Writing about Europe's future is like writing about the future of the Western Hemisphere.
Let us focus on France.
There are many good signs in France.
Here is one: since the introduction of the Euro, and with more flexible lending available from the expansion of banks and competition from across Europe, real estate values have surged dramatically. That means that the private wealth of individuals in France, where 62% of people own their own residences, has grown quite significantly.
Now, France does not yet have the suppleness of mind that allows the French to comfortably take out second mortgages on their homes and use this money to start businesses (or to speculate in more real estate). This is an American phenomenon. The French objective is, and is likely to remain, the ownership of one's own home unencumbered by debt. French people dislike debt rather intensely, when compared to Anglo-Saxons, and for this reason there is less leverage in the overall economy.
Nevertheless, Euroization has had a dramatically good effect on the personal wealth of French people, by expanding the value of their homes.
Therefore, the Euro will not be going away.
The "Non" on the referendum prevents an undemocratic European bureacracy from gaining more power, but it does not destroy the Euro.
The Euro will remain. France will keep that which the French consider to have been useful: the Euro, but reject that which has not been favored: closer political integration under bureaucratic control.
There are other good signs in France. The center-right government has been unpopular, but it has reformed labor law, allowing for flexible hours within the contours of the 35 hour limit. Overtime is also allowed more flexibly. The 35 hour rule stands as a symbol for the socialists, but the government has enacted a regime of derogations expansive enough to provide business and workers the sort of flexibility they both have said they desire.
The government has also increased the co-pay regime on health care, bringing the national insurance system into better alignment with fiscal reality.
These things are all good, because they change things at a structural level.
French population growth continues to be robust, and growing populations both make the social charges of the future easier to bear, as well as allow the economy to expand.
A paradox of the political paralysis that will descend on France now is that the subsidiary sources of national movement: businesses and families and private associations, will have greater room for maneuver. This will further the progress towards a supple economy, even as everyone complains and worries that things are falling apart because the government is weakened at the center.
Taken altogether the French future, seen through the haze of confusion and political turmoil looks cautiously optimistic.
The future of the Western Hemisphere lies in the hands of the New World, not Old Europe, whose inevitable fate is to become Eurabia.
The political establishment must therefore move on to its next excuse: people are not voting against Europe, but against globalisation and market economics.
It isn't exactly opaque even this far across the water what the reasons for rejection were. The political establishment can use any excuses it likes; the people have spoken, and that's the way it ought to be.
I've read this before, perhaps from you. I also have read in many more places that the French population is in steep decline, in line with the rest of European non-Muslim populations. Europe is being Islamicized, with immigrants paying the taxes necessary to support the aging population.
The center-right government has been unpopular, but it has reformed labor law,
My impression of this "center-right" is that the term in an American sense is useless. It is not centrist in the sense in which we understand centrism. John Kerry is a French centrist.
...allowing for flexible hours within the contours of the 35 hour limit. Overtime is also allowed more flexibly. The 35 hour rule stands as a symbol for the socialists, but the government has enacted a regime of derogations expansive enough to provide business and workers the sort of flexibility they both have said they desire.
These are pure rationalizations that do not address core inefficiencies. They are pretty words, e.g., "a regime of derogations expansive enough to provide business and workers the sort of flexibility they both have said they desire", but they reveal, perhaps, myopic Francophilia steeped in wine rather than logic. Flexibility in the use of high-wage inefficiencies will not build competitive resolve into a workforce. If it were not so obviously silly, it might be believable.