If you want to travel from Britain to and from continental Europe with your own car, however, things have been rather different. Particularly on the short distance routes, i.e from South-East England to North-East France, competition has been patchy, despite there being two main ferry companies and the Eurotunnel train service.

For day-trippers, or those who want to spend only a weekend across the channel, things were pretty good, with the cost of taking a car for a day trip ranging from about 45 euros to 90 euros (or even cheaper if you got a special offer), and a weekend perhaps up to 150 euros, depending on duration of stay and season.

If however you wanted to spend more than three days suddenly things weren’t so good, particularly if you want to go in peak season. For example a trip from Dover to Calais on P&O, leaving July 4th and returning July 15th is around 375 euros. On the Eurotunnel it usually is even more expensive. Trips further afield are proportionately more expensive.

What’s even stranger is that these are fixed prices, dependent on length of stay and day of travel (and month). Often the ferries, and tunnel, would travel only half full, rather than reducing prices. The reasons for this have never been quite clear, though one is obviously Eurotunnel’s precarious debt situation is not conducive to a price war.

That’s why I am optimistic for the prospects for a new Danish company that started sailing across the channel last month, called Speed Ferries. This company hopes to bring budget-airline style travel to cross-channel ferries, with internet-only booking, prices that reflect supply & demand, and prices that do no depend on the length of stay. The trip is ’no frills’ with only a cafe (though you can pay more for a better lounge), but only last 55 minutes, and sales not to and from Calais to Dover, but Boulogne , which is a much nicer town.

Prices therefore, much like the budget airlines, can be bargains. For the dates I quoted above with P&O, Speedferries are offering a trip for 143 euros (83 euros out, 60 euros back), or less than half the ferry price.

It won’t be to everyone’s taste. Lots of people see the ferry trip, with duty-free shops, restaurants, etc as part of the holiday. Speedferries’ catamaran doesn’t have those. For your “booze-cruisers” (or the French equivalent) day-trips are not, usually, such good value, as there are no special offers. Therefore to go on a Saturday and come back the same day costs the same amount as to go on that Saturday and come back a week later. And of course the company has only been sailing for a few weeks and might encounter teething problems; its launch was delayed for months.

In the meantime though I’ve booked to go with a car on July 18th for 12 days for just 100 euros. I’ll tell you what it’s like. Or maybe some readers have already been?

This westernisation has not happened to Israeli Arabs because Israel encouraged them to abandon their traditional attitudes. If anything, it seems that the opposite has happened. Israel’s Bedouins still practice polygamy without any discouragement from the state. Significant portions of Israeli civil law are handled by religious and quasi-religious courts. Arab language schools in Israel do not seem to go out of their way to encourage a critical look at Arab or Israeli culture, or at least they don’t if this is to be believed. This transformation has happened despite living in a state where much of the population is openly hostile to Arabs, and where the state responds to their complaints with rhetoric more often than action.

Contrast this with Europe. In France certainly - and probably elsewhere - there is relatively little open hostility towards Arabs and Muslims by comparison to Israeli attitudes, although there is still plenty of hostility and a long history of egalitarin rhetoric in lieu of action. However, unlike in Israel, fairly large majorities of European-born Arabs identify strongly with Europe. Unlike in Israel, there is little to compare with the events of 1948 to sustain historical grievances. Even in Algeria - the closest example - France ulimately lost.

Yet in Europe, we expel imams for saying things that I suspect barely merit a second glace from Shin Bet. I suspect Israel worries far less about the mere incitement to murder than about actual guns and bombs, and I suspect they ignore the preaching of neanderthal sexual attitudes completely. Israel is far more genuinely threatened by its Muslim population than France is, and yet it has never felt the need to ban headscarves. I note little fear in Haaretz that Israeli Muslims are not modernising or adapting to global cultural norms. If anything, there seems to be a fear of the opposite - that an Arab community representing approximately as large a part of Israel’s population as francophones do of Canada’s population might make very modern demands for cultural equality.

I was watching a programme on BBC the other day about French Muslims who, despite considering themselves quite liberal and well integrated in France, greet the expulsion of imams and the new restrictions on conservative Muslims with trepidation. It leads me to wonder if in France, like in Israel, extremism is less of a problem than fear. Left to their own devices, freed from the entrenched political conservativism of Arab dictatorships but still the objects of suspicion and repression by a non-Arab state, Israel’s highly concentrated Arab population has become at least as liberal as many very successful states in the Far East and Latin America. Why then, is there so much fear that Europe’s small, dispersed Muslim population is failing to integrate?

Kaplan was head of a soi-disant ’Caliphate State’ in Cologne. In the eyes of German law, the ’state’ was a registered voluntary association, a Verein, like so many others in Germany (I belong to a couple myself, though so far as I can tell none is an Islamist extremist group.). To Kaplan, it was the government of God on earth; his followers numbered a couple of thousand, who paid taxes to their leader’s state. That state’s policy was pretty much what you’d expect: death to the infidel, drive the Jews into the sea, sharia all round, blah blah blah. Kaplan himself had spent several years as involuntary guest of the larger state surrounding his own, convicted of incitement to murder. After his release, Innenminister Otto Schily (who has come a long way from his days defending RAF members*) revoked the Verein’s status, declared it illegal and sought to ship the Caliph back to Turkey.

