European Union

In this case it's an acronym coined by "economic analysts" to describe the European countries that have been hardest hit by the recession: Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain.

Now, I happen to be Irish, but I'm not particularly nationally-minded, so on one level it doesn't bother me all that much. However, when you consider who these "economic analysts" are, and what their role has been in the crisis affecting Greece, it's a different story.

Irish voters delivered a major blow to the plans of Europe's rulers and the Irish political establishment by voting against the Lisbon Reform Treaty on 12 June. Supporters of Lisbon have been quick to try and frighten the Irish public with the consequences of their No vote - a continuation of the strategy of the Yes side during the campaign.

Europe In Crisis' has been a regular fallback for headline writers over the decades. But now, after the referendums in France and the Netherlands, the European Union really is in crisis. Various factors have gone into the making of this crisis, some of which have been in the foreground of the debate on the proposed European Constitution - for example, the implications for the EU of enlargement to incorporate East and Central Europe.

Revolt against the elites

A joyful No.' This was how dissident Socialist Party deputy Jean-Luc Mélenchon summed up the remarkable campaign that has developed against the proposed constitutional treaty for the European Union, the subject of a referendum in France on 29 May.

Mélenchon was speaking at a 6,000-strong meeting organised by the French Communist Party in Paris last month. It brought together as broad a platform of speakers from the left as any meeting held in France over the past decade.

Barely a week after elections to the European Parliament delivered a stinging rebuke to government parties - with the largest parties in 23 out of the 25 EU member countries suffering a drop in their share of the vote - ministers from these parties agreed the text of a 330-page EU constitution. It provoked the right wing press into apoplectic jingoism, which Tony Blair countered by wrapping himself in the Union Jack and boasting of 'red line' British issues defended from the continentals.

The row between Poland, the biggest of the new entrants, and Germany, its neighbour and biggest trading partner, led to talks over the proposed European constitution collapsing in acrimony.

We have come a long way since the Tories seemed to have a monopoly on being torn apart by arguments over the euro and Europe. Labour's official policy is that it will call a referendum and then argue for entry if it is 'in Britain's economic interest to do so'. The problem is that this supposedly 'economic' judgement on the five tests is in fact also about politics. And there are three deep splits behind the reluctance either to decisively reject the euro or to leap into the unknown of a referendum.