Fashionable talk of a "European culture" is pointless and may even be damaging

Ideals animate every endeavour worth its salt. Robert Musil, an Austrian novelist at the turn of the 20th century, wrote that each of us has a second country in which everything we do is innocent. For Americans, that second country is an idealised America, where every child can become president and through which runs the yellow brick road. In European nations, Europe is that second country. When Franco's dictatorship fell, Spaniards shouted in the streets that "we are Europeans now." To peoples little affected by the appeals of God or country, the EU has become (to borrow a favourite phrase of Senator John McCain), "a cause greater than themselves".

But European leaders now want to go beyond idealism to assert particular qualities of Europeanness and make specific arguments about the EU.

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It is true that, compared with Americans, Europeans spend much time thinking of, talking about and subsidising their high culture. But this does not mean they are inspired by it. Like the rest of the world, Europeans' cultural references are at least as populist and American--"Desperate Housewives", "Temptation Island"--as they are high-minded and European. Proxy measures of creativity, such as patent awards, the quality of universities, the numbers of films and videos, are all strongly in America's favour. It seems extremely unlikely that cultural vitality will somehow renew European ideals about the EU. For too many, it is America that is creative and exciting, not Europe.

Even if Europe were more stirring than it is, this would still not impinge on the EU one way or the other.

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At best, talking about culture is a distraction from the harder task of economic reform. It could also become an insidious way of stopping Turkey from joining the EU (Turkey might meet the formal conditions of entry but not count as culturally European).

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Worst of all, talk of Europe's cultural distinctiveness can be a way of attacking globalisation.

But Europe has its myth. Maybe it does not talk to you in Ireland, but it does work here on the continent: Europe is the reconciliation of France and Germany (and the relief of those squeezed in the middle). The problem of Europe is that it has brought in members that have not accepted this idea of reconciliation, and see intra-European stuff as a continuation of old fights in a new way.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes