Any process of developing a positive business relationship means bridging a cultural barrier of some kind or another. Even a person-to-person relationship between individuals from the same community or country implies bridging a cultural barrier, because everyone carries a 'microculture' around in his or her head.

But when it comes to dealing or negotiating with people from another continent or another country, the cultural barriers are much greater, though not always more evident (what Edward Hall calls 'the hidden differences').

The most evident difference is language. The solution is simple - you either hire interpreters, or you all speak English (dommage, mes amis francophones, mais c'est comme ça). But the outcome is not guaranteed. It depends who's hiring the interpreters, and sometimes it also depends how good the interpreters are. Moreover interpretation involves an inevitable time lag, so it's best not to tell jokes because the reaction to your joke is likely to come when you've changed to something serious. In fact, avoid humour in any case until you can be sure the relationship you are developing is a positive one.

On the other hand if you decide all to speak English, then those of you who are non-English-mother-tongue have both a problem and an opportunity. The problem is that you may not entirely understand what the other side is saying, you may hesitate to express an opinion and, quite understandably, you will feel frustrated. But the opportunity is that you can quite reasonably claim you have not understood what has been said (when in reality you have!) and ask the other side to explain themselves more fully. You then use that 'extra time' to decide how you are going to respond.

In fact, if you feel frustrated, things are not going to work out - so the other side is ultimately going to feel frustrated too. Negotiations have to be 'win-win', if not the deal won't work.

So much for language, but what about silence? This is also a negotiating technique - and a very powerful one at that. Some people like Finns and Russians are comfortable with silence, others like the French, the Italians and even the English find it positively unnerving (I recently heard of a French salesman who made a presentation to a Finnish board and, confronted with total silence at the end of his presentation, started all over again...). Silence can be a great negotiating technique and, used intelligently, can even bridge cultural barriers - provided both sides play the game.

So much for language and non-language. But then there's body language. Photographs pulled from the front pages of various newspapers show that what is normal for people from one culture may be abnormal for people from another. Even within Europe, personal 'bubbles of space' (technically what is called 'the intimate zone') range from minimal with the Spanish and the Russians to significant with the English and enormous with the Norwegians. Gestures and sign language also convey different things to different people: avoid them if you can!

So much for the superficial. What is going on deeper down? For a start, the way we tend to approach negotiations. Western Europeans - and their descendants in the United States and other predominantly Anglo-Saxon countries like Canada and Australia – are generally individualist in spirit. Go further east into the Orthodox countries and beyond, and the spirit is increasingly collectivist.

Individualist people tend to be task- or issue-oriented and also dependent on written contractual relationships: the relationship develops through the common experience rather than preceding it. Collectivist people by comparison tend to be relationship-oriented and, for them, personal trust is more important than a written contract: they develop the relationship before embarking on the task. Even in Europe there are differences: Latins and French people in particular want to 'check out' a person before buying his or her products. Even the English allow the personal relationship to influence their decision on whether to buy a product or not. With the Germans on the other hand, business is business - and that's that!

We even tend to reason differently. The French prefer to work conceptually in a cartesian spirit ("OK, it works in practice, but will it work in theory?"), the English think pragmatically ("what if?"), and the Germans have a legalistic frame of mind ("what's the precedent?"). Attitudes to time also differ. Americans and Anglo-Saxons generally think that "time is money". Germans, Swedes - and particularly the Japanese - consider that time has no value unless it is put to work in the right way: they are prepared to take longer deliberating in order to come up with the right decision first time.

Sense of punctuality varies too. It is very precise in the Nordic countries - where people set and respect both the starting times and the finishing times for meetings. It is less precise in Mediterranean countries, where the significance of a meeting depends as much on the quality of the company and the conversation. For similar reasons, northerners tend to tackle their agendas in a predetermined sequence ('monochronic'), whereas southerners are much more flexible in attitude and prepared to jump around from one point to another ('polychronic').

