We have embraced the euro happily, it seems, and the Taoiseach is againsaying the Nice Treaty will need to be addressed this year. As our attitudetowards the EU develops, Eamon Delaney argues that we are indeedcloser to Boston than Berlin - at least culturally
After last month's European Summit near Brussels, the European Union decided to go away and rethink its whole image, and set up a grand-sounding "Convention on the Future of Europe". Perhaps they heeded the vote of the Irish people on the Nice Treaty. The Belgian Prime Minister, Mr Guy Verhof-stadt, certainly thought so. He accepted that we rejected Nice because it was deficient, with the EU "failing to communicate properly its plans for the future, or allay fears which were perfectly predictable".
This is more than the Taoiseach or a surly Foreign Minister are prepared to concede. Like hurt children, they doggedly repeat their belief that the public were confused and that the treaty will have to be passed. And that's that.
But how did the Irish, once regarded as model Europeans, become so sceptical? Bluntly, our economic success has taken us further away from the higher taxation, interventionist EU, and not closer. We were slapped down twice for having too much economic growth, and we didn't like it.
But what about us individuals? Are we more, or less, European? More, obviously, but wouldn't this have happened anyway. Perhaps from here on in we will develop as Europeans, in tandem with, or outside the context of the EU. Especially since the EU seems to be in some confusion right now.
It is hardly coincidental that our support for the EU has waned just as the great European dream of unity has itself gone off the boil, and now needs the services of resurrected old worthies such as Giscard d'Estaing.
Nor is it coincidental that our pessimism comes at a time of an economic downturn, since the downturn marks the culmination of a dramatic economic transformation, and possible evolution away from the EU. For, although it is true that the massive transfu-sion of EU funds kick-started the boom, the actual business culture had much more to do with US investment and an American-type business culture, than with the strictures of an envious, top-heavy EU. Hence the slapdown for our Finance Minister.
It would be glib to say that we took the money and ran. Instead, the aid came at a time of our economic and cultural emergence as a nation and, possibly to the distress of Brussels bureaucrats, the EU assisted this. But the boom was only one part of our accelerated development in recent years.
We had a lot of catching up to do, after the economic crisis and bitter social/moral issues of the 1990s and, like the boom, this often painful development was an individual experience, not shared by other post-imperial European countries. Part of it was finding a settlement in Northern Ireland, something the US assisted us in, much more than the EU, who studiously ignored the situation for 20 years, a fact not often emphasised.
We are essentially an independent, neutral country. When the EU was 12 member states we were the only non-military member and conscious of it.
We were the brake on an otherwise NATO alliance. But when the EU expanded to an unwieldly 15 going on 24, it became somewhat confusing.
We have no problem with international participation, and our UN commitments long predate those in Europe. Nor have we any problem with a bigger economic market, which was, after all, the EU's original purpose. But it is the overreaching plans for political unification that we are suspicious of, along with the almost inevitable slippery slope to military involvement.
What a change then from 18 years ago, when our presidency of the EU came at a time of great excitement. Eastern Europe was emerging from Communism. Germany was about to reunite, and so we got two summits, instead of the usual one.
It was all very glamorous: the flags, the motorcades and C.J. Haughey, the "President of Europe" showing his counterparts around his stately home. But who now is interested in such pageantry?
The second Dublin summit coincided exactly with our first soccer World Cup, a fitting overlap with what for many was a far more exciting barometer of European participation and international prestige
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GERMANY was reunited in 1990, but within a year Yugoslavia disintegrated into horrendous conflict and EU attempts to intervene possibly made the situation worse.
The differing, confused attitudes of EU states on this, and on the Gulf War, followed by years of in-fighting about the EU itself made the European experience look like a growing failure.
At heart, its members would always be more different than similar. And here's a thought: many of the original Eurocrats feel European integration has fulfilled as much as it can.
From its origins in the coal and steel agreements between France and Germany it has come a long way and for that they are grateful. Europe is not our political, or historical destiny. We did not participate in the two world wars which shaped it.
Instead, we had national revolt (1916) in the midst of a European war. We were not directly involved in the Cold War. In a strange sort of way, we become involved in Europe in the way the US does: dragged in, but keen to build economic links.
This is not surprising given that our relationship with the US is emotionally closer. Mary Harney's famous remark, that "we are closer to Boston than to Berlin", was never more evident than after September 11th, with a National Day of Mourning and large-scale condolences outside the US embassy.
We are more European now, in our fashions and our foods, but we are still mainly Anglo-American in our appetites. We are incredibly absorbent and probably better "mixed" Europeans than most, and certainly more than, say, the mono-cultural Spanish or the self-obsessed Greeks. We holiday in these places, but, more than ever, we travel further afield, now that we have cheap flights and more money. And this is, probably, the key change: the world is suddenly more open than it used to be.
For western Europeans, inside the EU, our rediscovered scepticism probably comes as no surprise. We have long been perceived as a English-speaking, former British people who are close to America and yet stubbornly neutral.
And yet such a perception may surprise us, since we think of ourselves as being more like other Europeans - gregarious and sociable, and, basically, a Mediterranean country stuck too far north.
In short, we got the best out of the EU, when the EU was at its best, but we are a sceptical island people, whose next parish to the west is America.
Eamon Delaney is a former diplomat and author of The Accidental Diplomat, a memoir of his time at the Department of Foreign Affairs, published last year