As Europeans took stock Thursday of the charter's troubles, leaders and ordinary citizens in Turkey and across the former Soviet bloc worried that the crisis might conspire against their dreams of joining the EU.

Having worked tirelessly and against all odds to prepare for membership, many couldn't help but wonder whether Europe is coming apart just when they're getting their acts together.

This week's momentous repudiations by the Dutch and the French both founding members of the now 25-nation EU "shattered the very concept for a European Union," said Ivan Krastev, a political analyst in Bulgaria, which hopes to join with neighbouring Romania in 2007.

Bulgaria's independent Dnevnik newspaper echoed that bleak outlook, saying "the collapse of enlargement verges on national tragedy."

"We witnessed Europeans rejecting something that we are struggling to achieve," said Cetin Kargin, 41, a jeweller in Turkey. The mostly Muslim nation hopes to begin membership talks in October, but many Turks now worry that EU leaders will be too distracted to bother.

Across Eastern Europe, where eight countries joined the bloc a year ago along with Cyprus and Malta, and others have been scrambling to become credible candidates, the sense of frustration was palpable.

Spurred by dreams of unprecedented prosperity, stability and freedom of movement, EU candidates like Romania have spent the last decade constructing democracies and building market economies from scratch. Having invested so much, they have the most at stake.

Many reacted cautiously to the constitution's latest setback, widely seen as a backlash against the growing power of EU headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, and of the very expansion process that opened the club to the "new Europe."

The resistance to the treaty, whose backers believed could lead to a better-oiled economy and a higher profile for Europe internationally, "could influence the future development of the EU" by freezing enlargement, acknowledged Dmytro Svystkov, a spokesman for Ukraine's Foreign Ministry.

But the former Soviet republic "hopes that the EU's difficult internal reform will not have negative consequences for Ukraine's future membership," Svystkov said, adding that the EU's "attractiveness in the eyes of would-be members has not decreased."

In Turkey, it may work the other way.

Ordinary Turks tired of hearing that many Europeans don't want their Islamic influence in the EU, and mindful that the country's bid has fed the angst fuelling opposition to the constitution are losing interest in membership, analyst Duygu Bazoglu Sezer contends.