To bridge the cultural barriers means being aware of all these things. It also means being aware of the protocol (often unspelled-out) of the other side, in particular the hierarchy, the management styles and the attitudes to authority of the people you are dealing with, the way they share or do not share information, and how they communicate. It is also important to know when and how to introduce personal matters to your professional relationship, if at all: wait for your host to take the first step in bridging between the two.

The most important aspect of international business is how people behave when they come to the negotiation table. One extreme in negotiating techniques is well expressed in the advice to a young European planning to do business in a Middle East market: "If he asks for ten, he means eight and he wants six. So it's worth four. Offer two."

Called positional bargaining, this typically 'southern' approach damages relationships, destroys credibility, is inefficient, and often produces unwise agreements. Yet it is no worse than the other extreme, the 'northern' approach which baldly states the terms at the outset - "take it or leave it" - and provides no room for negotiating manoeuvre.

A Finnish representative to the European Union acknowledges his typically Nordic attitude when he talks about Brussels: "There's a bazaar culture here and we're not really good at playing it. We're much more realistic in negotiations, and it doesn't always help us. If our bottom line is 100, we start bidding at 120 and the other countries start at 200."

At the European level, there are two traditional bargaining styles: integrative bargaining, where the two sides try to build bridges between their relative standpoints, and distributive bargaining, where they progress stepwise using a 'carrot-and-stick' approach (i.e. concession-appeal-concession-appeal).

Various cultural constraints influence these negotiating styles. One of them is varying attitudes to time (Anglo-Saxons should on no account pressure Mediterraneans with remarks like: "remember I have a plane to catch at 1700 hours!"). Others are relative readiness to take risks, different bases of trust, and the various types of argument that may be used (logic, experience, tradition, dogma, intuition, emotion, etc).

Principled Negotiation is the recommended approach that bridges cultural barriers in international business dealings. Using this approach, the effective negotiator learns to listen and watch carefully, to represent his or her needs clearly at the same time as understanding the other party's needs, to explore mutual interests and develop multiple options, to adopt a flexible approach to dealing with the various issues, to be prepared to ask questions, to test both sides' understanding regularly, and to summarise frequently.

© Richard Hill

rhill@europublic.com

It’s no secret that Italy’s economia sommersa is one of the biggest in Europe. Traditional estimates of no less than 15 per cent of GDP have now been topped by an independent study which puts the Italian black economy at nearly 25 per cent, one-third of which is not surprisingly attributed to creative minds in the Mezzogiorno – Italy has always produced great artists.

As Italian sociologist Franco Ferrarotti said in a moment of blinding candidness, speaking of ‘raccomandazione’, the custom of seeking special treatment from people in power or close to it (a practice dating back to Cicero): “Essentially the judges are saying what everybody in Italy believes. When a favour works successfully, it ceases to be a crime and becomes a work of art.”

All the more surprising, then, that in early September, the Italian Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, defended the country’s approach to tackling the Roma problem with the words: “We aren’t xenophobic, but serious people who want laws to be respected.”

OK, maybe he was speaking in defence of the government and not the country…

The country has a long record of sidestepping legality, in fact it is something Italians are proud of when they say their minds are tangenziale. They are indeed exceptionally creative. They are also very realistic. As the head of Italy’s Carabinieri force in Afghanistan said recently about Afghan recruits, “it’s better to join the Taliban; they pay more money!”

One example of the Italian creativity/realism factor is the ceramics factory near Rome which was mounted on wheels to evade local tax collectors. Another was the survival, until the late-1960s, of a government department for ‘the regularisation of fascist affairs’, some 15-people strong, which the government itself did not know existed.

A late-1995 medical check in Naples of 100 postal employees with disability pensions (in addition to their wages) found 94 of them to be perfectly healthy. As the Financial Times commented at the time: “Many had done military service, some were key players in local football teams and most were in their mid-thirties. One fit person even claimed he had been cured at Lourdes but had kept quiet about his altered status.”

