If that appeal is becoming threadbare an immediate switch to a completely factual discussion will always cause a backlash as voters will realise that they have been lied to.
You cannot have it both ways.

- A “yes” voter…

But precisely that drives many. If you take this vote as an expression of the priority of national identity over the european identity than you better go and accept the fact as it is. You want to presuppose the result.

So in a peculiar way you are asking voters to prioritise the cognitive over the affective.

You always do. At least when it matters.

I don’t know, at least we’d know how to interpret the results. I still don’t really know what the French vote means. My impression as the day goes on, is that Sarkozy is going to be the powerhouse in the new French government. So the French get a new government comitted to economic liberalism (which is fine by me), but is that what they voted for?

When I say abstract, I mean that the EU is a kind of meta problem, given that most EU citizens are focused on their national identity, and not their european one.

Those who are focused on their european rather than national identities tend to be intellectuals.

What I mean is that in this sense the EU is a kind of ‘meta problem’. It is about the class of classes, which you tend to reason about, and most people don’t like to focus on this type of problem, they would rather focus on members of the class, like the fact that coffee got to be more expensive after the ‘Teuro’ was introduced.

Also belonging feelings, on the affective level, tend to be national. So in a peculiar way you are asking voters to prioritise the cognitive over the affective. If this is the case, it is going to be hard, uphill work, however simple the text itself is. Sorry if this sounds like a load of pretensious intellectual nonsense. It probably is.

I regret nitpicking your English, but this sounds like the Christian Democrats wanted a turnout of 60%. In case people misunderstand, the CDA wanted a “yes” or a “no” of 60% or greater before they’d take the result seriously. This has now been revised down to 55%.

To your list of No themes, I’d add the complaint that the Dutch pay by far the most into the EU. I wouldn’t have said animal rights was at all a big issue. The Party for the Animals have got a lot of posters up but that doesn’t mean people are paying much attention to them. Same goes for the Polish Plumber.

Edward, I agree with Guy on the referendum topic being explainable. A lot of people complained it was too complex but, then again, national elections cover even more ground. Both campaigns started too late. Voters started looking at irrelevant topics partly because of the lack of information.

The campaigns were also very poorly managed. When the politicians finally did start talking, they put out a lot of contradictory information and panic stories. There were endless statements like, “the Constitution is bad for the environment.” “No! The Constitution is good for the environment”. The voters didn’t know who to believe.

By the time the shouters had grown hoarse and a factual debate started to emerge last week, it was too late. Voters did not have time to inform themselves even if they were so inclined. And that’s the other thing, despite our founder status and usually very pro-European attitude, most people plain aren’t interested in Europe.

1. If a lay person of normal intellegence cannot understand a constitution, that in itself is a damning fact.

2. What exactly is the issue? When we consider the implications for the Euro, relations to China and any number of issues we will never agree on priorities. In fact we would come to the conclusion that the future is unpredictable. For the voters picking their reasons is as legitimate as for anybody else and better than loyalty to a political party, which would be the alternative. This is only in the smallest part about the actual text or mechanism of the constitution.

3. Why would abstractness be a problem? On the contrary, having a referendum about very concrete things like the tax on coffee would be rediculous.

Turn-out looks like it is going to be high - well, higher than for the last European elections when it was 39%. The last poll last night showed the gap between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ was narrowing fast, but probably not fast enough for a ‘yes’ outcome.

Didn’t Jeremy Irons already make the film :).