Charles de Gaulle once asked how one could govern a country that had so many cheeses. The same might be said of bread and beer in Germany. Where is the Brussels bulldozer?
As soon as parliament finished its work, I took my children off through the Channel Tunnel, across the Alps to Italy and back, to stay with friends in different parts of France. As always, the mainland Europe I encounter seems to be on the dark side of the moon compared with the European Union we read about in most of our press. Millions of Brits now holiday or work in another European country. And Britain is home to millions of EU citizens - 250,000 French, 60,000 Danes and who knows how many Irish passport-holders? - all valued taxpayers in Europe's most successful economy.
Like most baby-boom boys from suburban, neither-rich-nor-poor families, I didn't really do Europe until university. But how do I explain to my children what Europe was like 30 or 40 years ago? Half of it under communist rule. Spain, Portugal and Greece under generals. The Ireland of my schoolday holidays much poorer than Britain and sending half its male workers abroad to find work.
Even when, three decades ago, I started to get to know bits of Europe, it was a very different place. You needed to show passports to cross frontiers. Queues of lorries waited to have their cargoes inspected at border posts. The corner of Tuscany where I have visited friends since the early 1970s was then rutted with dusty, unpaved roads, its peasant population working as gardeners, cooks and servants for the rich Brits who bought villas there.
This summer, I drove between France and Italy as easily as one might drive between California and Oregon, or from England into Scotland. Tuscany's dirt-track roads between the sunflower fields are now black and shiny, and the scooters and tiny Fiats have been replaced by air-conditioned saloons taking the post-peasant Tuscan population to better-paid jobs. The dirty, stinking, fishing village beach where I risked a Mediterranean sea bathe in the 1970s now flies the blue flag of EU cleanliness. Does anyone remember what some British beaches were like before Brussels insisted on clean sand and water? Ireland is now a country of immigration, not emigration, with a per capita income rivalling that of France. In 1960, Spain had the same GDP per head as Mexico; today it is three times richer than its transatlantic friend. Twenty years ago, the biggest immigrant community in France was Portuguese. Today, they have gone home. Like Spain and Ireland - once provider of low-paid workers to northern Europe - Portugal has become rich and home once more to its native-born.
The euro is used everywhere. It has become a shared currency allowing people, businesses, investors and trade union negotiators to compare prices in a way that the multi-currency Europe of only a few years ago prevented.
As I drive through mainland or Irish Europe on holiday, or in my travels to EU capitals, I search in vain for the dreaded European superstate. Where is the Brussels bulldozer stamping out national identity? France seems more than ever French, Italy as profoundly Italian as ever I remember her. De Gaulle once asked how one could govern a country that produced so many cheeses. The same might be said about bread and beer in Germany. Far from homogenising and harmonising Europe's nations, the EU allows them to breathe, strengthen their own identity and, above all, give space to their own cultural existence.
In his autobiography, the oral historian Ronald Fraser writes how his nanny, arriving from Germany in the 1930s, spent her last weeks in Hamburg going to endless concerts, because, once installed in England, her contact with Kultur would be cut off. Today's Europe, including Britain, is so awash with music, opera, book fairs, film festivals and arts events that one wonders if the market can bear any more.
Back at the Foreign Office, I open a season of European films. Colin McCabe is about to publish his long-awaited biography of Jean-Luc Godard. But the Swiss-French film-maker belongs to the 20th century. Today's European film space is filled with Hungarian, Lithuanian, Danish and Finnish film-makers, all finding an audience for their work as the growth of Europe's middle class spawns a culture-hungry public.
One non-EU nation I visited was Switzerland. I arrived to work in Geneva in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher was elected. Then, the French-speaking Swiss city was pristine, Protestant and powerfully self-confident. Today's Geneva is still lively, but its centre has become as dirty as any other average European city. Its banks have to compete with other financial centres in Europe, as money now goes where it wants under the rules of globalisation. Euros are accepted in all shops.
To export to its neighbours, Swiss business - industry and services - has to obey the same rules as business in Wigan or Warsaw. Swiss frontiers have to let EU citizens in and out, and the once fiercely patrolled Swiss-French border has dissolved. No one even glances at a British car crossing over.
To return home to the dreary, cynical discourse on Europe among the Westminster political-media set is depressing. The first e-mail I open is from Estonia. Money from the "Say No to Europe" brigade in England is pouring into groups trying to stop Estonia from joining the EU.
In the nine months I have been Europe minister, I have visited roughly 50 towns and cities in Britain to talk about European enlargement, the constitutional treaty and the euro. How does one get it across that Europe is here to stay? That Britain has to be in the EU and helping to run the EU? That, far from denying national identity, EU membership has strengthened what is important about our respective nations - not least by improved economic growth? Or that as many Europeans now use the euro as there are Americans using the dollar? I can see all this in ten days of driving, meeting people and talking to them.
My daughter returns from learning Spanish near Cadiz, having discovered a new world of eating after midnight, new drinks, new music - all as Spanish and European as I am British and European. That's today EU.
Denis MacShane is minister for Europe and Labour MP for Rotherham
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