“Italians”, says Robert Graham of the Financial Time, talking about the ‘great mamma state’, “are still greedily sucking this gigantic breast in thousands of legal ways: jobs for life, indexed wages, discounts, subsidies and generous pensions. The system is ever more abused: from illicit tapping into electricity supplies to the 16 civil servants found receiving overtime – on the basis that they were working 29 hours a day.”

Obviously something needs to change – but, even if it does, Italians will probably be sufficiently creative to get around it. So the question may be: is Italy destined to go the same way as Greece? But, then, we have to remember that the SMEs in the area around the town of Treviso north of Venice have, on their own, an output that exceeds Greek GNP…

I first started worrying about the European Commission’s ability to express itself clearly when I came across the following statement: “For the Nuclear Safety Sector, a major sector with some 15-20% of the Tacis budget, 2003 was a year that saw major changes and improvements, both in the managerial sense as well as in the start of major important projects. The safety in Nuclear Power Plants of Soviet design has been a major concern since a mission of the International Atomic Energy Agency to nuclear power plants in Central and Eastern Europe in the early nineties revealed major shortcomings.” I felt that this could be the beginning of a major problem.

But there is a bigger problem, namely the broad-scale adoption by Commission officials of weasel words and phrases that either bankrupt themselves by overuse or fail to communicate the realities of the flesh-and-blood world we live in. One of these is ‘the European citizen’. Why can’t we talk about ‘people’ or, if you prefer it, ‘the public’, or just simply ‘Europeans’? None of this is demeaning and it gets closer to real language. It also has the benefit, for the British, of not bearing overtones of the French Revolution and smelling of sulphur – the sort of sulphur you sniff when people talk about ‘civil society’.

One suspects the influence of the French as founding members of the Community. What we call ‘players’ are ‘actors’ (like ‘non-state actors’) in Eurospeak. The French influence is also evident in the use of words like ‘actions’ and ‘interventions’ which, in normal English, are not found in the plural. English mounts counter-attacks with descriptive words like ‘concrete’, but when Eurocrats use good solid and pragmatic words like these – as in ‘concrete orientations’, ‘concrete results’ and ‘time-bound concrete deliverables’ (visions of Mafia victims) – they are generally referring to intangibles like strategies and decisions and, again, they overuse them grossly.

I also notice another intrusive alien influence: the Dutch tendency to stick separate words together, resulting in things like ‘workpackage’ – a word (?) I particularly dislike.

Of course we have to have definitions to cope with the complexities of everyday life. But some of them definitely get deformed. Witness the following statement: “The project will persuade armed non-state actors (NSAs)… not to use antipersonnel mines” Armed non-state actors in this case are presumably synonymous with terrorists! The statement then goes on to refer to the need to “minimise the impact of landmines on communities, refugees and internally displaced persons” – an expression that conjures up images of citizens with their entrails hanging out…

But one of the biggest binds is the overuse of words that no longer have any real content, words like ‘sustainable’. Sustainable this, sustainable that, even ‘sustainable towns and cities’ – has no one heard of Athens or Rome? The most sustainable thing in the world seems to be the word itself.

The other bind is the introduction of new weasel words that really add nothing to understanding, but clearly have an intended ‘smoke-and-mirrors’ effect. One of the most recent and most offensive is ‘operationalise’, a verb derived from a noun that, as far as I can tell, means essentially the same as ‘implement’. OK, that’s a long word too, but at least it’s three syllables shorter. Other words the Commission is inordinately fond of are ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘cross-cutting’.

On the other hand , one can’t blame the Commission for the current engouement with the word ‘metrics’. The French may have invented the metric system, but the Americans are the ones to blame for flogging this word to death. The Commission sticks to ‘deliverables’ which, when all is said and done, comes to much the same thing. It may even be worse…

This kind of alienation is reinforced by the fact that, inevitably the Commission is often obliged to put its messages into indirect speech and abstract contexts, often supported by dry and distant data. Speaking in his book Dark Angels of the art of seducing the reader, John Simmons said: “It is a matter of putting an individual at the center of the story. And it is not whoever happens to be the president of the European Commission at the time.”  

At the end of the day, as the British say, all these habits cloud the messages the European institutions are attempting to pass on to the European… citizen. In reality, in most cases these messages are really aimed at the other European institutions. The fact that the European Commission has to ‘sell’ its ideas and performance to the Member State administrations that constitute its front-line clients means its messages are often diverted from the real audience further back, the great European public. And, as the French say, tant pis.

Unless you happen to be American or Asian, there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ European. The reality is much more complex… and richer. But it does take time and experience to be fully aware of this reality. Its complexity comes out in practical matters like the comparative statistics for average payment terms in business transactions which vary enormously from North to South – Finnish companies have to wait three times as long if they export to Italy, for example. To some extent you see the same factor at work in the statistics for the shadow economies of Western Europe.

Some sense can be made of criminality - and of the problems facing Europe today - by considering the basic orientations of people. The first is the issue of what can be called Rules or Relationships?. Some cultures – Russia, Bulgaria and Greece, for example – are much more motivated by their loyalty to a friend than they are by ‘abstract’ rules and regulations. Others, in particular the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon cultures, are the opposite. Clearly this has an impact on people’s attitudes towards those breaking the rules – whether by helping a friend in court, cheating financially, or indulging in what some people call ‘clientelism’.

Edward Hall, an American sociologist, identified the relationship-oriented cultures – what he called the ‘High Context Cultures’ – with two characteristics in particular: the ability to operate more or less intuitively on ‘stored knowledge’ and a tendency to do things in a ‘non-sequential’ way. In contrast, the ‘Low Context Cultures’ tend to apply direct knowledge (for example by briefing themselves before meetings) and deal with issues in a predetermined and sequential way. The further southwards and eastwards we go across Europe, the more we move from Low Context to High Context cultures.

The second issue, in the context of cultural attitudes to fraud and corruption, is Transparency or Concealment?.  Again, the people of north-western Europe – the Nordics and the Anglo-Saxons – are fervent believers in transparency at all costs. This became apparent when Finland and Sweden joined the Union in 1995, the Finns in particular helping to introduce something like a ‘cultural revolution’ to the European Commission. Their preference for talking and tackling openly things that people further south would prefer to leave unsaid has caused a great deal of unrest in many circles.

The third issue is what can be called Conformity or Challenge?. Some cultures regard getting around the rules as a ‘David and Goliath’ scenario, where the individual cheater or defrauder is David and the authorities – and, by extension, the European Commission – are Goliath. Such people tend to admire the offender, either for what they perceive as his ingenuity or his courage. This attitude inevitably tends to encourage the spirit of clientelismo dear to the Italians, mirrored in the enchufe of the Spanish and the rousfeti of the Greeks.

This is not generally regarded as a problem in a well organised society like that of the Dutch, though even they and the Nordics have their ‘inner circles’: it’s easier to great ‘clubs’ in small countries! Yet, perhaps prompted by their natural sense of frugality, even the Dutch can be tricky (without breaking the law) or, like some Dutch traffic policemen, responsive to bribes from speeding motorists (when they’re definitely breaking it!).

Specialists – spokespeople, journalists and others – exposed to frequent dealing with the people from other cultures have no difficulty in observing these ‘national’ cultural differences at work. It is important to be aware of them without letting them become stereotypes!

So that Balkans bogeyman – the row about Macedonia (sorry, FYROM) – is raising its ugly head again. Like Serbia’s stance on Kosovo, Greek opposition draws on the historical mythmaking of communities that claim to have suffered the indignity of occupation by the Ottomans (an experience often portrayed in that part of the world as much worse than it really was).