Kaplan fought hard against the expulsion order, not with the scimitar but with legal briefs. (A pragmatist, he shrewdly chose to engage a German lawyer rather than an imam.) Some of the evidence the Turks had amassed on him, it seems, had been extracted by measures one has come to associate with Abu Ghraib. The courts ruled such evidence could not ground extradition (Germany has taken this sort of thing seriously for the past half century). Lawyers rubbed their hands in glee as the appeals process began.

Wednesday evening, the Superior Administrative Court at Münster ruled that Kaplan could be extradited after all - but permitted a final appeal. When the authorities arrived at Kaplan’s flat (which is, amusingly, across the road from the Cologne offices of the Verfassungsschutz, the agency charged with monitoring extremists), they found that Kaplan had disappeared.

He could be anywhere. His lawyer claims he’s still in Cologne, and that he’ll swing by the police station voluntarily at some point, or maybe send a note from his doctor explaining why he can’t.

The German government has been left looking rather silly, and the Turks are fuming. But there’s more to all this than merely a story that is almost as amusing as it is alarming. Why on earth was Kaplan still free? Why hadn’t he been packed off to Turkey years ago?

The answer is that the present German legal system, for understandable reasons, has a lot of built-in safeguards, and that as a downside people like Kaplan have benefitted from a very long leash. Until quite recently, Islamist (and other) extremist groups enjoyed a good deal of immunity so long as they could characterise themselves as ’religious’ organisations. Schily fixed that shortly after the al Qaeda attacks in the USA. Still, Germany preserves a lot of procedural protections that some think no longer affordable since 11 September 2001.

The state is wrestling with itself on the issue. And it’s doing so in a serious way. John Ashcroft and David Blunkett may have a few Doppelgänger in Bavaria, but these, thankfully, are not in government. Extremists must not be permitted to turn the rule of law into a weapon against those who, unlike themselves, prize it. But nor must the state discard the rule of law when it proves inconvenient. I hope the authorities find Kaplan soon; I hope they succeed against Kaplan’s appeal and bundle him off shortly to the land of his fathers. But I am glad they have had to go by the book in trying to get rid of him.

* No, not the Royal Air Force, but the Rote Armee Fraktion, a terrorist group that developed out of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

You can read more about the disappearance of Kaplan at the Süddeutsche Zeitung; for the full background, follow the links. (Articles in German.)

Tarantino’s films export poorly to Asian markets precisely because audiences who do not share those references do not understand his work. Even Europeans and North Americans who never saw the genre films that he is echoing fail to appreciate him. Tarantino’s widespread acclaim is a sign that the film world has never really been as sophisticated and elitist as it liked to pretend to be.

In the same way, Emmerich’s Godzilla could never have stood on its own. If you did not already know who Godzilla was, if you have not come into the cinema with those expectations, the film would be unwatchable. Independence Day is a genuinely enjoyable film on several levels, but it can only be enjoyed by people who are receptive to its reconstruction of countless alien invasion stories dating back to H. G. Wells himself. And Emmerich’s new film evokes the 70s disaster movies that he is so clearly fond of, like a faded echo of Tarantino’s homage to the Hong Kong action classics of all those years ago.

Emmerich, however, is the Anti-Tarantino because where Tarantino’s films are witty and unexpected, where they appeal to us intellectually and nostalgically, where they force us to examine the real content of genre fiction, Emmerich simply likes to make disaster porn. He appeals to that well-concealed part of every American that knows, in the marrow of his bones, that one day God will reach down from Heaven and smite Los Angeles and New York off the face of the earth. He appeals to that shameful part of our inner couch potato that, on 9/11, kept expecting Arnold Schwartzeneggar to wipe out an Al Qaeda brigade on CNN and save New York. He appeals to those of us who masochistically like to watch the masses die, helpless in the face of forces beyond any but the most heroic of men, but safe in our own seats in air conditioned theatres.

If you get your kicks from seeing that sort of thing, you’ve probably already decided to go see The Day after Tomorrow and if you do, you will certainly get your destruction fix. If you don’t get off on seeing CGI people swept away like so many ants, you probably don’t much like Emmerich’s films anyway and you won’t like this one. However, if gross film receipts are any measure, us disaster junkies have you outnumbered.

I don’t want to focus on the many things that are deeply wrong with this film. Emmerich can hope to one day be an icon of a genre, to live to see the day when his films are praised for their postmodern tackiness, and where film theory students pour over his work looking for the essence of the big budget special effects action extravaganza. God knows, he won’t be remembered as a good filmmaker. If I were to give you a simple review of this film, I would have to say that Emmerich’s latest is, like most of his work, awful by any traditional normative measure. But so what? In my mind I see Emmerich laughing all the way to the bank, saying “Do you know how much money that piece of shit made me?”

