- i don’t think it’s accurate to equate the recent right-wing populist parties and the anti- or alter-globalist movement, even though they, indeed, feed on the same ground and, sometimes, the same communicational methods. Wilders, de Villiers, Haider, A. Mussolini and the like reshape the bad-old xenophobic, protectionist, gross and violent speech of the nineteen-thirties in the guise of smiling, well-dressed executives. But the underlying ideology remains at best very conservative, at worse implicitly fascist. Anti-globalist movement are really very diverse (marxists and ecologists being an important devide), but many among them would agree that they do not seek the extinction of trade and international exchange in general: rather, a change in the purposes, methods, agenda of internationalism.

- on euro and inflation: Prices were actually marked up in France following the introduction of coins and notes in euros. Inflation statistics remained low, due to the coincidence of the (initially) deflationist effect of telecoms liberalisation. The new money was, in itself, a source of inflationist practices by shopkeepers.

On the real issue of what the ‘no’ meant:

- i truly think there was a problem with labelling “constitution” a text that not only described constitutional arrangements, but policy decisions, details, details of the details, to the detail of how the word “euro” should be orthographed in certain countries.

- more profoundly, i do not agree that, just because some recipes of free-trade and competition were agreed upon in 1957 and 1987, that they must have remained, unchanged, relevant in 2005. I actually think that French voters had enough experience of theirs effects on their own life to vote relevantly AGAINST their permanent upholding, their being carved in the stone of a constitution. A ride accross the french countryside or former industrial areas (or, for that sake, the British midlands and Wallonie and many a suburban neighborhood anywhere in Europe) demonstrate easily that Europe as it is doesn’t deliver; or, not at all for everyone.

In that sense, the analysis of Baudrillard on a self-serving, almost Brechtian behaviour of the elite (“if the people vote wrong, let’s just dissolve them”) makes sense: indeed, though people voted ‘no’, only a small measure of their concern is taken onboard in the “modificating treaty”, and business-as-usual still has good days in front of it.

The problem you face is to convince even a significant minority of the population that it is more than putty, brass and paint.

Look into the mirror: the problem for voters is not so much with the issue at stake or with anything else that is factually or reasonably connected to it, but, on a meta-level with not being in control of events…