The EU Constitution ratification process failed to pass the democratic hurdles raised by the two referendums in France and the Netherlands. Differently to what had happened in former cases (Maastricht and Nice), member states abandoned the project and embraced an alternative one, the Lisbon Treaty. This created a first paradox: the comparatively most democratic process of EU constitution making was ruined by democratic means and this lead of a kind of "clandestine constitutional politics" in which the main concern was to avoid national referendums. The result, the Lisbon Treaty, did not have an easy passage and it had to circumvent the Irish negative referendum and a number of potential obstacles for its final ratification.
