WorldView: Seeing is (only part of) believing. Our eyes see coastlines and the right side of our brain labels them as "permanent".
Our brain's left side informs us that they are subject to change, that the coast we look at today is not the same as it was last year, and that it will be different again next year.
This ability to blend sources of information and knowledge to compose an informed picture is one of the distinguishing features of our species. It is something we do several times each day.
Voting on the Treaty of Lisbon will be one such moment. Irish voters will have to express themselves on the complex package of largely technocratic measures 27 democratic national governments have managed to agree upon.
As Paddy Smyth pointed out in this column last Saturday, we, the sovereign people, will be asked if we will vest some of our sovereignty in the European Union as well as in our own republic.
The 27 nation states which currently form the EU are more transient than their rivers, mountains and coasts. Two centuries ago 19 of them - including Germany and Italy - did not exist. A mere 100 years ago, 13 states, including our own, had yet to be born.
It would take an uncommonly talented psychic to hazard a guess at what the political contours of our continent might resemble in 2108, much less 2208, but it is fairly reasonable to make two assumptions. One is that some form of European polity, a descendant of today's EU, will continue to wrestle with many of the vital, if mundane, questions of everyday life. Secondly, the number and form of today's nation states will be different.
Nationalism, as we understand it, is a largely 19th-century phenomenon. Frequently stimulated through imperial indifference or injustice, it was greatly facilitated by the industrial revolution, and the arrival of universal primary education and newspapers.
Belgium was always an engaging country defined by internal and external negatives. Its peoples were not Dutch, German or French and so to find their expression were obliged to become Belgian. After centuries of imperial musical chairs, the post-Napoleonic European powers could not agree on Dutch, French, British or Prussian hegemony. In their disagreement, the creation of Belgium in 1831 became an acceptable compromise.
Today those negative consensuses are being called into question, but Belgium's demise - the casus belli of at least one world war - poses no threat because of the existence of the body we have all painstakingly built, the EU.
An independent Flanders and an independent Wallonia would pose no difficulties under the revised ¨commission structure of the Lisbon Treaty. Both new states would have open frontiers under the Schengen agreements and a common currency in the euro. The thorny and all but insoluble question of Brussels, a polyglot and largely Francophone island in a Flemish sea, could be resolved by the establishment of a multi-lingual European Capital Territory. Catalonia has quietly established a status for which we lack terminology. Its seven million inhabitants enjoy such a degree of autonomy as a nation within Spain that a formally independent Catalonia would be much the same. Schengen frontiers and the euro would remain. Barcelona would have to face creating a Catalan diplomatic service and army but little else would change.
The administrations in Belfast, Cardiff and Edinburgh all pose major constitutional challenges to a United Kingdom that lacks both a constitution, and a definition of its English core. The EU adds to the irresistible pressure on London to define the levers and frontiers of power within the UK. It is a debate that is long overdue. One ducked by the Conservatives when they refused Irish Home Rule in the 19th century. One they flee today behind a smokescreen of Euroscepticism. The EU framework offers a benign environment for the realisation of national identities.
If Belgium, Catalonia and the UK offer us quiet examples of the positive effects of such a continental political framework, the smouldering embers of the 1990s Balkan wars proclaim the horrors of the traditional alternative.
The kingdom of the southern Slavs, or Yugoslavia, was a creation of the 1919 Congress of Versailles. Peoples with significant linguistic and ethnic similarities (Serbo-Croat) but different imperial (Austrian/Ottoman/Russian) and religious (Catholic/Muslim/Orthodox) traditions, physically separated by the mountainous topography of their peninsula, were shoe-horned into a single nation state.
Slobodan Milosevic's dreams of Serbian hegemony and personal enrichment plunged the crumbling Yugoslavia into a series of local conflicts which in their ethnic and religious overtones and their sheer barbarity reminded us more of the Middle Ages than the end of the 20th century. The ancient slash-and-burn approach to conflict resolution played out in full colour in our living rooms.
Six new nation states emerged from the killing fields of the disintegrating Yugoslavia. The thorny Kosovo question will probably create a seventh. These seven states, plus Albania, remain a tinderbox.
The only long-term guarantee of peace and prosperity and the sole method of transforming ethnic hostilities into cultural pageants lie in the extension of Europe's benign environment for national identities to the Balkans. EU membership is the political and physical carrot, EU investment the primary tool in transforming some of the most impoverished, if beautiful, of our continent's landscapes.
EU policies, from non-discrimination against minorities to open frontiers, offer effective and humane economic and
social transformational tools - something our island's experience bears witness to.
Introducing the euro poses little challenge, it is already the effective currency of the Balkans. An EU of 34 or more sovereign member states requires different procedures and structures, and must address more tasks than the original community designed for six.
The Lisbon Treaty referendum essentially asks if we endorse such changes, ones 27 democratic governments have agreed upon.
We owe it to ourselves and to more than 500 million other Europeans to, at the very least, use both sides of our brains when we answer the vital question.
Which would we prefer for all our futures, Srebrenica or Schengen?