Continental Drift: Travels in the New Europe, by Nicholas Fraser, Secker & Warburg, 322pp, £15.99 in UK
The geological metaphor of the title is apt. It serves as a fair warning. The nationstates of Europe are drifting towards each other as unpredictably as tectonic plates, those unstable land masses whose coming together can cause earthquakes.
Europeanisation is a bewilderingly spasmodic process - political, economic, cultural and emotional - which jaded cosmopolitans such as Nicholas Fraser seem to find provocative.
Fraser was born in London and educated at Oxford, but he is half French (ah!) and has been around, as a reporter, columnist, producer and BBC editor. He is an acute observer of flies in ointment and writes of them with energetic fluency and sardonic wit. New York's Harper's Magazine got him to undertake the survey that produced this book. He was the right man for the job: Americans always enjoy reading about European difficulties.
He establishes his report's generally prevailing down-beat mood in an introductory chapter entitled "Adventures in Euroland". Almost any word can be worsened with the prefix Euro, as he demonstrates in the first few pages, with "Eurodespondency" and "Eurotruculence".
As he is a man who evidently cherishes inherited civilised values, it is hardly surprising that the European Union's headquarters in Brussels, its inhumanly grandiose buildings and the usual ineffectiveness of what goes on in them, depressed him. He found that the vast and growing bureaucracy's main functions are the production of red tape, and having lunch; 518 MEPs and their staffs confer inconclusively in gobbledegook he calls "tin ear Desperanto", coining words such as "sub sidiarity" in attempts to keep lesser member nations in their places.
In the opinion of Jean Baudrillard, a French sociologist, New Europe right from the start has been "a vacuum-packed phantasmagoria". Fraser likes the phrase so much that he quotes it twice, and approvingly quotes him further:
Europe will take place . . . in the sleep-walker's space in which politicians increasingly move, in dossiers, speeches, programmes, budgetary or fiscal projects - and in the artificially manufactured public opinion of universal suffrage cunningly manipulated by professionals . . . As things are going, Europe is a computer model mocking us amidst the desert of our dreams of a genuine political community.
Disillusioned in Belgium, Fraser finds next to nothing to admire in other countries:
Luxembourg, with its "scandalfree Grand Duke whose name no one could quite remember, a disenfranchised population of foreigners . . . and the highest standard of living in Europe, the prototype nationless state. If Croatia, Scotland or the Isle of Man were to become statelets, this is how they would end up."
Austria: "The only lessons available in Vienna were those conventionally associated with death, or whipped cream." "Diving each day through the intact wreckage of this European Atlantis, I felt able to reclaim the Habsburg disaster for the present."
Italy: in Bologna, as a juror of the Prix Italia, Fraser was obliged to spend ten days watching "pseudoverite films that scrutinised their subjects as if they were cut-price watches in air terminals or piles of half-frozen sushi; vacuous, opportunistic histories accompanied by portentous wind music; ethnic sentimentalism of the chummy, mateish sort practised by the bureaucracies of ancient regime socialism."
France: "Alone among European cultures, France had retained the notion of human perfectibility - and yet, taken as individuals, French people, as any casual visitor could ascertain, were persistently, unassuageably grumpy."
Britain: ". . . in its perverseness, and through the depth of its contrasts, Britain remained the most difficult European nation to understand. The country was quite prosperous - but it wasn't specially happy." He records an English television interviewer's judgment that the Lottery is Britain's "principal symptom of national collapse", even worse than "a literacy rate in free fall, scandal-ridden judicial and parliamentary institutions, monarchical practices preserved in the pickle jar of inanity".
Compared with various kinds of dreariness in Bosnia, Poland, Germany and Russia, Nicholas Fraser's New Ireland is quite refreshing: "Mysteriously, and without undue fuss, it was suddenly more than all right to be Irish," he felt, "and I wasn't surprised that this happened precisely at the moment when one could say the opposite about the condition of being English."
Fraser regards Michael D. Higgins as "a European in what I had come to see as the Irish style - pragmatic and successfully opportunistic." The Minister of Culture "didn't agree with the French sense of cultural exclusiveness ("They will be elitist, won't they?") but he felt that this was how Europe would be created, through culture."
Fraser does not actually declare his own disagreement, but even in his final chapter. "How to be a European", his scepticism endures. "The most positive interpretation of `Europe'," he writes, "was to be found in small, poor countries - the former because their power was enhanced, the latter because they received so much money - so it wasn't surprising to find Finns and Irish the most enthusiastic participants, eager to wrest themselves free of their once-powerful neighbours, and hardly capable of believing that they had found an organisation willing to pay them to do so."
Yes, there are enough prickly opinions in this book to irritate just about all of us Continental drifters.
Patrick Skene Catling is a novelist and critic