Except for Newstalk ZB's morning host, Leighton Smith, I have never heard anyone predict the eventual disintegration of the European Union, and sooner rather than later.

Yet for years I have held the opinion that this unwieldy collection of different nations cannot survive as an entity and that the more additional economic, social and political connections that are made, the less likely it is to survive.

The resounding "non" in the referendum on the proposed EU constitution held in France this week is merely the first major breeze through the house-of-cards structure that is European "unity".

And at the time of writing it is expected that the Dutch, fiercely protective of the sovereignty of their damp little patch of dirt, will follow suit.

That the breach happened in France comes as no surprise, for the French are probably the most nationalistic, insular and xenophobic of all Europeans.

The court action to suppress courtroom videotapes by the undercover Rainbow Warrior killers, Mafart and Prieur, is simply further evidence - although none is needed - of the selfishness and arrogance of this insufferable race.

It would have been interesting if Germany had held a referendum instead of deciding the constitution issue in the Bundestag. But Gerhard Schroeder wasn't as silly as the doddering Jacques Chirac. He probably knew that a referendum would be doomed to failure in a country in which neo-Nazism flourishes mainly as a result of European Union racial liberalism.

And I wonder, too, what the results might have been had Austria and Italy asked their populations to decide. Greece, too, with Turkey knocking on the EU's door.

In Britain, which to its credit has remained more at arm's length from the EU than most, Tony Blair seems sure to think twice about the referendum planned for next year because there is nothing surer than that the Brits would deliver an even stronger "no" than the French.

How anyone can believe that this assortment of nations can form such an intimate relationship and make it last is beyond me, although I'm sure it makes perfect sense to the post-modernist utopianists who devised it and built it.

They seem to think that history can be ignored, that nationhood, race, ethnicity and culture developed and nurtured over thousands of years can suddenly be subsumed to a perceived "good".

They seem to think that in this New Age of political correctness, ancient rivalries - often virulent hatreds - can be overcome and forgotten as if they had never happened. The whole of European history says bollocks to that.