On Sunday night, shortly after the results of the French referendum on the European Constitution had become known, I called a friend in Paris to find out her reaction. My friend was of Italian-Jewish descent, raised in France, and American educated – in short, she was incurably cosmopolitan. Her judgment in a nutshell: “Sunday at 8:00 p.m. I turned on the television and saw Europe die.”

Her words may have been a trifle melodramatic. But they summarized well the outcome of Sunday’s vote. France’s fickle electorate had delivered a caput mortum to the idea of a politically unified Europe. Instead, the European Union will lumber along like a disoriented and wounded beast, pulled this way and that by its leading constituents, but lacking the capacity to arrive at autonomous and meaningful political decisions.

On Wednesday, the Dutch will have their say. If the opinion polls are correct, they too will vote “no.” The double defeat within a period of a few days will mean that, for the foreseeable future, Europe will be stuck in its current status as an economic giant and a political dwarf.

Political analysts have been quick to find fault with the provincialism of French voters, and they are not entirely wrong. One of the tragic aspects of Sunday’s vote is that, for the most part, voters used it as a pretext to voice their displeasure with the state of French domestic politics. Jacques Chirac has occupied the Elysee Palace for 10 lackluster years. France’s unemployment rate remains over 10% – more or less the same as it was in 1995 when Mr. Chirac began his first term as president. France is a nation with a long tradition of smallholder resentment at the arrogance and high-handedness of the political classes. In the 2002 presidential elections, this anger expressed itself in a stunning second-place finish for right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen. It bodes ill for Europe that today right wing populist parties like Mr. Le Pen’s xenophobic National Front – parties that viscerally oppose the precepts of tolerance that the E.U. favors – represent the largest political grouping in the European Parliament in Strasbourg. To judge by preliminary exit poll breakdowns and analyses, it seems that the same electoral contingent that, in 2002, shamelessly backed Mr. Le Pen or one of the various far left candidates combined forces on Sunday to ensure the success of the “no.” As one member of the European Parliament aptly warned last week: “The ‘no’ camp, the strange alliance of antiglobalization activists, communists and neo-fascists are opportunists playing a dangerous game [with Europe’s future].”

Yet, it would be misleading to foist all of the blame for Sunday’s setback on the political vindictiveness of the French lower middle classes. The E.U. is doubtlessly a noble political ideal. The problem, though, has been that for decades European political elites have done an execrable job of communicating the meaning of that ideal to the population in general. In essence, they have systematically shied away from addressing the hard questions. This week they paid a high price for their reticence.

In the first instance, the idea of Europe is a moral ideal. Postwar Europe, in a remarkable political turnabout, has systematically promoted the humane values of justice, toleration, and fairness. One can perceive these ideals in action in the European commitment to human rights – for example, in the rulings of the European Constitutional Court, which on several occasions has overturned the decisions of various member national courts in light of the aforementioned higher norms. They have also been in evidence in Europe’s staunch commitment to humanitarian intervention: for example, in conjunction with the American-led actions in Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999). One can also see these values at work in organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, which for nearly four decades has selflessly ministered to victims of some of the world’s most violent and predatory civil conflicts.

Historically, leading European politicians have shied away from a voluble public discussion of Europe’s meaning, irrationally fearing an embarrassing rebuff by their various national constituencies. Instead, since the European Union’s humble beginnings with the 1951 Franco-German Coal and Steel Community, political figures like Konrad Adenauer, Jean Monnet, and Robert Schuman have, in the first instance, stressed the E.U.’s potential economic benefits, as well as the advantages of defusing, via European integration, the perils of German nationalism. A perfect case in point is the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, also known as the Single Currency Act – the precursor of the 2004 Constitution. The Maastricht Treaty systematically avoided questions concerning European political unity. Instead, its backers elected to focus on the worthy, if prosaic, goal of monetary union, resulting in the adoption of the Euro in January 2002.

How should Americans react to Europe’s unfortunate political demise? With considerable sadness, I would hope. After all, during the last century, America and its European allies twice joined forces to defeat the totalitarian menace, in both its “brown” and “red” variants – no mean achievement. For a time, the fear surfaced that a united Europe, with 450 million inhabitants, might rival America economically. However, high structural unemployment in France and Germany, coupled with Italy’s deep-seated and persistent economic woes, make this an extremely unlikely eventuality. A politically united Europe would constitute a valuable source of geopolitical stability vis-a-vis (1) Vladimir Putin’s Russia; (2) a militarily revitalized China; (3) the volatile lure of political Islam in the Middle East. After all, a powerful ally is worth infinitely more than an anemic one.

Mr. Wolin is a professor of history and political science at the Graduate Center of CUNY.