Any other business: It rained on President Hollande’s first parade, but not on mine

While François Hollande was being shoulder-barged by Angela Merkel as they inspected a rained-on guard of honour during the French president’s tense first visit to Berlin, I was enjoying a parallel encounter with military formality in the spring sunshine of Rome. In town to lecture at the Nato Defence College, I shared a staff car with a Luftwaffe general. A former fighter pilot who did his training with the RAF, he’s now part of Nato’s ‘smart defence’ command structure, which seeks efficiencies by combining national resources where it makes sense without compromising the kit that individual nations might one day need for themselves — such as, in Britain’s case, for defending the Falklands again.

Writing last week about a ‘mood of defeatism’ in the fag-end of Nato’s Afghanistan mission, Con Coughlin characterised the 63-year-old organisation as an arena for ‘unseemly squabbles’ between its 28 member states. Underpinned by American funding, at arm’s length from democratic accountability, Nato can hardly be presented as an exact role model for the European Union. But a flexible military co-operation which draws on national strengths and respects differences certainly seems to work better — as evidenced in the Anglo-French-led Libyan campaign — than the politico-monetary fiasco whose cataclysmic denouement we await shortly after a left-wing victory in the Greek election on 17 June.

Everywhere I went on this trip, in fact, I observed examples large and small of the ways in which multinational connections have become a hugely positive factor for Europe. I flew onwards to Toulouse, where the airport café affords a view of the fleet of bulbous Beluga transporter planes that carry Airbus aircraft sections from remote sites (wings from Britain, tails from Spain) for final assembly here and in Hamburg. An odd way to design a heavy manufacturing business, you might think, but Airbus has grown up to be a global giant and technology leader.