Czech RepublicIrish EU critic Anthony Coughlan has joined forces with Czech president Vaclav Klaus to pen a pamphlet attacking the European Constitution.
A right-wing Czech think-tank has distributed more than 40,000 copies of the pamphlet, entitled Say Your Yes or No to the European Constitution. Bookshops in Prague say that the 50-page volume is flying off the shelves.
President Klaus, one of Europe's best-known EU critics, praises Mr Coughlan in his foreward for his "real arguments instead of non-arguments".
"We could have done the analysis ourselves, but no one here is a prophet, so we favoured a text we regard as exceptionally successful and very easy to read," writes Mr Klaus, before putting forward 10 of his own arguments against the constitution.
"Members will only be able to use the authority left to them by the constitution and not the other way round, as was the original idea of EU integration."
Mr Coughlan, senior lecturer emeritus in social policy at Trinity College Dublin, restates arguments he made during his "No to Nice" campaign, such as on common defence and new voting rules. The constitution will "worsen the crisis of democracy at both EU and member-state level".
The constitution "enshrines a particular economic system based on an extreme neo-liberal ideology, which it seeks to clamp as a constitutional imperative on 450 million Europeans," he writes.
"What fundamentally inspires most [constitution proponents] is the old European dream of big powerdom, the intoxication of empire-building, of taking part in however small a way in running a superpower, while simultaneously freeing themselves from democratic control and political accountability to national parliaments and electorates domestically."
The Czech Republic has yet to announce whether the constitution will be put to a referendum.
"This pamphlet could have a huge influence on the large numbers of people who have yet to make up their minds," says Petr Mach, executive secretary of the CEP, the think-tank close to Mr Klaus which published the pamphlet.
Some political observers have dismissed the pamphlet as another rambling diatribe from Mr Klaus.
"Mr Klaus is known here as an agent provocateur," said Zdenek Zboril, a leading political analyst, "but his main problem is not his EU scepticism or realism, but that he writes and publishes too much. Thousands and thousands of grey words in the last 10 years. I don't like [former president] Vaclav Havel very much, but at least he had a great talent for articulation of ideas."