Sitting in the Ferryman, a dockside Dublin pub, U2's guitarist, the Edge, speaks about the political crisis in Europe: "The single most powerful feeling we have is of the uncertainty of the situation here.

"Nothing really can be taken for granted anymore," he goes on, a Guinness close at hand, as strains of traditional Irish music float in from the bar's main room. "The old ideologies have fallen away. Capitalism won out. You can't even say it was democracy, because ultimately the ground upon which the battle was fought was economics — it was about money. And the West's economy won, and communism is pretty much over."

"But rather than the sense that 'Well, that's over — now we can mow forward with certainty,' the opposite has happened," the Edge continues. "People are perplexed. Maybe the stability that the Cold War created was the foundation of the West's movement forward, and now that that's gone and we haw the resurgence of radical nationalism, people in Europe don't know who they are trying to be. Not only do they not know who they are, they don't know who they want to be. They don't know whether they want to be Europeans, part of the European community or whether they should be fighting to protect their national and ethnic identities.

"Even national boundaries don't mean much anymore. You've got the movement in Italy to partition the country into two or three autonomous states. There's the Basque-separatist movement that's alive and kicking. Northern Ireland is still no closer to a real solution. And Yugoslavia is the most obvious example of where things are starting to dissolve. Sarajevo has been a symbol of this."