The Greek attitude fully exploits the fact that there is no clear identification with real estate. Pre-Alexander, classical Greece was a conglomeration of city-states. With Alexander, it became an empire which extended to Afghanistan. Post-Alexander, it became part of someone’s else’s empire, Roman, Byzantine, then Ottoman. So the gap has had to be filled by an almost mystical sense of ‘Greekitude’ which is not even determined by language. The Greeks’ relaxed attitude also to ethnic identification is demonstrated by the cavalier description of the Macedonians they acquired in 1913 as ’slavophone Greeks’.
Unlike their ancient homonyms, with whom they have little in common, today’s Greeks lack a sufficiently coherent identity to feel secure (maybe they should be told that none of us Europeans have a really coherent identity). So they claim, with great vehemence and against all the evidence, direct lineage with the ancient Greeks. This overlooks the fact that – according to many people, including a number of properly informed Greeks – they are more Slav than Greek. To be more precise, Slav on the east side of the peninsula, Albanian on the other…
Even Greeks, when they feel reasonable (which is not that often), will admit to their uncertain origins. The author Nicholas Gage, a Greek despite his name, concedes that for the most part “modern Greeks are the product of centuries of racial mixing, and the invasions by the Turks, Slavs, Franks, and Italians can be read in their faces.” Not to mention the Albanians.
The classical Greeks didn’t have to worry about this kind of thing. What they were was evident to everyone, including themselves, even if Philip of Macedonia’s wife – Alexander the Great’s mother – hailed from Epirus which, in terms of the modern map of Europe, straddles Albania as well as northwest Greece.
In any case Philip and Alexander were, as Macedonians, not exactly kosher by Athenian standards. No less than Demosthenes spoke of “Philip – a man who not only is no Greek, and in no way akin to the Greeks, but is not even a barbarian from a respectable country – no, a pestilent fellow of Macedon, a country from which we never even get a decent slave.” In fact most of Alexander’s Greek contemporaries viewed the Macedonian and his cohorts with fear and loathing: they had reason to do so since he snuffed out the fragile flame of Athenian democracy.
Yet brushing aside Demosthenes’ judgement and the record of history, today’s Greeks consider Philip and Alexander to be Greek enough by contemporary standards to justify all the fuss about FYROM, the Star of Vergina, etc. The rest of us are still barbaros, barbarians.
 

The revelation that Greece had been fiddling the accounts for so long prompted one of its citizens to exclaim to a reporter that" we gave the world democracy, and we expect the European Union to support us!"

Yes, well… If the democracy we're living with today is anything to go by, we don't have much to thank the Greeks for. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

Democracy in Europe is increasingly a case of the tail wagging the dog. Europe's political leaders seriously lack the courage of their convictions, and that poses the question of whether they have any convictions, other than their own interests, in the first place. They too often say one thing to the world and then, looking over their shoulders, do the opposite to appease their electorates.

Charlemagne's columnist got it right In The Economist of February 6 when he said: "Arguably, the problem is Europe itself: its querulous voters and its cowardly political leaders."
The voters are of course querulous, though there is a certain consistency in their concerns: keeping what they've got (and not giving it to Greece), protecting jobs, stemming immigration and the like. At least we don't share the symptoms of the US, where voter mood swings cause the country to oscillate from one extreme to the other. 
The Lisbon Agenda offers lofty ideals for the future of Europe, and the European Commission tries to promote these within the limits of its remit as a regulatory organisation. But we are not going to get anywhere far or fast without the real commitment of the ultimate political decision-makers, whoever they may be. Europe needs to start moving towards closer political union, otherwise the conflicts of interest and muddling through will just persist.
Should we 'decouple' the political elite from the whims of voters? Or should we take a radically different approach to how Europe is governed? A Europe of the Regions? Yet even this may pander even more to the esprit de clocher of the French (malgré their fondness for dirigisme), the campanilismo of the Italians and the Kleinbürger mentality of the Germans (watch Karnaval on German TV!).Not to mention the Little Englanders.

Democracy has to have a purpose beyond reflecting and respecting the opinions of just everyone, which is fine for the rights of man, but far less so for the rights of mankind.
 
