Ireland’s referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, its latest attempt to pass a massive constitutional update, has produced a defeat. The rejection stops the EU from implementing its new constitution and forces the union to reconsider whether it can pass any expansion of the multinational government in a way that achieves unanimity:

Irish Justice Minister Dermot Ahern says substantial referendum returns show that Ireland has rejected the European Union reform treaty.

Electoral officials expect to confirm the result later Friday.

Ahern based his conclusion on tallies of votes produced nationally by election observers as well as early official returns.

They show the “no” camp ahead in the vast majority of Ireland’s 43 electoral constituencies, while pro-treaty voters were clearly ahead in only a few.

France and the Netherlands rejected the previous proposed constitution on various grounds. With Lisbon, the Irish had objected to changes that they believed would affect their sovereignty, especially on social issues such as abortion. The rejection of a larger, more powerful EU appears to be the common thread through all of these popular votes over the last few years.

Europe has to begin asking itself whether it really wants to be one nation of many ethnicities, or simply a trading system of sovereign nations. The results of its attempts to make itself the former keeps foundering whenever the people of the nations have their say in the matter. It’s all the more understandable with the Irish, who finally recovered their sovereignty just 80 or so years ago, after more than 700 years of foreign rule, and who do not wish to abandon their hard-won independence so quickly.

It would seem that the history of the various peoples of Europe would argue against the abandonment of national sovereignty towards which the EU process is clearly heading. The Balkans have moved in the opposite direction over the last twenty years, as have the Czechs and Slovaks. People want self-determination, not excessively bloated bureaucracies even farther out of their control. The EU experiment as federal government seems destined for failure.