Upon its signing in December 2007, the long-anticipated Treaty of Lisbon wasceremoniously heralded as ‘provid[ing] the Union with a stable andlasting institutional framework’ and as requiring ‘no change inthe foreseeable future’. There was undoubtedly a pervasive sense ofrelief and accomplishment amongst European leaders. The then–PortuguesePrime Minister Mr José Sócrates stated that ‘what we aredoing here is already part of History. History will remember this day as a daywhen new paths of hope were opened to the European ideal’. EuropeanCommission President José Barroso was perhaps more cautious, but hisspeech on ‘The European Union After the Lisbon Treaty’ revealed aconsiderable degree of satisfaction with what had been achieved in Lisbon, whichhe summarised as ‘improv[ing] the Union's capacity to pursue one of itscentral tasks: to shape globalization’. This was surely a far cry fromthe overly optimistic comments made by Mr Giscard d’Estaing, who in 2002had famously predicted that the EU Constitution would have served Europe‘for at least 50 years’, but enough to remind ourselves that theadoption of the Lisbon Treaty was celebrate with more fanfare thanfado. Fado here refers to the rather sober, possibly sadPortuguese folk music. We would avoid any translation, certainly any literaryone.