We owe this statement to the original Henry Ford, pioneer of the ‘Model T’. He went on to tell the journalist interviewing him: “It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we made today.”

But even the history we made today runs the risk, like the past, of being massaged or mishandled by the generations that follow.

Legitimate history has so much to offer humanity. It can teach us fundamental truths, point out potential consequences, prevent us from repeating our mistakes. Yet so much of the past has been manipulated, consciously or unconsciously, by politicians, national apologists and others uncomfortable with the truth.

The business of rewriting history is often a protracted one. As layer after layer of half-truths is applied to a historical event or process, it becomes increasingly difficult to restore the reality. Even when myths are knowingly and conspiratorially organised, they can still – with the aid of sympathetic minds –
be rapidly accepted as the truth.

Attempts to rewrite history go back a long way. In the beginning was the word, but the word was often passed on inaccurately. As humanity struggled to emerge from the mists of time, reality and myth were close partners.

But, as recorded history became an established process, its inadequacies – focusing on individuals and events rather than people and processes – became apparent and the falsifications evident.

One of the early examples of tampering with the truth was Caesar’s portrayal of the Celts in his de Bello Gallico, caricaturising them as primitive savages when they had already developed a civilisation of their own.

Later came the adaptation, for doctrinal and political purposes, of the history of the First Crusade, the legend that underpins today’s standoff between the Muslim world and the West. The official version would have it that the initiative came from Western Europe, with Pope Urban II calling on the righteous to smite the infidels in the Holy Land.

But the reality is that it was triggered by a request from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos for help in liberating parts of Anatolia occupied by the Seljuk Turks. It was in fact a practical initiative, not a spiritual one. Moreover, relationships with the Muslim Turks were reasonably cordial at the time – and Jerusalem wasn’t ‘liberated’ until 450 years later!

Religious and political impulses have helped reshape the presentation of other events, notably various episodes during the process of expelling the Arabs from Europe and buttressing the stronghold of the Church of Rome. Contrary to their images as role models for Christianity and Europe, Ferdinand and Isabella behaved like the bigots they were.

The falsifications of the fascist regimes of Germany, Italy and Spain – where the history books have since been put to right, with occasional gaps – reflect a tradition of ideological totalitarianism that was first inspired by the Crusades and then institutionalised in the acts of the Catholic Monarchs, the Inquisition and the pogroms that ensued across the Continent over the centuries.

The nation state has been as great a culprit as religion. History has been substantially reworked by politicians and nationalists for various reasons: aggrandisement, self-respect, simple convenience.

The French and the British have always tended to highlight the victories in their mutual wars and play down their defeats, even giving the names of their victories to such buildings as Blenheim Palace, Waterloo Station and the Gare d’Austerlitz.

The Gallic thirst for la gloire has prompted frequent manipulations of history. The fact that the majority of the population of France couldn’t speak the French language at the time of the Revolution and were unable to sing the ‘Marseillaise’ is hardly ever mentioned!

The English were responsible for a demonization campaign against the Dutch – conducted by a frightened royalty with the complicity of creative spirits like Samuel Pepys – that coined a vocabulary of smears: ‘going Dutch’ and ‘Dutch auction’ to emphasise meanness, ‘Dutch comfort’ (thank God it’s no worse!), ‘Dutch courage’, ‘talking double-Dutch’, ‘talking like a Dutch uncle’ (moralising), and so on.

Like the French, the English have encouraged myths about themselves too. Many of them are convinced that they are direct descendants of the Anglo-Saxons, despite the growing evidence that their genes are closely related to those of the Basques.

A similar challenge posed by genetic research faces the Greek Cypriots, confronted with the scientific reality that they are the same people as the indigenous Turkish Cypriots and, oh horror! a different race from the mainland Greeks – who themselves bear a greater admixture of Albanian and Slav genes than those of their ancestors.

In the words of the Greek author Nikos Dimou: “We used to speak Albanian and call ourselves Romans, but then Winkelmann [the German art historian], Goethe, Victor Hugo, Delacroix, they all told us: ‘No, you are Hellenes, direct descendants of Plato and Socrates’, and that did it. If a small, poor nation has such a burden put on its shoulders, it will never recover.” Recent events have proved Nikos Dimou right.

