The institutional uncertainty ensuing on the fiasco of the Constitutional Treaty and its ratification referendums in France and the Netherland in 2005 has triggered a deep crisis in the integration project. Above all, this has affected the kind of treaty put for ward since the end of the last century, especially by what has become known as the French-German Axis. The first symptoms of the coming crisis were detected in the process of ratifying the European Union Treaty, as the distance grew between the public opinion in some of the biggest Community members and the European integration project. This article analyses some of the causes for this distance and the close correlation it has with divergences between the European political elites in their definition of the project that should serve as a backbone for Europe, in which many different political cultures and traditions coexist, whose contrasts have been accentuated with recent enlargements to the countries from the old Communist block.
