[rsynnott]

The Lisbon Treaty was, in practice, a repackaging of the earlier "EU Constitution". In general, people seem fine with the EU behaving more like a single country, as long as it doesn't _represent_ itself that way. Most people, say, don't have a problem with the Working Time Directive (which is quite a country-ish thing to do; there are actual countries with less unified employment rules than the EU) but would be a lot less comfortable with cosmetic stuff (like calling the Lisbon Treaty a constitution, even though it clearly is one).