Mythmaking is not confined to ancient history. Most Brits think they were responsible for winning WWII, readily acknowledging help from the Americans and less readily from the Russians. They certainly played their part, but let’s not distort reality. Quoting official German sources in his book Europe East and West, Norman Davies says “they state unequivocally that 75-80 per cent of Germany’s losses in men and materiel were incurred on the Eastern Front. The unavoidable implication is that all other contributions added up to a maximum of 20-25 per cent. Of this, the Americans might claim the laurels for 15 per cent, and the British for perhaps 10 per cent.”

Education is also often a culprit. One of the gaps in the knowledge of Britain’s schoolchildren was the country’s dubious conduct in the Boer War. At the same time, Italian schoolchildren were being taught that this war was the most despicable in European colonial history – and that the Italian escapade in Abyssinia was the most admirable!

Nationalist impulses can prompt the manipulation of trivia as well as major events. A striking example is the account of the Flemish brothers, Frans and Edward Van Raemdonck, who both died on a First World War battlefield. According to a carefully constructed and fervently supported legend, the dying Frans cradled his dead brother in his arms. In reality, the dead soldier was not his brother, not even a fellow-Fleming, but a Walloon comrade, Aimé Fiévez. But that did not satisfy the appetite of Flemish nationalism, which demanded a reconstruction…

Over a century ago, in his essay What is a Nation, French historian Ernest Renan said: “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. Indeed, historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial. Unity is always effected by means of brutality; the union of northern France with the Midi was the result of massacres and terror lasting for the best part of a century.”

How much of the history of that last Crusade by the French elite against their own people in the Languedoc is remembered by le peuple français today?

With the help of new technologies and the social media, our world is changing so fast that we have difficulty in keeping up with it. Instant videos and SMS messaging fuel grassroots movements and challenge the established order. They create novel situations that, as in the Arab world, bring the need for new social constructs in their wake.

Yet, amid all this change, we see the influence of regional and national cultural attitudes that persist.

The fate of European nations in the economic meltdown of the euro echoes a number of cultural characteristics of the countries most seriously hit. These start out with positive traits like family ties, self-reliance at family level (in the absence of the social safety nets provided further north), extended families and, as a symptom of this, adherence to personal and local loyalties (campanilismo) rather than acceptance of the dictates of an impersonal and distant state.

Less positive are the far reaches of this process which lead to cronyism (clientelismo in Italy, enchufe in Spain, rousfeti in Greece, and so on) and incitement to cheat on the system. Northerners may complain about these things, but they are engrained in the institutions and lifestyles of these countries and will be difficult to change.

The Nordic countries, with their commitment to social responsibility, manage to curb such human tendencies, while Germany remains true to its cultural tradition of responsibility and discipline. A Socialist political slogan from the 1920s said: “Rot ist richtig aber Ordnung muss sein!” (“Red is right but we must have order”). That commitment to discipline, regardless of one’s political views, still dominates public life in Germany.

Events in France also demonstrate a grassroots commitment to social equality, though the behaviour of the elite and the antics of the National Front suggest otherwise. As Rudolf von Thadden, a German government adviser on foreign policy, said: “The French are an autistic nation.”

Multicultural Belgium continues to practice its traditional pragmatism by ‘fixing’ its problems and those of others. Its talents of compromise and mediation have not only produced a government of its own (at last!), they are also making a substantial contribution to the task of putting Europe back on the rails. Not just leading Belgian figures like ex-PM Guy Verhofstadt in the European Parliament and another ex-PM Herman Van Rompuy, now President of the European Council, but a major contingent of Belgian administrators working in the European Commission.

While British, French, Czech and Greek Eurocrats tend to network with ‘their own’, the Belgians get on with the job. “We have a capacity for producing compromises,” says a senior Belgian official. We are pragmatic. We want to make sure that the machine works.”

Meanwhile, the English continue to show their short-termism and potential for self-delusion in their reservations about the European ideal. More than a century ago the historian Thomas Carlyle said in his book The French Revolution: “Of the continental nuisance called ‘Bureaucracy’ I can see no risk or possibility in England.” That attitude shows no sign of changing, even if the reality is different: England is now a very bureaucratic country. There are other reasons though, also predominantly cultural, that the Scots are now contemplating independence…

As for the USA, well, the traditional verbal commitment to absolute values – freedom, democracy, limited government and so on – is rampant, polarising attitudes and prompting the electorate to view the world in black-and-white terms. Manicheism should be added to the long list of weird American cults: pentacostalism, scientology and the like.

