On Sunday, French voters rejected a proposed European constitution. Tomorrow, Dutch voters will likely follow suit. European politicians, out of touch with their constituents, support the constitution. They confuse an expansion of E.U. governmental power with the creation of real European power.

American businesses look across the Atlantic and wonder if anything has changed. After all, the European Union is America’s largest trading partner. Does the failure of the constitution mean the unraveling of the E.U., with all of its regulations? The simple answer is no.

Throughout the 20th century, European taxes and governments grew. Europeans are the most highly taxed and heavily regulated people in the world. Not surprisingly, for most of the past century, Europe has grown more slowly than the more lightly governed America.

The puzzle of European economics is not that it works poorly but that it works at all. Despite the burdens of large government, Europe has successful businesses, both large and small. From finance to automobile manufacturing to pharmaceuticals to high fashion, European firms are competitive at home and around the world.

The great European political innovation of the 20th century was to tie together nations that had fought one another for millennia. More remarkable, the most intensively governed people in the world conceived of yet another layer of government to tax and regulate themselves. A European constitution would have enshrined the central government in Brussels.

American bonds to Europe are more than cultural. We import far more from the E.U. than from any other region, including China, and we sell far more to the E.U. Moreover, capital flows between the U.S. and the E.U. are even greater than the trade in goods. Those business ties will continue, with or without a European constitution.

Many American businesses see Europe as a land of commercial opportunities impeded by government protectionism, legal hurdles such as antitrust litigation, and expansive red tape. Boeing, Microsoft, much of the agricultural industry, and other American businesses have encountered legal difficulties selling goods and services in Europe. They are all too familiar with the current power of the E.U. government. No doubt, many European businesses have similar complaints about the American government.

An extraordinarily lengthy document drafted over many years, the proposed E.U. constitution would have formalized central power in Brussels.

For companies engaged in retail commerce across the E.U., such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, a centralized government might reduce the transaction costs of dealing intensively with 25 separate national governments. But most American businesses, having dealt for years with both Brussels and national governments, recognize that the growth of the former does not mean the complete demise of the latter.

At any given time, at least a few of the 25 countries do not subscribe to the protectionist measures and anti-American sentiments that periodically wash across Europe. With a stronger central government, those localized sentiments might extend more widely across all of Europe. Ironically, if exit polls are to be believed, many Frenchmen voted against the proposed constitution precisely because it would not provide enough protectionism.

Our founding fathers, reacting to an overbearing British colonial government, drafted a constitution that would ensure that the American government, particularly the executive branch, did not become too powerful. Contemporary European statesmen, in contrast, see overly powerful European national governments and merely seek to create an even more powerful E.U. government to supplant them.

Several countries including Germany have approved the E.U. constitution, but it is hard to see how it can move forward without France.

European constitutions may come and go, but business will go on as usual.

Mr. Furchtgott-Roth is a former FCC commissioner and president of Furchtgott-Roth Economic Enterprises. E-mail comments to hfr@furchtgott-roth.com.