Kevin Myers: What beautiful timing: the European Union released the latest version of its draft constitution, with all sorts of fantasies about "common" defence and "common" foreign policies, within weeks of Europe showing it has about as much unity as Portadown in July.
This would be entertaining if the man working at the heart of the European project, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, wasn't, even by abominable standards of French sleaziness, spectacularly delinquent. He is perhaps the only living European leader who has dined with an infantivorous cannibal, and was then given the Congolese crown jewels. Which he has to this day.
I don't know whether he was wearing the jewels when he devised the bejewelled document that is the draft constitution. But we shouldn't be surprised that his initial draft proposals provoked few amendments from the French government. Nor should we surprised by the duplicitous eurobabble emanating from those countries which opposed any allied intervention in Iraq regardless of the circumstances.
It's all history, cry the eurobabblers. Let us work within the new consensus. This precisely the kind of pseudo-consensual euromerde which the French Minister for European Affairs, Noëlle Lenoir, uttered earlier this week, as if the crisis over Iraq were some inexplicable plague that had emerged from nowhere, was now gone, and there was simply no longer any point in talking about it.
Miss Christmasse the Black uses history in a way that Irish republicans do: as if it were a vector towards a particular, chosen goal; and from its troves, she finds whatever evidence she needs to prove her case. Why did the East Europeans support the American-British position? Oh, because countries which had emerged from the Soviet block felt a stronger need for security, she said. But never fear: progress in European defence would anchor them more firmly in the EU.
No. Countries that had emerged from Communist tyranny did not imperil their future membership of the EU - as threatened by that other French crook, the blackmailing, swindling bully Chirac - by backing the US because of insecurity, but because they have a real sense of what it is like to live under tyranny.
And are they - and we - meant to be reassured by her promise that with "progress in European defence" such differences will vanish? Why should they vanish? Why should the sense of self and of history and of duty of eastern European peoples vanish simply because Brussels wants it that way? Of course, our eurocracy thinks like Stalin: it really believes that human nature can be shaped according to the diktats of some central, albeit elected, authority.
And when it receives the clearest evidence possible that Europe is a deeply divided entity, as it did over Iraq, it ignores it, sweeps it under the carpet and, once it seems to be invisible, continues to jabber in eurobabble.
Iraq should teach us that: and the rights and the wrongs of the argument are utterly irrelevant. Europe broke asunder over the war, with France in particular following deeply non-European instincts - Arabist, African, and most of all, self-interested - yet presenting them all as expressions of Euro-unionism.
And this is what the French do. They follow their national interests and declare those interests to be in the interests of Europe. This is what that cadaverous old rogue Giscard has been doing, sitting there with his cannibal's baubles on his head as he pens an outline document for Europe, proposing common defence and foreign policies, as realistically as he might discuss the Lapland olive harvest and the future of the Sicilian walrus.
Of course, here in Ireland, the eurodebate has never got underway, because we've been sitting beneath a downpipe of euroboodle for the past 30 years, and because our foreign and defence policies are almost meaningless, freeloading sub-variants of British and US policy. EU foreign policy, whenever it has done anything at all, has normally been driven by French or German interests: hence the calamitous and premature recognition of Croatia at Germany's behest in 1992.
That tragedy does demand this question: what is the chemistry that enables one political union to survive, but not another? For Yugoslavia seemed to have it. So did Czechoslovakia. Fifteen years ago who could have foreseen the epidemic of little -istans where the Soviet Union then stood? Switzerland has no logical right to exist, but it is one of the most successful polities in world history. The US stayed together only at the cost of enduring one of the most brutal civil wars ever known, followed by a terrible "pacification" of the conquered territories. Yet despite that coercion, the most loyal citizens of the US, and much of its officer corps, come from the old confederacy.
Does this make any sense? No, it doesn't. Presuming that people or even polities are invariably susceptible to logical analysis is a classical Enlightenment fantasy: and there is no greater fantasy of reasonable, intelligent and enlightened people, such as Miss Christmasse the Black, than the europroject, with its "common" economic, employment, defence and foreign policies.
A large free trade area is one thing; so too is the creation of common laws in support of common liberties; and so too are the transfer of structural funds to economically backward areas such as we once were, and eastern Europe now is. But a union, with common defence and foreign policies, is something else entirely.
But, of course, eurosceptics are also euro-abstentionists: so there is no dissenting voice in Brussels. The juggernaut of the Brussels euro-imagination rolls on, even as before its eyes, the divisions of Belgium prove what a fantasy it all is.