Communism was – is – a cult too, though not in the USA. Its failure in Russia and its endurance in China may also find their roots in culture, even if part of the explanation lies in the relative non-doctrinaire approach of the Chinese authorities to the way they manage their society. North Korea meanwhile holds together through a mix of traditional confucianism and Buddhism, and modern juche.

To return to recent developments, it is evident that the younger generations in the Arab world and now Russia are challenging some of the old stereotypes without necessarily changing them. The fever of revolutionary zeal released through the social media will eventually subside and the old cultural patterns will reassert themselves.

In fact, as a counter-current to globalisation, we have mounting evidence in Europe of a return to our roots. Despite the younger generations’ addiction to new technologies and the social media (or maybe because of the increased opportunity to ‘tune into’ grassroots opinions), the young are as much a party to this process as their elders.

So the hidden hand of culture is still evident in many aspects of public life. It will be fascinating to see what the coming months and years have in store. If indeed we are returning to our roots, there may be much more of the same to come.

Richard Hill’s latest book, ‘A Question of Identity: Getting the Better of Globalization’ is available on the eBook website www.europublications.com.

We may well ask where Europe is heading these days. Public opinion is notoriously fickle, and we are getting conflicting signals from different sources.

Adversity, as in recent times, tends to reinforce the hold of traditional national identities. So we still have to see whether we have really seen the back of old-style nationalism in Western Europe. Currently a mix of grievances over immigrant minorities and bailing out other countries is mutating into a new form of nationalism, less vicious than the old but equally insidious.

 There are also long-term influences at work that challenge the existing order. One inevitably is globalization, another is the spirit of localism. “Not long ago, people said that globalization and the revolution in communications technology would bring us all together,” comments David Brooks in an op-ed piece in the New York Times. “But the opposite is true. People are taking advantage of freedom and technology to create new groups and cultural zones. Old national identities and behaviour patterns are proving surprisingly durable. People are moving into self-segregating communities with people like themselves and building invisible and sometimes visible barriers to keep strangers out.”

 Many younger Europeans are imbued with this spirit of localism. People are going back to their roots.

 Evidence of the power of localism is the dramatic growth, with the help of new technologies, of media that identify with the local communities they serve. Piet Bakker, a Dutch professor of journalism at the Hogeschool Utrecht, says “if you ask people what kind of information they want in a newspaper, local information almost always comes out on top.” Also the fact that a country like Spain has independent TV stations transmitting to communities no more than 20 kilometres apart would have been unthinkable even 20 or 30 years ago.

TV producers in most European countries have reported a subtle shift in viewer priorities since the early-90s – partly no doubt reflecting the troubled times we live in, but also pointing to something deeper. They detect a trend in demand away from international news and documentaries towards domestic issues, national and regional news.

Other straws in the wind are the growing popularity of regional folk music groups across much of Europe, East and West, and efforts to revive minority languages, some of them almost extinct.

Maybe the spirit of localism even helps explain the strange phenomenon of voter behaviour in the Eurovision Song Contest. People demonstrate a sense of solidarity with their neighbours. Old enemies like the Portuguese vote for the Spanish, Norwegians vote for the Swedes, young enemies like the Slovenes vote for the Serbs, and so on.

Quizzed on their cultural identity in a random survey in 2009 at the KUL University in Belgium, Catalan students said that they thought of themselves as Catalan first, then Spanish, then European. Scots saw themselves as Scots first, then British, then European, while Flemish Belgians considered themselves Flemish first, then Belgian, then European. Probably the most committed Europeans are the Italians but, in their case too, there is a renewed trend towards localism.

So where in the world are we going? Helped or hindered by the new technologies, Western Europe seems to be reconsidering its identity.

Conferences, in our experience, can be very boring, but one that we found ourselves at last month was really thought-provoking. The subject was that old ‘chestnut’ of how to get development aid to Africa. It could have been a mind-numbing experience, despite the continued urgency of the issue, but it was transformed by the vitality and commitment of the African participants.

In the course of two days, a number of significant realities emerged to illustrate the idiosyncrasies of sub-Saharan African society:

• Africans from la Francophonie are culturally and educationally different from their English-speaking neighbours. Britain gave her colonial subjects language and institutions, France gave her subjects language and culture.

• Africans are close to nature, a nature that has been so generous that there has been little reason to create or innovate. Also, African society being essentially communitarian, individual entrepreneurialism – implying the act of putting oneself first – is not that easy to come by. Just as in southern Europe, where many societies function on the principle of the extended family, the tribe is still the dominant social component in sub-Saharan African countries.

• Things tend to happen more slowly in sub-Saharan Africa, which encourages many Europeans to think that the people are simply too ‘laid back’, passive and lacking any sense of urgency. Also, lower down the socio-economic scale, it tends to be the womenfolk who take the initiative. But Africans, particularly the educated ones, are in many cases more motivated then Europeans.

• Colonial Africa has left its mark on the continent by providing relatively few effective transport links between countries. This hampers economic development.

• The introduction of the cellphone is stimulating activity, but there are large swathes of the continent’s interior that the technology still has to penetrate.

• Traditional sub-Saharan African ways of cooking with biomass are not only dangerous to human health (the WHO estimates 1.5 million deaths per year as a result of indoor pollution), it also means people pay much more for their energy than we do. A candle, or kerosene for a lamp, costs far more than electricity would do to achieve the same end.

• In many African countries land is the traditional property of the tribe. Less than 10 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa’s land is formally owned – there are often no title deeds, certainly not in terms of the land ownership of individual members of a tribe, and only one African in ten lives in a house with title deeds. The fact that people cannot use title deeds as security on bank loans, etc, puts a brake on economic development.

• The Chinese are helping build the transport links that the Europeans failed to provide but, in return, they are seeking access to natural and mineral resources: hardwoods, foodstuffs, copper, etc. Africa’s governments are selling concessions over the heads of their people – and the people are gradually being driven off their ancestral lands. In the Mayombe, the largest rainforest in the world after the Amazon, land is being appropriated at the rate of a football pitch a day…

• Despite problems, Africans – at least those that go on the conference circuit – laugh a lot, even when they don’t have a lot to laugh about.

A piece about the euro crisis published early in December in the New York Times pointed out that “Portugal shares the high wages and prices of richer northern European neighbors, but not their competitiveness”.

The headline read “Euro Zone Is Imperiled by North-South Divide”, but the article failed to deliver on its promise, apart from failing to fit equally euro-stricken Ireland into the equation. For a start, its arguable whether Atlantic-oriented Portugal really qualifies as part of the European South, even if it shares, with Spain and Greece, “their inefficient labor markets and tax systems and heavy debt.”

The article quotes Oscar Turner, the owner of a film company in Portugal who quite rightly says that “the euro’s great if you’re traveling around, but it’s an absurd idea to have the same currency in a country like Greece or Portugal as in Germany, which has totally different habits and culture.” Habits and culture. There we go! There’s a lot more to it than the NYT article suggests. From our research, we see plenty of evidence of what we choose to call ‘the South-North Incline’, And we’re not just talking here about the Catholic-Protestant divide.

As you move northwards from the Mediterranean littoral, the social constraints experienced largely at an almost subconscious level by southern cultures emerge further north as clearcut, expressly stated and universally held social attitudes.

This has nothing to do with the law. Italy has the European record for lawmaking (it is said that the conduct of the Italian citizen is governed by no less than 800,000 rules and regulations), yet the system is so top-heavy that the man-and-woman-in-the-street has no choice but to circumvent the law with typically Italian ingenuity. The ‘incline’ has to do with values like accountability and transparency, which are much more integral to everyday life in the countries of the North.

This South-North Incline pops up time and time again in research studies. When asked to estimate the percentage of the European Union’s budget spent on ‘bureaucracy’, the member states line up dutifully, with a steady progression from the lowest ratings in the South to the highest in the North. A number of factors may contribute to this, including the fact that the northern countries tend to spend more of their GNP on government than the ones to the south. So much for stories of southern red tape… in fact in these countries it is the family rather than the state that provides the social safety net.

It’s notable that the seven countries giving estimates in excess of the average (33%, wide of the actual mark of 5%) are all Protestant with the exception of Belgium, and the seven countries with estimates below the average are all Catholic with the exception of Orthodox Greece.

The South-North Incline is even evident in statistics of payment delays in business. The slowest payers are the Greeks and the promptest are the Finns (pity the Finnish exporter who depends on a customer base in Greece!). And, in terms of transparency per se, nothing could be more eloquent than the statistics produced by Euro-Bid Watch which show the relative performance of the EU/EEA member states in publishing details of official contract awards.

