“From this old continent, a new Europe is born,” declared the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, as European Union member states gathered yesterday at Lisbon to sign their new treaty. But the Lisbon Treaty is not the birth certificate of a new Europe. It is a rehash of the constitution that was rejected by the French and Dutch electorates two years ago. The bell will toll for the independence and democracy of Europe’s ancient nation states if the Lisbon Treaty becomes law.

For that to happen, all 27 national parliaments must ratify the treaty. Using the excuse that it no longer calls itself a constitution, and lacks the symbolic trappings of an official European flag and anthem, hardly any member states are this time risking a referendum. Only Ireland is giving its voters a direct veto over the Lisbon Treaty; the Irish electorate has never yet bitten the hand that subsidized it for so many years.

This time the only country that just might derail the Lisbon Treaty is also the only one that has an unbroken tradition of common law, parliamentary sovereignty, and national independence — namely, Britain, where the Lisbon Treaty, like almost everything else that emerges from the smokeless rooms of Brussels, is unpopular. Most opinion polls indicate that if the government were to hold a referendum on the treaty, it would lose.

Prime Minister Blair promised just such a referendum on the constitution. Now Prime Minister Brown is trying to wriggle out of that commitment, even though the Lisbon Treaty is substantially the same as the constitution. So eager is Mr. Brown to distance himself from the treaty that he failed even to turn up for the signing with the other 26 E.U. leaders yesterday. He slunk into Lisbon later in the day to add his name to the document privately, out of sight of the cameras.

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There are those on this side of the Atlantic who reckon the whole scheme is a bid to create in Europe a rival of America — in trade and diplomacy, if not in military might. That is not, and has never been, our worry and, in any event, is as doomed today as it ever was. But the signing at Lisbon is, for those of us who have been following this drama over the past generation, a moment of sadness. We have long placed our hopes in the marker Prime Minister Thatcher laid down in 1989, when she went to Bruges, Belgium, and declared: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level.” She wanted Europe to be what she called “a family of nations” whose members relished their national identity no less than their common endeavour. We’d like to think that her words will help Britain through the coming fight over ratification.