Alan Bock Sr. editorial writer The Orange County Register abock@ocregister.com

For decades now, advocates of a "greater Europe" - to serve as a counterbalance to the United States, to secure greater prosperity for European inhabitants, to restore former glory, or perhaps to enhance the power of European Union bureaucrats in Brussels - has been a dream of European statesmen, leaders and the aforementioned Brussels bureaucrats.

That dream seems to be dying - or is it?

With the rejection by French voters of the proposed new EU constitution, the even more resounding defeat at the hands of Dutch voters, and the decision by the United Kingdom to postpone a scheduled vote, perhaps indefinitely, the prospect for European unity, at least in the form contemplated by EU leaders, has suffered a setback. Can European unity be reconstituted, perhaps in a different form? Would that be good for Europeans? What would be the impact on the United States and the rest of the world? Or would Europe be better advised to stick with economic integration and forget about further steps toward political unification?

EU leaders are scheduled to meet June 16-17. Instead of basking in the glory of successful referenda, they are likely to be asking themselves some hard questions about Europe's future.

In some ways the handwringing might be unnecessary. As Jeffrey Vanke, who teaches history at Kaplan University, recently wrote for the History News Network:

"Europe has had a constitution since 1951, and the 2004 Treaty of Rome [the formal title of what was called a constitution]contained only marginal changes in it. So the treaty's defeat will make little difference in European affairs, not to mention European history."

Long the home of bloody battles and wars, the most recent of which came to be called World War II, European leaders contemplating the wake of that great struggle - and faced with formal division due to Soviet occupation or control of much of Eastern Europe - diagnosed nationalism as the cause of wars and decided to opt for greater unity and cooperation.

Six countries formed the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, replete with a parliament and supreme court, to encourage economic harmonization. The six tried to form a European Defense Community in 1952, but French rejection stymied it. The 1957 Treaty of Rome formed the European Economic Community, or Common Market. The 1986 Single European Act further eased the free movement of goods and labor. The 1992 Treaty of Maastricht began the process of creating a single currency, the Euro, and created the European Union to coordinate foreign policy and immigration. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the EU has gradually taken in former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe.

Given opposition in much of Western Europe to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, European leaders have talked about forming a common military alliance that would raise a common European army.

While a skeletal structure has been erected, the will to divert taxes to a European military has not been there. Most European countries have advanced welfare states and strict labor laws that mandate short workweeks, long vacations, generous benefits and high taxes. European voters have been reluctant to give up these benefits so a Europe with a larger military could play a larger role on the world stage.

The reasons for French and Dutch rejection of the new constitution are complex and sometimes contradictory. Some of them had little or nothing to do with the complicated and oft-impenetrable prose of the 300-page "constitution." Many of them will hardly be congenial to Americans who want to view the referenda as a rejection of the Jacques Chirac who tried to throw roadblocks in the path of a United States determined to invade Iraq. As Philip H. Gordon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote after the French referendum, "If anything, that [Chirac's anti-Americanism]remains one of his few redeeming qualities in the eyes of many French."

Or, as Peter Zeihan, a senior analyst for European issues at Stratfor.com told me, "The joke in France now is: 'No. What was the question?'"

The states of "Old Europe" - France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and, to a great extent, the Scandinavian countries - have evolved over the years into advanced welfare states with high taxes and generous vacation, unemployment and retirement benefits. As might be expected, what many Europeans view as the stability of such a system has come at a price. Private companies find it almost impossible to lay off workers when business conditions change and the economies as a whole have become seriously inflexible.

The European model has yielded an unemployment rate of 8.7 percent in the EU as a whole (10 percent for the last decade in France) compared to 5.6 percent for the United States. The U.S. growth rate from 2003 to 2005 was about 3.7 percent, while Europe has limped along at about 1.5 percent economic growth.

Rather than attributing stagnation to the welfare states on which they are increasingly dependent, many Europeans prefer to see economic openness and the possibility of increased competition from more market-friendly "new Europe" countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic countries as the villain. In France it has become a cliche that reduced barriers to labor mobility could lead to "Polish plumbers" - a metaphor for larger fears - moving west and taking jobs from decent French and Germans who have little desire to change their ways by competing more aggressively.

Americans, as Charles Wolf, a senior economist at the Rand Corp., told me, tend to see Europe's problem as being not open enough to capital and labor mobility and freer trade. Many of the French who voted against the EU constitution think the problem is that Europe is not protectionist enough. Jacques Chirac tried to cast the constitution as a way to protect Europeans from "ultra-liberal Anglo-Saxon economics," but voters did not believe him. Many feared more integration would mean more openness to competition and globalization.

When they think of globalization, however, many European voters do not think of better access to cheaper electronics from Singapore or GPS systems from China, but more immigration from Islamic countries. Both France and Germany, which don't have the long tradition of open immigration the United States does, are having trouble coping with large numbers of immigrants from North Africa and Turkey who maintain their Islamic faith and tend to live in ghettos afflicted with poverty and crime.

While a French scholar like Gilles Kepel ("The War for Muslim Minds") can make a case that these immigrants can be successfully integrated into European life, to many European voters they don't look very assimilable just now. The prospect of admitting Turkey into the EU - which was not part of the constitution but was on voters' minds anyway - is also unsettling.

Many ordinary Europeans - as compared to internationalist elites - also saw a new constitution as a way to undermine sovereignty, turning over even more aspects of life to bureaucrats at EU headquarters in Brussels who already seem faraway and unaccountable.

Not everyone in Europe shares the view of Efraim Karsh, head of the Mediterranean Studies Program at King's College, University of London, who sees Brussels as "a gigantic imperial machinery that has largely eroded the democratic values and objectives for which it was originally established," but they know they already have little control over what Brussels does and feared a new constitution would mean even less control.

French voters and to a lesser extent Dutch voters also probably saw a "no" vote on a new constitution as a way to express dissatisfaction with their own national leaders, often for reasons that had little to do with European integration.

Perhaps the best outcome would be a gradual recognition in Europe that economic integration, at least as much as has been implemented so far, is generally a benefit, but that political integration is less desirable and less feasible.

Efraim Karsh writes, "There is nothing inherently ugly or violent about the desire of a specific group of people, sharing attributes including a common descent, a common language, culture, tradition and history, to live their lives as they see fit in a territory they consider their historical or ancestral homeland. Rather the real problem is imperialism, which has constituted the foremost generator of violence throughout world history."

One problem Peter Zeihan sees is that with the rejection of the constitution and the reversion to previous treaties, smaller countries will have more power in the EU and the larger countries - mainly France and Germany - will get restive.

Free trade and a common currency have generated economic benefits for Europe, though not as extensive as they would have been in the absence of welfare states that may well prove to be unsustainable over the long haul. If European leaders focus on safeguarding those benefits and abandon the dream of political unity that Efraim Karsh believes stokes imperial ambitions, they might just muddle through to a reasonably satisfactory future.

But that's far from inevitable. It will be fascinating - and not especially dangerous to the United States - to watch.