The Incline is perceptible in many other comparative studies – work opportunities for women for example, attitudes to self-employment, usage of online government, new product take-off times and, of course, the size of shadow economies. Though lines of latitude may really have little to do with this phenomenon of the South-North Incline, they do help to illustrate it!

Like a hot air balloon, the issue of respect for human rights in Flanders goes up and up in the institutional stratosphere. After a near collision with a critical report from the Council of Europe – a report which produced no response at all from the Flemish Government – the balloon has now floated up into the rarified air of the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations.

Paragraph 10 of the minutes of the 100th Session of the Committee, held in Geneva this October, states the following (our translation from the French):

“The Committee is concerned over the fact that access to certain rights foreseen in the Convention may be impeded by decisions taken by some communal authorities in Flanders, notably with regard to the purchase of communal land, access to services and housing, the enjoyment of certain social benefits, as well as the right to stand for office, requiring the knowledge of or intention to learn Dutch, thereby creating a discrimination against other categories of the population.

The State concerned should ensure, in conformity with Article 50 of the Convention, that the decisions taken by the communal authorities on linguistic requirements do not open the way to discrimination in the exercise of the rights set out in the Convention by other categories of the population. It should also encourage awareness and exercise of the right of appeal against such decisions by the population concerned.”

Though cautiously worded, the Committee’s opinion leaves no doubt that the measures taken by these Flemish communes, most of them on the outskirts of Brussels, are undemocratic. In referring to the right to stand for office, it hints at the long-standing refusal of the Flemish Government to recognise the democratic election of the three French-speaking candidates for the office of burgomaster. The Flemish Government has responded by saying it will undertake an “in-depth analysis” of the report and decide whether remedial action is necessary.

Paradoxically, the Flemish Right seems to think the development of supranational institutions will help it escape its human responsibilities. NVA spokesman Jeroen Overmeer was recently quoted as saying that: “The EU makes it possible for countries such as this one to split up. We believe we are experiencing both globalisation and localisation. Some problems are global, like defence or the environment, and these need to be dealt with by the EU. But at the same time democracy needs to be closer to the people, and that is why we are a regionalist party. The two trends go hand in hand.”

So the NVA believes that globalisation implies disinterest in the application of human rights? Evidently not, if this UN report is anything to go by.

As in all matters Belgian, today’s situation has a lot to do with things that happened a long time ago. The Flemish have good reason to harbour a deep-set resentment towards French-speakers – though they fail to make a distinction between the Walloons and the French-speaking elites of the big cities, the latter being largely responsible for introducing class sentiment to a largely classless society.

There are also some less historic, yet more realistic, factors that can be cited in defence of the Flemish Government’s standpoint. The communes around Brussels are under constant assault from the money-rich and property-hungry French-speaking middle classes (not to mention the Eurocrats!), while the Region suffers from a chronic lack of social housing.

It can also be said that there was extensive coverage of the UN Committee’s report in the Flemish media… and hardly a word anywhere else!

Other issues highlighted in the UN report? Belgium’s record combating domestic violence, providing facilities for the handicapped, ensuring gender equality, curbing police violence, combating human trafficking, providing detainees access to legal and medical services, improving prison conditions and the treatment of deportees, suppressing racism and improving the treatment of minors. What was that about Flanders?

It’s no secret that Italy’s economia sommersa is one of the biggest in Europe. Traditional estimates of no less than 15 per cent of GDP have now been topped by an independent study which puts the Italian black economy at nearly 25 per cent, one-third of which is not surprisingly attributed to creative minds in the Mezzogiorno – Italy has always produced great artists.

As Italian sociologist Franco Ferrarotti said in a moment of blinding candidness, speaking of ‘raccomandazione’, the custom of seeking special treatment from people in power or close to it (a practice dating back to Cicero): “Essentially the judges are saying what everybody in Italy believes. When a favour works successfully, it ceases to be a crime and becomes a work of art.”

All the more surprising, then, that in early September, the Italian Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, defended the country’s approach to tackling the Roma problem with the words: “We aren’t xenophobic, but serious people who want laws to be respected.”

OK, maybe he was speaking in defence of the government and not the country…

The country has a long record of sidestepping legality, in fact it is something Italians are proud of when they say their minds are tangenziale. They are indeed exceptionally creative. They are also very realistic. As the head of Italy’s Carabinieri force in Afghanistan said recently about Afghan recruits, “it’s better to join the Taliban; they pay more money!”

