Opinion/Mark Steyn: If you went to the theatre in London or New York during the 1990s, chances are you ran across Livent.
They were the big producers of the day, headed by my fellow Torontonian Garth Drabinsky, who spent the decade enthusiastically presiding over a succession of Broadway and West End musicals - Kiss Of The Spider Woman, Show Boat, Ragtime, Sweet Smell Of Success.
They all opened with a splash, got rave reviews and never made any money. But, somehow, Livent believed that if you put together enough flops they would cumulatively add up to one hit.
That seems to be the business model of the European Union - if you merge a lot of sclerotic economies, they'll add up to one dynamic blockbuster economy.
In fairness, Livent had one profitable production - the Canadian touring company of Phantom Of The Opera. Likewise, among the ramshackle provinces of the EU, Britain and Ireland remain relatively liberal and therefore functioning, economies.
In the long run, one Canadian road company can't prop up a bunch of expensive disasters on the Great White Way and a couple of tiny islands can't support a vast moribund continent. And, even if they could, the question in the end is whether they'll want to.
If ever there was an appropriate moment for some second thoughts on the European project, it has surely been this last fortnight or so.
To his credit, the Guardian's Timothy Garton Ash, a fully paid-up Eurofantasist, produced an article last week that read like a Steyn column circa 2002.
As he acknowledged to his - presumably discombobulated - readers: "It may not have escaped your attention that this analysis of European decadence bears a startling resemblance to that of American neo- conservatives and anti- Europeans, against whose crude caricatures I have so often fought." Alas, sometimes the crude caricature turns out to be more accurate than the sophisticated analysis.
But, while Garton Ash shows signs of emerging from his Eurostupor, the EU's political leadership remains blissfully untouched by reality. One thinks of the T-shirt slogan popular among American feminists: "What part of No don't you understand?" Pretty much every part it seems. The rhetorically deranged prime minister of Luxembourg continues to stagger around like a college date-rape defendant, insisting that all reasonable persons understand that "Non" really means "Oui".
Meanwhile, Jacques Chirac has reacted to his ingrate electorate's appalling lèse- majesté by appointing as French prime minister a man who is the very embodiment of the ruling elite's serene insulation from popular opinion - Dominique de Villepin.
Monsieur de Villepin has Byronic hair and writes sub-sub-sub-Byronic doggerel. Whenever he turns up on CNN, starry-eyed American Democrats send cooing e-mails wondering why their own vulgar republic can't produce a political leader who speaks English with such dash and élan -a veritable Rimbaud to Bush's Rambo.
So, after the voters gave their betters a bloody nose, Monsieur Sophisticate was at pains to reassure them that the contradictions of a pampered lethargic over-regulated welfare society could all be resolved through "Gallic genius": "In a modern democracy, the debate is not between the liberal and the social, it is between immobilism and action. Solidarity and initiative, protection and daring: that is the French genius."
Oh-la-la! C'est magnifique! C'est formidable, n'est-ce pas? All those fabulous nouns just waiting for a stylishly coiffed French genius to steer the appropriate course between the Scylla of solidarity and the Charybdis of initiative, between protection and daring, immobilism and action, inertia and panic, stylish insouciance and meaningless gestures, abstract nouns and street riots, etc, etc.
The French electorate has relatively down-to-earth concerns: crime, jobs, immigration. But for a man of letters that's all too dreary and prosaic compared with an open- ended debate between solidarity and initiative stretching lazily into the future.
President Chirac cut to the chase and sent Tony Blair an invoice. It was time for the United Kingdom to "make a gesture of solidarity for Europe" by renouncing its £3 billion annual rebate from Brussels.
Mr Blair got the better of that exchange: "Britain has been making a gesture because, over the past 10 years, even with the British rebate, we have been making a contribution to Europe 2½ times that of France. Without the rebate, it would have been 15 times as much as France. So that is our gesture."
The prime minister flipped a couple of digits Monsieur le President's way by adding that the reason for all the structural imbalance in the first place is because "the spending of Europe is so geared to the Common Agricultural Policy" - chief beneficiary thereof being a certain Fifth Republic with a genius for solidarity and initiative.
Some 40 per cent of the EU budget goes to the CAP, and Monsieur Chirac has no interest in making any gestures in that particular area.
In America, politicians indifferent to fiscal responsibility are routinely accused of running up debts our grandchildren will have to pay.
In the deathbed demographics of post-Christian Europe, there are no grandchildren to stick it to.
The delusion of the EU since its inception is that a country unwilling to discipline itself financially can instead stick it to the state next door - to Germany, to Britain, even to Ireland.
Europe's underlying problems - its collapsed fertility rate and ever greater dependence on a dwindling supply of Third World immigrants - are potential catastrophes that will require profound cultural change to correct. But you realise that there's no chance the ruling class will ever muster the comparatively modest political courage to tackle even matters directly under their control when the entire structure of post-war Europe is designed to indulge fiscal irresponsibility by spreading it around.
The European Union was supposed to be a Greater France bankrolled by a German sugar- daddy. Not everyone will wish to stay on a boat so obviously holed below the water-line: I doubt the euro zone, for example, will be fielding quite the same players by 2007. But, at the core of the European project, Chirac and de Villepin will totter on in defiance of reality.