The subject is EU

The Guardian published Colley’s comments last week as part of a dialogue between key thinkers on Europe. The discussion framed the sprawl and complexity of a debate so often reduced to emotive positions for and against EU.

Many Europhiles are also wary of a take-it-or-leave-it stance on the 450-page constitution which would bind 25 countries under one flag; dislike of the document appears to straddle the pro- and anti- divide. Many Eurosceptics are only queasy about being shepherded into the new order by the ‘‘EU’s grand viziers’’, the ‘‘bloody minded Brussels elite’’ which ‘‘dishes out rules and regulations with total indifference to the millions of people they affect’’. They would be happier with a more democratic process that allows more freedom to pick and choose among the political initiatives for closer integration.

On the eve of the French referendum, the consensus was that regardless of the verdict, the idea of Europe requires an act of rescue. A new vision, perhaps, and some imaginative politics to carry it through. The more practical suggested a rebranding. Or simply a shift of the EU headquarters out of Brussels. As one participant in the Guardian debate asked: ‘‘Why not move it somewhere cool, like Barcelona, where everyone wants to go?’’

Bad news week

Just as the agonising on the use of anonymous sources in news reports was building up, the plot lurched back to an issue more grave.

It began with a report Newsweek published in its May 9 issue. It said that US officials had confirmed the claim of a detainee at Guantanamo Bay that a guard had flushed a Koran down a toilet; the story was based on an anonymous source. Violence erupted, particularly in Afghanistan, that left 16 people dead; the Pentagon declared war on the magazine as a representative of the ‘‘liberal media’’; Newsweek retracted the story after mere apology was deemed inadequate. And the US media generally brimmed over with comment and analysis on journalistic ethics, and specifically the place of anonymous sources in newsgathering.

Then, last week, for the first time the Pentagon confirmed mistreatment of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay. On Thursday, they said that investigators have identified five incidents of military guards and an interrogator ‘‘mishandling’’ the Koran, two of them ‘‘very likely accidental’’ and three ‘‘very likely’’ deliberate.

‘‘Shut it down. Just shut it down’’, wrote columnist Thomas Friedman in the New York Times of the POW camp at Guantanamo Bay ( see his full article on this page). Other commentators are speaking up and an issue that has been largely been left unattended in the US press may be gaining centrestage. It has to do with America’s treatment of its prisoners and how that treatment corrodes both the morality and the efficacy of Washington’s war-on-terrorism in the world. ‘‘Guantanamo Bay is becoming the anti-Statue of Liberty’’, said Friedman.

On that day

On May 27, at about 4 in the afternoon, when Guardian correspondent Victor Anant walked into the Indian prime minister’s house, his first instinct was not to look at Nehru, but at the people milling around him. After five minutes, he looked and was struck by what he saw: ‘‘No, the face was not waxen… No, the face was not that of an old man… In death as in life this was a face, not of repose, but of eager, impatient discovery’’.

Fear, he reported, was the dominant feeling that day. Last week, the Guardian dipped into its archives to retrieve the report and posted it on its website on the anniversary of that day in 1964 when India was plunged into the dreaded ‘‘after Nehru’’ era.