuntary change underway.......by leveraging work and economic issues the french rejection could be presented as an economic and not a cultural/religious/immigration rejection of the impacts of the new constitution and the eu expansion plan.

supporting that view, i offer this story from amsterdam, although it's worth noting that nothing in the story connects back to the possible defeat of the eu constitution in holland...

The Sept. 11 attacks, although far away in the United States, had strong aftershocks here, exposing long-simmering tensions between conservative Muslim immigrants and the city's liberal traditions.

Many Dutch felt they now had a license to complain openly that the newcomers - from Morocco, Turkey, the Middle East - were changing their society for the worse, while the Muslims protested that they were being treated as aliens in their adopted country.

even with plenty of knowledge beforehand, i was unprepared for the depth of enmity between christians and muslims i encountered on my first stint working in the balkans... i am not at all convinced that will be lessened any time soon...

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