Original Sin in a Brave New World: The Paradox of Europe by Bobby McDonagh Institute of European Affairs 249pp, £15
A new game for long car journeys - reinterpreting popular songs as metaphors for political ideas. And in Bobby McDonagh we have a master. How better to express the desirability of gentle incrementalism in European integration than with The Supremes' "You can't hurry love"?
McDonagh's attempt to render intelligible to the ordinary reader the process of the Amsterdam Treaty negotiations, in which he was deeply involved, is an important, but also entertaining and elegantly written contribution not just to a popular understanding of why the treaty turned out the way it did, but to the literature of policy making and diplomacy.
It is also an important landmark in Irish attitudes to transparency in public administration. Although in the past some have contributed to academic journals, for the first time a serving diplomat has been allowed to describe in a book for wider circulation the details of a negotiation in which he was a significant player.
That is tribute to a more open approach in the Department of Foreign Affairs, in part a product, it has to be said, of the success of the Institute of European Affairs in encouraging an unthreatening dialogue between the worlds of the civil service, academic life, and civil society, whether journalists, NGOs, or just interested members of the public.
McDonagh, well experienced in EU affairs as diplomat, a former cabinet member in the Commission and an official in the European Parliament, could not be better placed to write the story - he served on the Irish team with Gay Mitchell from the earliest days of the Reflection Group in June 1995 and then in the InterGovernmental Conference representatives group under Noel Dorr from a year later. And the Irish Presidency's key role in brokering a deal offered unparalleled insight.
Yet if he has the advantage of the privileged access of a negotiator, his insider perspective also constitutes the book's biggest weakness. There is only so much a serving public servant can say, partly to respect the formal convention that these talks were ostensibly in private, partly not to cause offence to fellow member states.
Crudely put, there are good guys but no bad guys here, and McDonagh feels constrained still to use all too often the deliberately vague formulae that used to drive journalists mad at post-IGC briefings: "some member states" and "one member state". He would be the first to insist that this was never intended as a "kiss and tell" story nor even a work of history, but a description of a process and its pitfalls. Fair enough. But, for example, even the dogs in the street know that the Amsterdam summit's crucial failure to reduce veto voting substantially was the result of a German loss of nerve.
The point is important not just in European historical terms, but in the author's own terms in assessing Dutch management of the process. When did the Germans make clear their bottom line? Was it, as some have suggested, some weeks before the summit? Did the Dutch simply ignore the warning signs? Yet, such caveats aside, the book has important things to say about the nature of the EU today. The original sin of the title is the reality of the fierce contest of member state national interests that has yet to be banished from the idealistic project that is the Union.
McDonagh, a pragmatic Europhile rather than an ideologue, shows how that unresolved conflict necessarily shapes the treaty, and not necessarily for ill - in foreign policy, for example, he argues that the greater ease of decision-making that majority voting might have brought might well have served to reduce the effectiveness of the Union's diplomacy. What's the point in telling a foreign capital that X is the policy of thirteen of us when it may be that the other two member states are the only two that really matter locally? And his emphasis on the much-maligned Commission at the centre of the delicate balance between the institutions and the member states as a reconciler of national interests is both crucial and realistic in his defence of the right of each member state to have a seat at the table. The commissioners are not yet philosopher kings but serve to legitimise the Union in the member states. "Unless and until full political union exists in reality and people's hearts - and maybe some day in the distant future it will - there can be no question of acting as if it does," he argues. "There will be no institutional unilateral disarmament."
He chides the press for its rush to judgment on the treaty after the summit, arguing that, for all its institutional weaknesses, this was the "upper end of realism". (Some would say the lower end of effectiveness).
"A complex negotiation of this sort, which involves its disappointments as well as its achievements, cannot aim for the potential perfect score of the gymnast," he argues. "It should rather be judged like a football match which, whatever its quality, inevitably has its missed passes and tackles and opportunities."
Indeed, a bit like those nil-nil victories we are famous for!
"So," to cannibalise his E.M. Forster quote, "two cheers for Amsterdam . . . there is no occasion to give three." Three cheers, though, for McDonagh's efforts.
Patrick Smyth is European Correspondent of The Irish Times