Jerome a Paris:

Why the avowedly pro-EU people find it smart to support people whose sole goal is to destroy the EU as a political project I will never get.

I think you are getting very close to the central point this diary was trying to make: my frustration that avowedly progressive pro-Europeans were prepared either to do nothing or actually to make common cause with the most reactionary forces in Europe in a bid to destroy the political legitimacy of the EU still further - as a NO vote undoubtedly would.

I think the fundamental reason for this paradox is that we (on the Yes side) see the EU (for all its faults) as the best chance we have of reining in some of the worst excesses of the neo-lib project.

Those progressives on the NO side, on the other hand, see the EU as almost indistinguishable from the neo-lib project, and thus think they help to destroy the neolib project by further undermining the EU.  

(The concept of globalisation is sufficient fuzzy not to distinguish between global corporations and their political servants and global/regional political organisations like the EU)

The fallacy of this progressive position - in my view - is that they think they can replace the current EU with something better, whereas the people they are aligning with actual want to destroy as much of the EU as they can and replace it with unalloyed political nationalism allied to global capital.

Its the old divide and conquer routine.  Nothing scares global capital more than the prospect of more effective global political regulation.

My problem is:  If I cannot convince politically astute pro-European  progressives of this, what chance have I with popular sentiment in Ireland which is:

1. not as politically astute
   
2. has no great knowledge of the workings of the EU
   
3. Has no particular ideological orientation other than that we need jobs, investment etc, which allegedly global capital will provide
   
4. Is naturally inclined to be nationalistic and chauvinistic on the grounds that it favours more local control and feels more comfortable with a Government in Dublin which it can kick out of office rather than a more remote Commission in Brussels.

In this emotional context, the arguable fact the EU institutions have been more effective in securing peoples interests vis a vis global capital is almost irrelevant.  You are asking people to vote for an abstraction in Brussels rather than a more concrete reality closer to home.

It's going tobe a very tough sell...

notes from no w here

Maybe we're talking past each other, I meant Lisbon, not the Constitutional Treaty (Convention, and so on).