A quote from Daniel Hannan in The Spectator, 18 June 2008

Last month, […] I likened the EU’s leaders to the apparatchiks of the Comecon states who, having given up on persuading their electorates, sought compliance rather than consent, acquiescence rather than approval. Several people emailed me to complain that it was a tasteless parallel: the EU, after all, was an association of democracies. True. No one is suggesting that Brussels is about to take away dissidents’ passports or throw sceptics into gulags. But Euro-federalists, like Cold War communists, believe that their ruling ideology is more important than either democracy or the letter of the law. […] Small wonder that the communist parties of the former Soviet-bloc states led the campaigns to join the EU.

If you think I’m being too harsh, watch what happens next. First, there will be an attempt to bully Ireland into falling in line. Ratification will go ahead everywhere else in the hope that the Irish will obligingly lie down. When this fails – and, as an Irish friend put it to me during the campaign, ‘sure we didn’t fight off the might of the British empire just to be bossed about by the Belgians’ – the EU will simply implement the Lisbon Treaty.

To a large degree, this has already happened. One of the most contentious proposals in the text was the creation of a European foreign minister with attached embassies. Listening to the arguments of both sides, you would never guess that this is already in place. […] As with foreign policy, so with the other institutions that were established in anticipation of ‘Yes’ votes: the European Armaments Agency, the Human Rights Agency, the External Borders Agency. None of these has a proper legal base, but no one is proposing their abolition.

Lisbon would have made the Charter of Fundamental Rights directly justiciable, opening swaths of national life to the rulings of Euro-judges, on everything from family life to strikes. The Commission, the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have all declared that they will treat the Charter as if it were already legally binding, even though three electorates have now rejected the treaty that would have authorised it. The great bulk of Lisbon can be implemented through lawyerly creativity. And any disputes will ultimately be settled by the ECJ, which rarely lets the letter of the law stand in the way of deeper integration. […]

The leaders of the EU, in short, have resolved never again to consult their peoples. Public opinion, in their eyes, is an obstacle to overcome, not a reason to change direction.