Like people dazed by a storm that has pounded their home, the European Union and France are sweeping up the remains of cherished ornaments and family furniture after French voters rejected the EU's grand constitution.

The EU has been hurled into a crisis that threatens vital projects, could cripple its role on the world stage and forces it to face the taboo question: does the European public really want the European dream?

In France, meanwhile, President Jacques Chirac is locked in a bid to save his last two years in office from ridicule, and the first signs of civil war have erupted within the Opposition Socialist Party, bitterly divided by the referendum campaign.

The Netherlands is next up to vote, staging a non-binding referendum tonight that will, according to opinion polls, deliver an even bigger "no" vote than in France.

EU leaders are struggling to buy time as they figure out, before a scheduled summit on June 16-17, whether the ratification process should continue, even if to do so seems absurd, or whether the constitution should be scrapped and its acceptable parts cannibalised.

But the waves of Sunday's vote are already rippling far beyond the fate of the constitution itself. They are shaking the upcoming negotiations on the EU's six-year Budget plan, Turkey's bid to become a member and Europe's confidence for tackling external problems.

A worried EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, insisted yesterday that the union's international role must not suffer and begged Europeans not to plunge into "a zone of paralysis psychologically".

Previously just an economic bloc, the EU has sought to expand its global political role, casting itself as a potential handmaiden to peace in Middle East conflicts, negotiating an end to Iran's nuclear programme and taking the lead in tackling global warming.

"The EU is going to spend a lot of time and energy working out how to get out of this crisis, which will distract the leaders from the really big foreign policy questions," said Mark Leonard, an analyst with a London think tank, the Centre for European Reform.

In the mid-1990s, the Balkans war unfolded as the then 15-nation EU was focused on the Maastricht Treaty and monetary union, he noted.

As to what prompted France, a europhile and founder EU member, to reject the constitution, a common view is that many Europeans are in a visceral revolt.

They feel repelled by haughty, unaccountable elites that rule the roost in national capitals and in Brussels itself.

If this sense of deepening disconnection goes unaddressed, the vision of European integration - the process of an ever closer union that has been unfolding for half a century - could be destroyed, warn analysts.