If the solution to European democracy is monthly summits, as Herman Van Rompuy has suggested, then God help us all! At least, judging from recent debates, the European Parliament seems to have some convictions. But one is left with the feeling that the European Union is, simply, too ungainly to be governable.

Unless you happen to be American or Asian, there is no such thing as a 'typical' European. The reality is much more complex… and richer. But it does take time and experience to be fully aware of this reality. Its complexity comes out in practical matters like the comparative statistics for average payment terms in business transactions which vary enormously from North to South - Finnish companies have to wait three times as long if they export to Italy, for example. To some extent you see the same factor at work in the statistics for the shadow economies of Western Europe.

Some sense can be made of criminality - and of the problems facing Europe today - by considering the basic orientations of people. The first is the issue of what can be called Rules or Relationships?. Some cultures - Russia, Bulgaria and Greece, for example - are much more motivated by their loyalty to a friend than they are by 'abstract' rules and regulations. Others, in particular the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon cultures, are the opposite. Clearly this has an impact on people's attitudes towards those breaking the rules - whether by helping a friend in court, cheating financially, or indulging in what some people call 'clientelism'.

Edward Hall, an American sociologist, identified the relationship-oriented cultures - what he called the 'High Context Cultures' - with two characteristics in particular: the ability to operate more or less intuitively on 'stored knowledge' and a tendency to do things in a 'non-sequential' way. In contrast, the 'Low Context Cultures' tend to apply direct knowledge (for example by briefing themselves before meetings) and deal with issues in a predetermined and sequential way. The further southwards and eastwards we go across Europe, the more we move from Low Context to High Context cultures.

The second issue, in the context of cultural attitudes to fraud and corruption, is Transparency or Concealment?.  Again, the people of north-western Europe - the Nordics and the Anglo-Saxons - are fervent believers in transparency at all costs. This became apparent when Finland and Sweden joined the Union in 1995, the Finns in particular helping to introduce something like a 'cultural revolution' to the European Commission. Their preference for talking and tackling openly things that people further south would prefer to leave unsaid has caused a great deal of unrest in many circles.

The third issue is what can be called Conformity or Challenge?. Some cultures regard getting around the rules as a 'David and Goliath' scenario, where the individual cheater or defrauder is David and the authorities - and, by extension, the European Commission - are Goliath. Such people tend to admire the offender, either for what they perceive as his ingenuity or his courage. This attitude inevitably tends to encourage the spirit of clientelismo dear to the Italians, mirrored in the enchufe of the Spanish and the rousfeti of the Greeks.

This is not generally regarded as a problem in a well organised society like that of the Dutch, though even they and the Nordics have their 'inner circles': it's easier to great 'clubs' in small countries! Yet, perhaps prompted by their natural sense of frugality, even the Dutch can be tricky (without breaking the law) or, like some Dutch traffic policemen, responsive to bribes from speeding motorists (when they're definitely breaking it!).
 
Specialists - spokespeople, journalists and others - exposed to frequent dealing with the people from other cultures have no difficulty in observing these 'national' cultural differences at work. It is important to be aware of them without letting them become stereotypes!

Many of the world's foreign affairs initiatives are powered and propelled by stereotypes. "Freedom", "evil axis" and the like. We tend to think such things are a product of folk wisdom handed down over generations. After all, didn't the Sicilians have a saying back in the 17th century that "the French are wiser than they seem and the Spanish seem wiser than they are."? It was recorded nearly 400 years ago by two visitors from the British Isles - Francis Bacon in his essays Of Seeming Wise and William Lithgow in his travel book, Rare Adventures and Painful Peregrinations - and it is as true today as it was then.
Yet quite a number of the world's stereotypes owe their origins to a governmental act of deliberate disinformation about a people. It is a practise that has been perpetrated by most nations at some time, but suffice it to quote two examples.

The first is the stereotype of the Dutch as mean, a perception that is widely shared by perfectly intelligent people. It essentially owes its existence and vitality to a propaganda campaign sponsored by His English Majesty's Government in the 17th century, with the aid of pamphleteers and diarists like Samuel Pepys.

