Brian Friel once feared Ireland could become "a shabby imitation of a third-rate American state". Mind you, without decent roads, cheap petrol and a summer, we should be safe enough. Then again, if the price of the roads, the petrol and the weather is the death penalty, a barbaric gun culture, obscene obesity, shameful infant mortality rates, vile TV, "football" in crash helmets, Jerry Springer and an atavistic hatred of the very concept of government, we're better off in our traffic jams under 40 shades of grey.
Yet Friel's fears are not groundless. Disgraceful public health care, vacuous market worship and the recent paltry turnout of voters in Ireland (and Britain) are typical of third-rate US states. Fair enough, scandals have boosted cynicism about politics, and few people understood the Nice Treaty anyway. But with George W. Bush's payback to his cronies in the US energy and arms businesses widening the Atlantic, and Irish Euroscepticism, albeit embryonic, distancing the Continent, we are now confronted with deciding how European or American we want to be. It is, to be fair, a matter of degree rather than "either/or", but the balance is crucial.
The "Boston or Berlin" shorthand for cultural and political differences between the US and Europe is readily memorised. It is alliterative and has an easy rhythm. As a soundbite, it bites. Otherwise, however, it's deficient because neither Boston (historic, "Irish", academic and haughty) nor Berlin (with a building boom which makes the Dublin skyline look like nothing more than a kids' Meccano exhibition) are typical of their continents.
None the less, our attitudes towards the contrasting social and economic models of America and Europe will be telling. Think "Memphis or Milan" and the choice is recast.
We speak English as do the Americans (I know, I know ... it's not quite the same language but globalisation is eroding the differences). Many, especially big-city, Europeans speak English too. As the language of global business and popular culture - TV, films, pop music - the lingua britannica has ironically become the lingua franca of the world.
Meanwhile, knowledge of European languages in Ireland remains poor and without improvement; even Australia will, in a cultural sense, continue to feel closer to many of us than Brittany. Such is the power of a common language.
Anyway, back to Brian Friel. His play Translations (first staged in Derry in 1980) set in 1830s Co Donegal, addresses the defining role of language, stressing the impossibility of appropriately translating Irish place names into English for British Ordnance Survey maps. It suggests that a clash of cultures, as manifested in language and represented in the play's love affair between a local girl and a British officer, can result in tragedy. No doubt it can. But so can apathy about translating cultures for each other and this is a live risk in Tiger Ireland.
Friel's Translations dealt with history and the legacy of the clash between Irish and English, which remains, of course, a live - if not quite lively - debate. But the context has changed. Now the clash between English and Continental languages is more determining. Of course, economics presides over all international relationships now - Gothenburg showed the growing anger of the anti-capitalist movement. But a Europe divided by language as well as by politics can be no match for American clout and expansionist economic ambition as represented by Bush.
It is practically impossible to determine just how formidable a barrier to integration are the languages of Europe. In the most human of senses, if you can't understand and be understood by other people, integration is impossible. While Irish people now grapple with the "Boston or Berlin" debate (if you do, spare a thought for "Memphis or Milan"), our ignorance of Continental languages, like similar triumphal blindness in America and Britain, leaves us ignorant of many points of view. Colonised little Ireland talks the boss's language. How cute!
In the month in which Ireland rejected the Nice Treaty and Bush showed Europe's leaders who really is boss, the Irish Translators' Association (ITA) celebrates the 15th anniversary of its founding. The current chairman of the 380-member ITA, Michael McCann,
'Even though language teaching here has greatly improved, the results of teaching to Leaving Cert level, compared with the results of equivalent exams on the Continent, are poor. The problem is that second level is already too late." He cites Scandinavia as a European region with a strong commitment to teaching languages: "there they begin in primary school". He believes that, because of Ireland's poor knowledge of European languages, we lack understanding of other EU cultures.
He's right. "Consider it this way," he says, "we have no minister for Europe even though we have a junior one for the islands. That indicates just how local are our politics." As a polyglot European ("at home" in six languages and working professionally in four) he is, hardly surprisingly, "embarrassed" by Ireland's "No" to Nice.
"We would gain a far greater understanding of our European cousins if we put more resources into teaching and learning languages." We would - but it's hard to see it happening. Professional translators and interpreters, though their number and career prospects have been growing, remain, like people with a mastery of computer languages, a specialised elite. Their understanding of other countries is not that of English-only speakers. Echoing Brian Friel, McCann insists that "the cultural elements of translation cannot be overemphasised". There is more to the gig than mere mechanical transliteration.
And that is the nub of it, really. As Translations suggests, by not knowing Irish, we have been deprived of a defining heritage. But by not knowing European languages, we are being deprived of perspectives which might make some deeper sense of Europe. "I would love to see secondary school, second-year students sent to the Gaeltacht for a year and transition year students spend a year on the Continent," says McCann. Such moves would transform Ireland but, given the industrialisation of education, are not going to happen.
So, we'll remain for the most part bombarded by Anglo-American popular culture and unable to integrate more fully with Europe. Certainly, Ireland's "No" to Nice was a welcome rejection of EU leaders' top-down approach to decision-making. But the weakening of Europe's binding has strengthened the aims of the Bush administration and US-dominated multinationals. The EU has many faults, but it is not an ogre in the capitalist mould of the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation or the IMF.
The Gothenburg protesters, who seemed not to distinguish between the EU and those fundamentalist commando forces of global capitalism, might have been more selective. Sure, Western Europe still consumes more than its fair share of the world's resources. But, in that regard, it is not as greedy or wasteful as the US. And the more enlightened European countries continue to understand the civilising importance of a properly funded and administered public sector.
Still, Europe's fault-lines run deep. History, perhaps as much as language, keeps them brittle. The rejection of Nice has made it clear that many voters want (among all sorts of other interpretations) EU institutions to be more open and accountable. But without understandings of each others' cultures, for which a more widespread knowledge of each others' languages is necessary, Europeans are likely to feel the tugs of nationalisms and mother-tongues which will keep us separated.
The truth is that the EU, for all its faults, is a vital counterbalance to American market excesses. It is, however, a counterbalance only when it is united. Otherwise, US dominance - manifested as the raw rule of capital over labour - will prevail with even increasing intensity. Bertie Ahern is right in arguing that the European public is disaffected with Europe's attempts at enlargement and integration. The problem is that it's going to be difficult for politicians to regain the support of publics disaffected in a dozen different languages.
Meanwhile, watch the multinationals translate Europe's political and linguistic difficulties into profits - dollars mind, not euros. C'est la vie, as they say in Paris, France, whatever about Paris, Texas.