The credibility of Ireland’s already weak government will be on the line when it puts the Lisbon Treaty to a second referendum later this year.

Ireland’s EU partners have bent over backwards to give the country a wish-list of legal guarantees, including a pledge that each member state will still be able to nominate a European commissioner once the treaty is ratified. After the guarantees are polished and signed off, ministers will begin preparations for a new poll, which most observers expect will be held in October.

Photograph: Reuters

The stakes are high: a “Yes” vote will probably return the EU to what was the natural order of things, the re-jigging of its institutions every few years to cope with a changing world. A “No” vote would finish the treaty off and force the EU into weirder, wackier ways of integrating.

Worse for Ireland: history (and its partners) would remember it as the country which killed off the EU’s decades-long pattern of integration-by-grand treaty.

How did Ireland get itself back into this position? It took the country two referenda to ratify the Nice Treaty, one in June 2001, the second in October 2002. Given the sheer amount of pointless turmoil which these polls caused Ireland’s society and its foreign policy at the time, future historians will struggle to explain why so little was done to prevent a reoccurrence last June. Indeed, the ongoing drama to ratify the Lisbon Treaty shows uncanny parallels with Nice.

First, as with Nice, largely rudderless politicians and well-meaning civil society organisations found themselves out-thought and shouted down by a contradictory cabal of conservative and leftist populists.

Second, as with Nice, a single person – not previously well-known – has come to embody the No camp. In the case of the Lisbon Treaty, this is Declan Ganley, the slick but unknowable businessman leader of Libertas, a think-tank-cum-political party. With Nice in 2001, it was Justin Barrett, an anti-abortion campaigner, who later came unstuck when he was photographed addressing Germany’s extremist National Democratic Party (NDP).

Third, in both cases, major world events between the first and second votes served to change radically the mood music of the second debate.

In 2001, these were the attacks of September 11 and the effects of the bursting of the dot.com bubble the previous year. From 2008 to the present, the war in Georgia and especially the global economic crisis, in which Ireland is faring particularly badly, have changed the context. Lastly, in both cases the treaty at issue......