A favourite jibe of my American friends is that Europe is becoming a museum. My usual response is: "what is wrong with that?" I rather like museums. As long as the admission charges are set high enough, there is something to be said for growing old gracefully in the role of a curator.

Europe's politicians insist otherwise. Power and prestige lie in modernity. The digital future is the opium of our age. Only this week Jacques Chirac proclaimed that it rightly belonged to France. Some may have thought the French president a dinosaur. He wants to prove otherwise. The Elysée is pouring money into the development of a European search engine to rival the mighty Google. Odd then that the project, Quaero, has been given a Latin name.