The legitimacy crisis currently facing the European Union (EU) may be partly the consequence of human error or even the result of folly, but at the heart of the problem is structural breakdown. For decades, Europeans overlooked the high-handed and spendthrift ways of the Brussels technocracy out of trust, believing that, in spite of it all, over the long run the EU was an indispensable and irreplaceable engine of progress. The public repudiation of the proposed European constitution has shaken this complacent belief to the roots. No matter how emphatic the rejection, the episode is only a symptom of a deeper malady. The EU should no longer be imagined as a nascent political structure suffering teething problems: it is unsound and unraveling. The design is flawed, and the machinery needs repair. Coordination is lacking. There are no clear demarcations between its main institutions – theEuropean Commission, the European Council, and the European Parliament (EP) – or between these institutions and powerful affiliated bodies such as the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the European Central Bank. The relationship is equally blurry between the public and private spheres, both of which influence policy making. The dense thicket of snarled transnational structures that inextricably binds the twenty-five member states to Brussels is the cause of endless jurisdictional conflict between the central authorities and the states and among the states themselves. One never knows who or what can speak or act in the name of Europe.