What happened
Speaking to a City of London audience this week, the Prime Minister advocated an "enlightened patriotism" within Europe. He said Labour would encourage closer European ties while vigorously defending British interests on subjects such as tax harmonisation and football transfer policy. Hours earlier, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook had challenged the media to try a "positive storyline" about Europe instead of scare stories about "an EU in which jackbooted Eurocops roam the streets of Britain, arresting anyone eating bent bananas or drinking beer in pints". But German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer didn't help Labour's cause by lauding European integration and "the very clear sharing of sovereignty". Shadow foreign secretary Francis Maude said the Government was "in deep denial" of what was really happening in Europe.

What the editorials said
For too long, said the Financial Times, the debate about Europe has been reflected through the "distorting prism" of supposed threats to British sovereignty. Tony Blair is right to make the point that all the biggest national challenges, from crime and drugs to Aids prevention, require cross-border co-operation. But when Robin Cook tries to debunk the Eurosceptic "myths", he must beware of thereby putting them back on the agenda. The tide may be turning, said The Independent, but Europhiles dare not hope for too much: the Government has lost its nerve on this issue before.

How can Robin Cook pretend that the European superstate is some figment of our imagination, demanded the Daily Mail. "How else should we describe an entity that began as a trading bloc and now has its own currency, flag, executive, bureaucracy, parliament, and tax revenues, and is acquiring a constitution, criminal code, army, police force and 'standardised' passport?"

What the commentators said
Something big is happening in Europe, said Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph. An EU rapid reaction force is to be created by 2003: 80,000 men backed by 300 aircraft and a navy, based in Brussels. MEPs are currently voting to establish a European Police College as well as Eurojust, a collection of magistrates working together to defeat organised crime. Gradually, an EU criminal jurisdiction is emerging, and with each new EC directive, essential tenets of British law are being undermined. Meanwhile, as the growing volume of business requires more majority voting, the British veto comes under ever-greater pressure. The mercury on the European thermometer is certainly rising, said Anne McElvoy in The Independent, and when Tony Blair starts redefining patriotism, we are wise to be suspicious. The Government is facing both ways on Europe. On the one hand, Blair is trying to convince his European partners that he is still a major player, although not yet a member of the eurozone; on the other, he doesn't want to come back from Nice looking as though he didn't fight for Britain.

Blair's view of Europe is "like a warm breeze wandering the political landscape", said Simon Jenkins in The Times. He has failed to confront any of the deeper political issues, unlike the US writer Larry Siedentop, who has just published an essay on European democracy. Siedentop compares Europe's centralising tendency, which he attributes mainly to the French, with America's constitution, which protects the interests of every state in the union. In place of US-style "checks and balances", the EU has only the "new dictatorship of European bureaucrats". This analysis is not Eurosceptic, says Jenkins. It is born of a simple desire to build legal constraints into any new treaty, and to "stop this juggernaut" until they are in place.

What next?
The Government's offensive on Europe is designed to prepare the ground for concessions at the Nice summit, says the FT's Andrew Parker. Britain is willing to give up one of its two EU commissioners prior to enlargement, in return for greater voting power in the Council of Ministers. Qualified majority voting will be extended to areas such as industrial and transport policy, although Britain will retain its veto on defence, social security and taxation. Some EU member states will be allowed to integrate faster on certain issues.

Chaos in Palm Beach

Edging closer to Europe

The Dome disaster

Briefing
Japan's brutal treatment of British PoWs


George W. Bush is famously incoherent. But he might derive some comfort from the fact that academics at Yale are no easier to understand. In a fascinating piece in The Sunday Times, Helena Echlin, an Oxford graduate, described how she went there to do a PhD in English and American literature, but gave up in despair, unable to fathom what she was being taught. Here is her account of one particular seminar. "'The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism,' a young man is saying. He pauses for a long time. Underneath the table one leg is twisted round the other. 'In order to approach participating in' - long pause - 'the unity which is no longer accessible.' My fellow students utter a long, soft gasp, as if at a particularly beautiful firework. 'Brilliant,' says the professor. 'Very finely put. But I didn't quite understand it. Could you repeat it?'" The reason for the professor's incompre-hension, of course, is obvious. But this exchange, says Echlin, sums up the way English literature is now taught at Yale. This wonderful old university's English department, in her view, is now a place where "obfuscation is de rigeur" and where analysis matters more than the texts themselves.

Literary criticism, here as in America, has been heading this way for more than 20 years. But it is sad to think it's reached this point. Echlin recounts one telling moment. She asked one professor what was on her bedside table. "The answer: a bestseller about physics. 'No novels?' Her reply: 'I don't read literature for pleasure any more.'"