One example of the Italian creativity/realism factor is the ceramics factory near Rome which was mounted on wheels to evade local tax collectors. Another was the survival, until the late-1960s, of a government department for ‘the regularisation of fascist affairs’, some 15-people strong, which the government itself did not know existed.

A late-1995 medical check in Naples of 100 postal employees with disability pensions (in addition to their wages) found 94 of them to be perfectly healthy. As the Financial Times commented at the time: “Many had done military service, some were key players in local football teams and most were in their mid-thirties. One fit person even claimed he had been cured at Lourdes but had kept quiet about his altered status.”

“Italians”, says Robert Graham of the Financial Time, talking about the ‘great mamma state’, “are still greedily sucking this gigantic breast in thousands of legal ways: jobs for life, indexed wages, discounts, subsidies and generous pensions. The system is ever more abused: from illicit tapping into electricity supplies to the 16 civil servants found receiving overtime – on the basis that they were working 29 hours a day.”

Obviously something needs to change – but, even if it does, Italians will probably be sufficiently creative to get around it. So the question may be: is Italy destined to go the same way as Greece? But, then, we have to remember that the SMEs in the area around the town of Treviso north of Venice have, on their own, an output that exceeds Greek GNP…

It’s some 15 years now that I began to get the feeling that the good ol’ USA had lost its way. More recently, that feeling has taken hold of lots of people over here.

The great American public seems to have little time any longer for rational thinking. You can say the same thing about lots of other constituencies in the world, but the American version is special. There seems to be no middle ground for public opinion in ‘Middle America’, it is totally polarised. “You are either for us or against us.” You feel that commonsense has been hijacked.

The statements that come to us through the media are worrying enough, but then there’s what the opinion polls have told us:

Only 39% of Americans accept evolution as fact (Gallup, 2010).

17% of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime (Newsweek, 2004).

84% of West Michiganders believe in angels (Wirthlin, 2000).

12% think Noah was married to Joan of Arc (Gallup, 2007).

American fundamentalism is sometimes as frightening as Islamic fundamentalism – and now the Tea Party is calling for a “religious revival”!

It seems that, between the great concepts of democracy, free enterprise and “peace and freedom” on the one hand and the emotional trivia, frivolities, cheerleading and ‘high fives’ of everyday life on the other, there is absolutely nothing going on in the minds of average white Americans. Are they brainwashed?

I’m also left with the feeling that many Americans are running scared – scared of Islam, scared of losing their jobs and houses, scared of peer pressure, and scared of opinions that don’t equate with their own (one formed in the days of a bountiful nature, self-reliance and exhortations to “go west, young man.”).

Consider some of the things that people say about the US business world:

“As subordinates, Americans transform themselves into risk-averse order-takers who temper their comments, shy away from conflict, and readily defer to their bosses’ power and authority… They fear embarrassment, disagreement, and negative consequences” (American Susan Davidson of Beyond Borders Inc.).

“People are afraid to say honestly what’s on their mind. They aren’t as straightforward as in Europe.” (Finnish employee, Delta Air Lines).

“If you don’t say that something is great or that there’s been a dramatic improvement, then you leave people with the impression that they are doing a poor job.” (French project manager, Hewlett-Packard).

For me, this last comment puts the finger on the weakest spot in the American psyche: the tendency to hype everything. Hysteria and fear make perfect bedfellows.

This is sad, as the Americans I grew up with were among the most open-minded and rational people in the world. But they were, after all, living outside the pressure cooker of US society.

As a leading authority on nationalism, the Vienna-born historian Eric Hobsbawm recognised the rallying potential of the game. Speaking of his childhood in the 1920s he said that “the only thing that brought the Austrians together in those days was football.” Not much has changed since then.

Since WWII the sport has been marked by outbursts of raw nationalism, even racism – most notably by the British, French and Spanish and, more understandably, the countries of the old Yugoslavia. Eruptions by football rowdies at iconic clubs like Paris Saint Germain only show the nasty side of human nature. A so-called friendly match against an Israeli team turned into a vicious display of anti-Semitism. Nicolas Sarkozy, who was minister of the interior at the time, was reported by the British press to have said: “We no longer want racists, Nazi salutes, monkey noises in stadiums. Soccer is not war.” Soccer? He probably said futbol or something like it.

