Current polls show that French voters have rejected the European Union constitution. If that's true--and we all remember the hours of fun our own exit polls provided on November 2nd--for some thoughts on what that vote entails, click on this very detailed InstaPost. For some thoughts on what the EU as a whole means, check out this great Mark Steyn piece in England's Spectator, in which he writes:

Permanence is the illusion of every age, but it’s especially powerful in our time, reinforced by electronic media and other marvels that make ours much more of a present-tense culture than that of our grandfathers or great-great-grandfathers. That was the somewhat self-congratulatory message of the VE Day anniversary: 60 years ago, the Germans were operating a vast bureaucracy created to process the mass murder of Jews; the rest of the Continent was at each other’s throats. Now a bare half-century later Europeans live in harmony, spending so much on cradle-to-grave welfare that their decrepit militaries couldn’t invade each other even if they wanted to, which, given that it would cut into their two months’ paid holiday a year, they don’t. True, the Germans are now as obnoxiously pacifist as once they were aggressively militarist, but who can argue that if one has to err in one direction or another, today’s isn’t preferable?

So ‘Europhiles’ say to the moment, ‘Linger awhile! so fair thou art!’ That’s what the European constitution boils down to — an attempt to freeze the moment, to make time stand still in a permanent EUtopia so fair it should be constitutionally required to linger eternally. Virtually the entire European governing class has made no useful contribution to the French and Dutch referendum campaigns except to insist that this moment is for ever — or as the Netherlands’ foreign minister Bernard Bot reprimanded his ingrate electorate, ‘You have to understand the nature of the times in which you live.’