EU: While most European newspapers were agreed that the Brussels summit was a success for the Irish presidency some thought it a rather stage-managed one, particularly as regards the Union's response to terrorism.
The appointment of the Dutch politician Gijs de Vries as security co-ordinator, or , as the Belgian newspapers dubbed him, "Monsieur Terrorisme", was welcomed but some sources, quoted by La Libre Belgique and the International Herald Tribune, wondered if it was wise to set up new structures rather than making existing ones work better. Europol, for example, the IHT pointed out, was created in 1998 as a sort of European FBI to tackle terrorism and other types of criminal networks and already had 500 employees.
Progress, of a quite surprising kind, had undoubtedly been made earlier in the week. Above a picture of a somewhat embarrassed Tony Blair shaking hands with Col Gadafy in Tripoli, the Guardian offered the cheeky front-page headline "Big tent politics: Blair signs new recruit to war on terror". Denmark's Berlingske Tidning said Britain's new desert diplomacy was tasteless but nonetheless an expression of practical politics.
Europe's draft constitutional treaty "came back from the dead" at Brussels, the Financial Times wrote. But this was far from the end of the affair. The decision of the leaders to reach agreement by June 17th was now "doomed to succeed" but this would be followed by the extremely difficult problem of ratification. Seven member-states were committed to holding referendums and voters in two - Denmark and Ireland - had rejected past EU treaty revisions.
In spite of these anticipated difficulties the FT felt the constitution was on balance a good thing and "far superior to the existing treaties. Unlike them, it is at least mostly comprehensible. Above all, it presents the EU as it is: a hybrid structure with some federal traits but anchored in the nation state - and not the 'superstate' of eurosceptic myth."
Elsewhere the retired leader of the Anglican Church, Lord Carey, was in hot water for what was perceived as his disparagement of Islam. At a time when his successor, Rowan Williams, was preparing for a new round of talks in the US designed to promote Christian-Muslim dialogue, Lord Carey's blunt remarks about authoritarian regimes, half-hearted condemnations of terrorism and a culture well past its sell-by date caused considerable offence and embarrassment.
It is sad to relate, said Carey, that "no great invention has come for many hundred years from Muslim countries". There was also, he found, a disturbing lack of condemnation of theologies which celebrated suicide bombers as martyrs, while many Islamic countries were markedly less tolerant of Christian worship than they insisted Christian (or Western) countries should be of theirs.
Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, told the Guardian he was "dismayed" by the remarks: "Rather than hectoring Muslims, Lord Carey's skills would be more usefully employed in halting the drift away from Christianity in Europe," he suggested.
There was some Christian-influenced political fundamentalism on offer in Le Monde in an article by Jean-Louis Bourlanges, a French conservative MEP described as a fierce opponent of Turkey's entry into the European Union. "To be part of the same political community," he wrote, "it is not enough to pay tribute to abstract values; it is necessary to have participated in forming them. To be European is not just a matter of being Christian today, as those who wish to put God into the European constitution think. It is rather a matter of having been Christian for fifteen centuries."
For Bourlanges, the West was characterised by a joint heritage of Christianity and "Promethean rationalism" while the East was marked by "administrative despotism and a confusion of the spiritual and temporal realms". The founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, had proclaimed a secular state in 1924. Eighty years later, Bourlanges argued, that secularism could only be kept in place by the power of the army.
The readers of the Financial Times appeared to confirm the "Christian-centric" view of the continent in a poll conducted for a glitzy 112-page magazine supplement on "the meaning of Europe". The most influential European of the century, FT readers thought, was Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II. Also doing well were Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher and, strangely, Luciano Pavarotti. Kemal Ataturk came nowhere.