International football is a fine substitute for war but the motivation is often the same. Commenting a defeat of Germany by Russia in an international match, a football coach described it as a “revenge for Stalingrad”. In the run-up to the match with Spain in the Euro ’96 championships, British media evoked memories of the defeat of the Armada, the Spanish Inquisition and even the Spanish flu’. When England confronted the Germans in the semi-finals, the talk was of the Blitz, Spitfires and the like. One chant, to the tune of ‘The Camptown Lady’, ran: “Two World Wars and one World Cup, doo dah, doo dah, two World Wars and one World Cup, doo dah doo dah day.” When the Germans won, the English fans went berserk…

According to Dougie and Eddy Brimson, experts on the British hooligan’s mind (he does have one), “people fight because people like to fight. Soccer is the vehicle they use because they can justify violence as the defence of their team, town or reputation. They see their role as an extension of that of their teams: to beat the opposition. Violence is like smoking. If you try it once and hate it, you don’t do it again. But if you like it, it’s bloody hard to give it up.”

The Greeks, who tend to get xenophobic when they feel obliged to defend their own doctrine of racial purity – one of the biggest farces of recent times – also have football as a safety valve. The hubris (appropriately a Greek word) that preceded their national team’s defeat in the Albanian capital of Tirana quickly turned to a spirit of vengeance directed at immigrant Albanians living in Greece, a major if now largely hidden element of Greek society. The latter made the mistake of celebrating their team’s victory and the real Greeks, whoever they may be, took this as a provocation, urged on by the media who described the celebrants as ‘rebel-like’ and ‘criminals’.

The irony is that most teams recruit their best players from anywhere around the globe, while many of the best UK teams are now owned by foreigners: Manchester City by the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, Chelsea by a Russian oligarch, Fulham by an Egyptian mogul, and Manchester United by an American businessman.

Take a club like Cluj in Romania and you find its top players are Portuguese. Look at the French national team and you see Maghrebians and sub-Saharan Africans and you ask yourself “is there really a home-grown Frenchman in the team?” But that’s the way the French define nationality: get the numbers up!

Of course, the media add fuel to the flames of fan-worship. The Norwegian press runs headlines like “We won the second half”, when reporting a 2-1 defeat by Sweden, and “We beat England one-one!” when commenting on a draw.

At least the multinational complexion of many so-called ‘national’ teams has the advantage that most of the players don’t know the words of ‘their’ national anthems. There’s hope for human harmony yet!

The revelation that Greece had been fiddling the accounts for so long prompted one of its citizens to exclaim to a reporter that “we gave the world democracy, and we expect the European Union to support us!”

Yes, well… If the democracy we’re living with today is anything to go by, we don’t have much to thank the Greeks for. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

Democracy in Europe is increasingly a case of the tail wagging the dog. Europe’s political leaders seriously lack the courage of their convictions, and that poses the question of whether they have any convictions other than their own interests in the first place. They too often say one thing to the world and then, looking over their shoulders, do the opposite to appease their electorates.

Charlemagne’s columnist got it right In The Economist of February 6 when he said: “Arguably, the problem is Europe itself: its querulous voters and its cowardly political leaders.”

The voters are of course querulous, though there is a certain consistency in their concerns: keeping what they’ve got (and not giving it to Greece), protecting jobs, stemming immigration and the like. At least we don’t share the symptoms of the US, where voter mood swings cause the country to oscillate from one extreme to the other.

The Lisbon Agenda offers lofty ideals for the future of Europe, and the European Commission tries to promote these within the limits of its remit as a regulatory organisation. But we are not going to get anywhere far or fast without the real commitment of the ultimate political decision-makers, whoever they may be. Europe needs to start moving towards closer political union, otherwise the conflicts of interest and muddling through will just persist.

Should we ‘decouple’ the political elite from the whims of voters? Or should we take a radically different approach to how Europe is governed? A Europe of the Regions? Yet even this may pander even more to the esprit de clocher of the French (malgré their fondness for dirigisme), the campanilismo of the Italians and the Kleinbürger mentality of the Germans (watch Karnaval on German TV!).Not to mention the Little Englanders.

Democracy has to have a purpose beyond reflecting and respecting the opinions of just everyone, which is fine for the rights of man, but far less so for the rights of mankind.

If the solution to European democracy is monthly summits, as Herman Van Rompuy has suggested, then God help us all! At least, judging from recent debates, the European Parliament seems to have some convictions. But one is left with the feeling that the European Union is, simply, too ungainly to be governable.