France's "non" marks just the beginning of the campaign

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French elections are usually decided by a hair's breadth margin – 50-point-something to 49-point-something. France's referendum on the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe was different – a resounding 55% "no" to 45% "yes", with a voter turnout of 70%. The comparatively low abstention rate was in marked contrast to the European parliamentary elections a year earlier in which only 42% bothered to vote. When the figures jump by that much, you know that Europe has at last become an issue.

It was, of course, a class vote. The only socio-economic group in which a majority
registered a “yes” was that of company managers and directors. Workers and salaried employees were solidly in the "no" camp, and a majority of socialists and Greens defied the official instructions of their parties and voted against. So despite the unanimous support of France's political class, the media and the financial elite, the people stood up and massively refused the constitutional project. European Commission Vice President Günter Verheugen reacted by saying "We must not give in to blackmail". So much for universal suffrage as seen by the Commission.

The Constitution and the future of Europe itself became the centre of the liveliest debate I've witnessed in France for decades. Families and friends practically came to blows over the correct interpretation of this or that article. Thousands of meetings were held all over the country in front of record audiences. I spoke at some of them where audiences ranged from a hundred in a small village 80 kilometres from Paris to 5,000 people in Toulouse. The atmosphere across the country was electric.

Naturally there were some Right-wing "no" votes. But even our worst enemies in the media were forced to recognise that the progressive pro-Europe "no" vote was by far the largest factor. After about two months of the campaign, a kind of tacit agreement emerged between the two sides that there was no point in accusing each other of "mixing" their views with those of undesirables – for every Le Pen or Philippe de Villiers for the "no" camp, there was a Berlusconi, Haider or MEDEF [the French employers' union] for the "yes". In the final stages, no one even mentioned the question of Turkey, because that issue was not the point of the referendum.

The point lay elsewhere. I believe people in France have understood a momentous
truth. We were being asked to choose between a Europe which would, in the fullness of time, ensure that we were all subjected to an American-style, neo-liberal model based on competition and the survival of the fittest, accompanied by huge inequalities; or that we had one final chance to defend a genuine European model of solidarity and social justice. It was the first time in the 13 years since the
Maastricht treaty was ratified that anyone had bothered to ask us what we thought, and we told them.

What was wrong with the Constitution? The full answer would fill a book, and indeed
I have just finished writing one that sets out to give the answer (Nous, peuples d'Europe, Fayard, Paris, Septembre 2005). Briefly, however, the Preamble to the EU's constitutional treaty says it all. Whereas the US Constitution begins "We the People", and just as all other national Constitutions are based on popular sovereignty, this one begins, "His Majesty, King of the Belgians...".

The people were absent from this text, as even Valéry Giscard d'Estaing ruefully recognised in an interview with Time magazine. The text was written by appointees to the 105-member European Convention and although many were parliamentarians, no one had elected them to this job. It showed.

The text was long and hugely complex. A genuine constitution should be understandable by the people it is intended to govern. It should be short [the US Constitution is less than 5,000 words] and confine itself to describing the executive, legislative and judicial powers, their separation and the checks and balances between them, as does nearly every other constitution in the world. This one perpetuated a Commission that is independent of the will of the people, and a Parliament that cannot even initiate legislation, much less levy taxes.

The Constitution went into enormous detail concerning economic policies, stressing
free market economics [78 references], competition [over 100] and stressed again and again the needs of capital over those of people. The "yes" side kept complaining that Part 3 of the constitutional treaty
didn't count, as it was merely a compilation of what already existed in earlier treaties. But that wasn't what the French saw. They didn't like what they read, whether or not it had been said before. Even if the policies set out in the Constitution's voluminous Part 3 had been more to my liking, I still would have voted "no". The only comparable document to go into such economic detail was the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union, written by the Politburo. Such policies may be good at certain times and in certain circumstances but should not become, as the phrase has it, "engraved in stone".

And this Constitution was, indeed, granitic. Revisions and amendments were rendered all but impossible. On defence and security policy, it subjected us forever to NATO and the will of the United States; it also required that we increase defence spending, while never specifying why. It made "reinforced cooperation" or agreements between some member states to go further and faster than others, virtually impossible. There was no provision for encouraging growth and full employment.

The Charter of Fundamental Rights [already proclaimed in Nice in 2000] created "no new obligations" and was not enforceable. Even if it had been, it promised only the "right to seek employment" or to work if you happened to have a job, but not, as in the French Constitution, the right to have work, which is also the basis for unemployment compensation. Cooperation on fiscal and social policies, at least in the direction of improving them, was made subject to unanimous vote, thus guaranteeing paralysis and downward "harmonisation" at best, the better to impose neo-liberal globalisation as the single rule.

That's for starters, but there are limits on the space I have and want to devote the rest of it to the future. Now that two founding EU countries, France and the Netherlands, have refused this Constitution, it is, according to its own rules, dead, no matter what Jean-Claude Juncker said after Luxembourg's approval. We therefore need to talk seriously, among Europeans, about what kind of Europe we want. This process has already begun, but the people will have to impose new policies as most governments will not propose them spontaneously.

How can we do this? The same way we won the battle for the "no" vote. Something like a thousand "collectives" sprang up all over France – they numbered political parties, trade unions, small farmers, associations like Attac, think-tanks and just plain interested citizens – to organise the thousands of meetings and provided counterinformation to the media barrage of propaganda. They helped people master the text and force their opponents to argue using chapter and verse – the best antidote to voting Yes. It's fair to say that the French will no longer be afraid of, or indifferent to, what ever the Commission may have in store.

Now the first order of business is to get rid of the Bolkestein Directive and the Directive on working time, once and for all. French representatives of the collectives met with Prime Minister Juncker's second-in-command in mid-June to present the EU presidency with a first list of demands. We called for a meeting of the Eurogroup to oblige the European Central Bank to change its
restrictive monetary policy and lower interest rates. We said we want a policy that will encourage full employment, a much larger budget for social policy and structural funds for the EU's 10 newcomer States; and an expansionary, job-creating strategy through guaranteed public borrowing to provide for
renewable energy and improved infrastructure.

We also want a moratorium on the General Agreement on Trade in Services at the WTO to keep public goods and services outside the marketplace and the outlawing of European tax havens. We want Europewide taxation and harmonised fiscal policies, a thorough reworking of the Lisbon Agenda with a genuine commitment to research and high-tech development. We have called, too, for meeting the UN targets on development cooperation.

In due course, we want a text that will give us genuinely democratic European
institutions, including a citizens' initiative different from the travesty presented under that name in the Constitution, and the possibility of "reinforced cooperation" in all areas. All this will take time, but it is not Utopian. If we are lucky, history will record that the French and Dutch votes spelled the beginning of the end for neo-liberalism and for the rule of globalised elites in Europe.

We possess something called the "European model". A remarkable report in 2004 by the UN's International Labour Office in Geneva, Economic Security for a Better World, has proven that its benefits can be objectively measured. Europe still provides a far more decent life to its citizens than, say, the United States, and although this model is under fire from all sides and would have been given an early burial by the Constitution, it is worth protecting and improving. Our "Plan B" is about taking another step in the history of human emancipation, and we believe the people will not allow their victory to be stolen from them.