The Museum Boijmans van Beuningen is a majestic building, quite at odds with Rotterdam’s modernist blocks and edges. I had gone there to see an exhibition of Salvador Dali’s various contributions to multimedia and mass culture: his collaborations with Bunũel and Hitchcock; his drawings for a proposed Disney animation, Destino (now fully realised as a short film); and his astonishing set and costume designs, inspired by his love for Wagner, for the concept opera Tristan Fou. The Museum has gone to great lengths to promote It’s All Dali. The floor of the courtyard has been painted bright pink, and a flashing neon ‘box office’, especially constructed for the exhibition, sells tickets for the extravaganza. Inside, Dali’s love of kitsch is obvious in a trophy cabinet full of impossibly garish postcards he collected and sent to friends such as Federico Garcia Lorca, and which he celebrated as the apotheosis of modern art. Despite Dali’s virtuosity, the exhibition left me cold. The daring dives into the ridiculous and the improbable, the tentative sketches of the inane: it is quite overwhelming to be in a room solely dedicated to the random outpourings of one man’s mind over a lifetime. The work is often so starkly unadorned and yet so fluid, so awash with meaninglessness and space, that I left the exhibition recalling John Updike’s recent comment in The New York Review of Books that ‘surrealism is the natural, instinctive pictorial mode, and both abstraction and realism are academic refinements’.

Compared to the hum and hysteria of It’s All Dali – housed in one enormous room in which video clips and audio excerpts play on endless loops – the rest of the Museum is serene and uncluttered, its small rooms quiet and largely empty of visitors and tourists. Except, that is, the crowds that surrounded De Toren van Babel, who examined its detail and listened intently to the explanations of various tour guides. Like the National Gallery of Victoria, the Museum currently has on loan a number of works from Amsterdam’s more famous Rijksmuseum, which is undergoing prolonged renovation, but it was Bruegel’s work that attracted the greatest interest. John Berger has written that in the history of painting one can sometimes find strange prophesies. Thinking of Europe and of the gloom so many express about its future, I wondered whether the crowds – Dutch and foreign alike – saw in De Toren van Babel a distant analogy to the recently failed Constitution for the European Union (EU), rejected so decisively in France and the Netherlands.

The myth of Babel, like so many Biblical stories, stands for many things. In their recent book, Occidentalism (2004), Ian Buruma and Avashai Margalit point out that enemies of cosmopolitanism and Enlightenment have drawn succour from the Babel parable, seeing in it the futility of any attempt at civilisational fusion. Many see the No vote as a victory for such enemies. In the Netherlands, it is frequently said that the Dutch capacity for tolerance and openness has been shrouded by the 2004 murder, by an Islamic fanatic, of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh. Geert Wilders, a politician known for his anti-immigration bigotry, toured the country under the slogan ‘The Netherlands Must Stay’, and, just weeks before the vote, a neo-Nazi group had marched through a suburb of The Hague, ranting of the coming apocalypse when Turkey is admitted to a borderless Europe.

Bruegel’s painting, though, is not of the Tower’s rejection but of its beginnings, portraying the industry and intricacy of its design. The hundreds of workers are many levels above the ground. Rather than any fear of an Islamic Europe or of hordes of immigrants, the Dutch I spoke to before the vote were more concerned about the bureaucrats of the EU perched high above the citizens, presiding over their grand design and driving forward with integration, hammering deafly away. Many echoed the words of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a member of the European Parliament, who said before the vote: ‘[T]he feeling of the people is that we want to say no to what exists to prove that we exist.’ The Dutch government made no serious attempt to inform its citizens of the meaning of the unwieldy and inelegant constitutional text, which, despite its thicket of rights and obligations and declaration that Europe is a ‘special area of human hope’, has seemed distant from their concerns and aspirations. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the quixotic architect of the Constitution who warned against distributing the entire text to voters because they wouldn’t understand it, now says that those who voted against the Constitution were not behaving rationally. The text reproduces this sort of condescension, the preamble proclaiming that the people are ‘grateful to the members of the European Convention for having prepared this Constitution on behalf of the citizens and states of Europe’.

The evening before the Dutch referendum, I was drinking in a lively pub in the centre of The Hague. The Dutch strike up conversations with strangers in bars all the time, so I decided to ask a few locals about the upcoming vote. ‘Is tomorrow a big day for you?’ I enquired of a student in his late twenties. He looked blankly at me, and smiled when I told him I was talking about the European constitution. ‘Oh, that,’ he said with a mild shrug of his shoulders. ‘Nobody really cares about that.’ He knew that the Constitution would create a European foreign minister, but not much else; he had not bothered to read the ‘condensed’ version that was distributed to voters. Nearby, a balding young man named Cornelis was going to be voting No. I asked him whether the murder of Theo Van Gogh had had any influence on him or his friends. He grew passionate. ‘This is nonsense, all created by the media,’ he said. He was equally appalled by the arrogance of Brussels officials who proposed a re-vote if the Constitution was voted down. ‘This is like something out of Brecht, seriously.’ He was originally in favour of the Constitution because he believed it would give the Netherlands a greater say in Europe; but the prospect of a re-vote had convinced him to reject it. ‘It’s almost like they want us to say no,’ he said, looking into his beer. ‘If we don’t want it, they’ll have to accept it.’