Fearful of the challenge posed by the newly emergent Dutch republic, the court cultures of England and France could only accept the reality of Dutch wealth by linking it to a denigrating stereotype. So they commissioned the authorship of such derogatory phrases as 'going Dutch' and 'Dutch auction' to emphasise meanness, 'Dutch comfort' (thank God it's no worse!), 'Dutch courage', 'talking double-Dutch', 'talking like a Dutch uncle' and the like. Meanness, moralising and other abusive connotations were knowingly grafted onto the public image of the Dutch. 
Some people will say it's all true, but I interpret the perceived meanness of our northern neighbours as a proper appreciation of the value of things. As a long established foreigner in the Netherlands puts it: "I have come to the conclusion that the Dutch are not stingy after all. They just hate to waste anything."

The second example of deliberate disinformation is the stereotype of the Swedes. In response to an anti-USA movement in Sweden during the '60s and '70s, the CIA is reputed to have set in motion a smear campaign attributing Sweden with the world's highest suicide rate, also the highest alcoholism rate. John Alexander, an Australian interculturalist working in Sweden today, says that "the CIA programme proved effective. Ask any American and they will tell you about Sweden's high suicide rate. Even many Swedes believe it, as well as people outside Sweden. It makes you wonder what other cultural myths are out there..." Indeed.

The national political establishments find many ways to undermine the strenuous efforts made by the European Parliament to grab the attention of Europe's publics: gerrymandering the candidate lists, putting forward 'safe' people who will not challenge positions back home, and so on. On top of this, there is every sign that, out of disenchantment with these political establishments, voters in the European elections will tilt in favour of the margins rather than the mainstream.

Regrettably, this and other things suggest a resurgence of nationalism, though not in its old form (at least we can be grateful for that!). The electorate's reaction to dismal economies and unemployment is - with some justification - to put local, i.e. national, interests first. As the title of a famous comedy film about the British class wars of the 1950s put it: "I'm all right, Jack". It's ironic that, of all things, a vote for the European Parliament should be the pretext for people to behave so selfishly.

But, looking further ahead, I see the possibility of a radical return to our roots, in the form of an emerging spirit of regionalism. This has a lot of things going for it, not least the fact that current evidence suggests that the most successful bits of Europe socially and economically are the Member States, notably the Nordic countries, with populations of less than ten million!

In the words of the late A H Heineken of the Dutch brewing dynasty, "We have begun to realize that a state of thirty to fifty million people is hopelessly incompetent, with a deadening effect on provincial culture and a drearily standardizing effect on social life. For all purposes of internal administration we want a government which is accessible and economical, administering an area which is culturally unified and reasonably small."

But, as with all radical ideas, there are a number of problems. The first is the headache of integrating the administrations of the individual components of Europe - currently the Member States - which would be multiplied by the number of entities involved. As Belgium has already found out to its cost, regionalisation results in increased layers of bureaucracy and higher taxes.

A second problem is defining what constitutes a region in the sense of a coherent community, culturally and linguistically, linked with the danger of harnessing a region to an exclusive cultural or linguistic identity and creating a series of 'ghettoes'. A redistribution of dotted lines to respect ethnic, linguistic and cultural realities can also open a Pandora's box of self-interest.  Self-administration is no excuse for selfishness. Moreover, organising the world into units of ethnic exclusiveness is a daft idea which can have a debilitating effect on society. In the words of an 11th-century Hungarian cleric, "a kingdom of one race and custom is weak and fragile."
 
Finally, we come back full-circle to the biggest problem of them all: the national political establishments and the dilemma of persuading them to forsake their power and their privileges. As the Irish author and philosopher Charles Handy said in his book The Empty Raincoat, "national parliaments in Europe's larger countries, which are themselves federations of tribal regions, know that they are likely to be squeezed out if and when Europe becomes a fuller federation. Understandably, they do not relish the thought."