Hello? Is anyone interested in talking about what is going on in Europe, and whether it's desirable that we should continue down the road which this week passes the Nice milestone? Or are we going to keep on ambling along, heading towards a destination known unto God and the maybe the Germans, but not suspected and certainly not discussed by us lesser mortals?
And at the heart of that question is that larger and more fundamental question: how good are we at identifying our national interests, and how to pursue them with single-minded determination?
Strip away sentiment. The removal of that dangerous emotion from the conduct of policy is one of the hallmarks of statecraft. "Britain has no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies," remarked that shrewd fellow Henry John Temple. "Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow." As for Britain, so for any country, both in the pursuit of self-interest, and in the formulation of policy without what the French call sensibilite and which the clever Mr Temple described aptly as "humbug".
German reunification
The recent observations by the former German finance minister Theo Waigel should remind us not merely of the ambitions with which much of Europe covets our economic growth, but the breath-taking arrogance of large powers. He complained last week that he had to grit his teeth and watch while German companies transferred millions of deutschmarks to their low-tax Irish operations while he had to fund the process of German reunification. And naturally he was against this.
He wanted two things. He wanted German unification; and in essence, he wanted us to shape our economic policy to pay for it. Now what happened in the process of German unification was, in retrospect, quite extraordinary. The DDR, a state which had been in military alliance against most of the EU for 40 years, and which had not known either the rule of law or democracy for 60 years, which ran intelligence operations to subvert the democracies of the West, and which was economically hopelessly backward, with two shakes of a Teutonic wand was admitted almost overnight into the EU under the guise of a united Germany, though it in no way conformed to even the most basic rules of EU membership.
Why did German reunification, and the suspension of all usual EU rules, come about? Because the rest of Europe, which has such happy memories of the last time Germany was united, wanted it so very much? Or because the Germans did? The latter, of course; and more than that - they wanted us to pay for it. And even more than that. They complained because we didn't. They still want us to change our economic policies to suit their many requirements, such as constructing an entire economy from scratch amid the ruins bequeathed by communism.
Health service
There are a couple of other little indulgences the Berlin government wouldn't mind us helping to pay for, such as a health service which sends any poor German feeling out of sorts for a couple of weeks of mud-baths in Baden Baden, which subsidises the largest industry of homeopathic mumbo-jumbo in Europe, and which has an absolute obsession with shoving suppositories up hypochondriacal bottoms.
Germany is one example, Let us look at France's preposterous cultural ambition, which is to stem the flow of Anglo-American culture by European law. In other words, sensibilite.
No matter how laudable it would be to stop that vapid noise-machine dead, it is not possible. Culture, like the weather, is not susceptible to the dictates of politicians. We should know that, because we are the experts in the field. The biggest single project in independent Ireland, involving the expenditure of billions and the gross distortion of our educational system, has been the restoration of the Irish language. We have tried coercion, bullying, bribery, professional ostracism and economic exclusion, and the net outcome is that the last native Irish speakers will probably be born before the State celebrates its first centenary.
Do we want tax harmonisation? No. Do we want European laws which protect the French film industry? No. Do we want quotas in the workplace? No. Do want the European Rapid Reaction Force? Hmmm. Let me think about that. In principle, yes: it's absurd that Europe, the heartland of world civilisation, should have had the Yugoslavian war on its doorstep, and yet was unable to do anything about it except wring its hands and call for the Americans. But as William Cohen, the US Defence Secretary rightly asks, is this force going to be paid for out of existing military budgets, which are already far too small for their contributions to NATO? And will Irish soldiers be attached to this force? And will they find themselves in a foxhole in Bulgaria because of the requirements of German foreign policy?
Matters of state
Myself, I haven't a clue. Or rather, I have, only I change my mind every five minutes. Maybe I'd be a little happier about these questions if I wasn't asking them, and was instead hearing them being posed, discussed and answered by others in Ireland; if there were heat and light in the air. After all, these are major matters of state, which will decide the governance of Ireland and of Europe for the rest of the century. In the coming decades a single polity might well be joining Kalinin with Kerry: the real question is whether that polity is dilute or concentrate or just plain humbug.