Yes, well, after spending almost the entire weekend reading thousands of words on the European Draft Constitution, I can now safely say I understand absolutely none of it. Nothing. Rien. Nichts. Niente. Nada. And whatever "nothing" is in Polish - lbrnwywcz, probably, writes Kevin Myers
This lbrnwywcz is not an exaggerated form of "a little". I genuinely know nothing whatever about the European project, and worse (or better) don't understand any of the language in which it is written, even when that language is "English".
Of course, even that English is not English - apart, that is, from Bertie Ahern's aside about "a dog's dinner". I understood that bit, though the EU translators might have struggled with it, and foreign commentators might wrongly have assumed it was a dismissive reference to Albert Reynolds's pet-food factory, or the row between Irish Muslims and Irish Travellers outside a Hallal abattoir, or the export insurance given by the Government to Anglo-Irish Beef Processors to sell beef to Iraq.
And that's the point about language. The key to understanding it is less the words that are used than their cultural context. And the language used by the Euroliterate is rich in cultural contexts to them, but not to me. Reading through the various explanations of the constitution, and the debates surrounding it, throughout last weekend - easily the worst few days of my entire life - I was reminded of the time I opened up my first Windows explanatory book, a handy 1,200 or so pages of Siliconese mumbo-jumbo, and my brain instantly turned to magma.
We may make fun of Eamon de Valera's Constitution, with its references to the Most High God, its sturdy embrace of Catholicism, and its various and apparently meaningless pieties throughout, but its first challenge was to speak to the people who had to endorse it, and for most of them, those pieties were not in the least meaningless. Moreover, for all his faults, at least Dev had a vision for Ireland which he shared with many others, and the Constitution was an expression of that vision: I doubt, however, whether a Texan could have understood the cultural context of the Constitution, and therefore could not have begun to understand the real meaning of the words therein.
Similarly, when the founding fathers of the United States met in Philadelphia they had, generally speaking, various visions about the future of the land they were inhabiting, which they could dispute in a common tongue. But equally, it's unlikely that Hurons or Choctaws, not to speak of the newly arrived slaves from Dahomey, even had they been able to speak English, could have made the least sense of the Hamilton and Jefferson definitions of Enlightenment which so studiously excluded them.
Europe today is full of Hurons and Choctaws, who understand neither what the governing élite is up to, nor any of the Eurobabble emanating from its councils, in whatever language. To be sure, most of us Choctaws feel sentimentally European, and in a rather more practical way we share a determination to avoid the unbelievable evils of the 20th century. We want freedom of movement and trade, and the protection of predictable and reasonable law across Europe.
But that is not the same thing as living within the European political project, with a single constitution, heading in a direction those of us who have not been indoctrinated in Eurobabble even begin to understand. In part, perhaps this is because there are some concepts so inimical to one's understanding of self and identity that they resist comprehension.
And as the North should have taught us, people can't help the way they feel. Are we European? Of course we are, and at times passionately so, as at the moment, while we are captivated by a uniquely European sporting contest. But we are more than that. We are also part of the Anglophone world-wide cultural, legal and trading community, which we usually take for granted. This international community effortlessly features artists like Kylie Minogue and Mel Gibson, Irish-Australians who are hugely important participants in US popular culture. At a more lasting level, rulings in American, Canadian or British courts can be cited in Irish courts, and vice versa. Even though the constituent peoples of global Anglophonia are very different, we share many concepts that are almost in the DNA of the English language, and furthermore, fresh ideas and cultural shifts spread across this international Anglophone community with astonishing speed.
Moreover, do I fully trust this other community to which we belong, the land of Eurobabble? Can we rely on it to defend us? Did it not stand by, helpless and bickering, when Serbs massacred Muslim Bosnians by the thousand? And was it not the armed might of Anglophonia which brought peace there? So in the 2020s, will the Eurobabblers be capable of formulating coherent foreign and defence policies which will be honestly implemented by all the component governments? I cannot read Eurobabble, so maybe in the thousands of words which last weekend fused my brain into a single incoherent mass of gibbering protoplasm, there is the single answer, Yes. But I doubt it.
Moreover, I don't see it as possible. So what value a constitution which offers pieties which do not bind, and policies which do not command obedience? Most compellingly of all, I am instinctively an Atlanticist. For all its infuriating and often insufferable self-absorption, I see the US as the only true and enduring guardian of my values and my liberties.
And in this, even amid the din of Eurobabble, I suspect I am not alone.