So, instead of giving you a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down review of the film, I want to expose you to a slightly different idea in this review, something that won’t change whether or not you want to see The Day After Tomorrow, but which might change how you see it.

Roland Emmerich is desperately trying to be a subversive filmmaker, and he’s failing miserably. He’s not failing because he’s too subtle. You will leave The Day after Tomorrow without any doubt about what the native German director thinks of the Bush administration. Rather, he is failing because as obvious as the subversive elements of his films are, his audience will still miss them nine times out of ten because they will never get past the blunt, clichéd, hopelessly overplayed elements and see them. Any content in Emmerich’s films which is more subtle than a baseball bat to the back of the head is virtually imperceptible.

I have searched far and wide for someone else saying these things about Emmerich, and so far, I have found no one. I think the reason this is so obvious to me is that my favorite Emmerich film is not Independence Day, it’s Godzilla. Godzilla was trashed by critics. It had a mediocre performance at the box office. It has a low rating on IMDB. But I like it. I like the notion of the city as a maze for giant monsters. I like the whole way Emmerich handled Godzilla’s arrival in New York. I like the nod he gave to the critics (Mayor Ebert and his assistant Siskel). I liked the thing that I suspect most people hated the most about the film: the lack of a clear bad guy. Godzilla wasn’t evil, he just was. His death is both salvation and tragedy. Godzilla, like all the best comic book characters, is a profoundly ambiguous figure. I think people like Independence Day primarily because, unlike Godzilla, it has clear bad guys, and the bad guys get their comeuppance in the end in a way-cool giant explosion in space.

I like Godzilla enough to have actually seen it several times and after a few screenings I asked myself a question that seems never to have occurred to anyone:

Why is Jean Reno in this movie?

The surface reason is that Reno is French, and he’s reasonably well known in Anglostan as a French action/comedy actor. But that just begs the question, why the French? It certainly didn’t score Emmerich any points at Cannes. It didn’t help sell the film in the francophone market, and even if it would have, the francophone market is small compared to Japan, Germany and Latin America.

Why France? It wasn’t strictly necessary to the plot. Godzilla is the accidental by-product of nuclear testing in the Pacific. That was true even of the original Japanese version of Godzilla, but in those days it was the US doing nuclear testing in the Pacific at Bikini Atoll. France did do nuclear tests in the Pacific in the 90s, but by the late 90s, even France had stopped testing. I imagine that he chose France simply because the anti-testing movement had targeted France much more recently than it had targeted anyone else. It was nearer to the top of his head.

So, nothing too surprising there. Emmerich is a lefty of the German bleeding-heart Green-Socialist kind. Everybody knows that.

However, having been beaten upside the head with an anti-nuclear message in Godzilla, you miss the part of the film that is the most subversive. France is responsible for creating Godzilla. So what does France do? Well, when France makes mistakes, it take responsibility for them. Specifically, France sends Jean Reno to fix things. Matthew Broderick, Emmerich’s icon of science, reason and caution, is ignored by American authorities throughout the film, right up to the point where it’s almost too late. But who listens to him, and who risks life and limb following his advice about Godzilla? The French. Whose lives are sacrificed to stop the lizard hatchlings from escaping Madison Square Garden? French lives. And who, in the end, is instrumental in saving the world from giant lizards? Why, it’s France. And does France demand to be honored for its sacrifices? Does it expect the world to show its gratitude through obedience? No, they cover up their very involvement.

This, of course, bears little or no relationship to the actual France that exists outside of Emmerich’s imagination, but contrast this with the anti-French rhetoric of the recent unpleasantness and Emmerich begins to sound more and more subversive.

We might apply the same analysis to Independence Day. Quite a few critics caught on to the unsubtle subtext of that movie but very few members of the larger public did. Emmerich does not threaten the earth with incomprehensible aliens whose motives are unknown, nor is the enemy some horror movie construct like in the vastly better Alien movies. No, Emmerich’s aliens are interplanetary capitalists, bent on exploiting an entire “Third World”. He is truer to the tradition of H. G. Wells than any of his contemporaries. Wells’ War of the Worlds was a social commentary, a response to the English genocide in Tasmania. He used science fiction to imagine Englishmen placed in the position of the primitive Tasmanians, driven to extinction by incomprehensibly powerful invaders acting without scruples. Emmerich is essentially channeling Wells, showing Americans at the receiving end of a war by an exploitive, technologically advanced power that wants our natural resources.

He even accidentally foreshadows Abu Ghraib by linking his aliens to the sadistic anal probers of the Roswell legends.

The title - Independence Day - makes precious little sense without this subtext. Humans are not declaring their independence from their invaders. They were never dependent on them in the first place. Instead, Emmerich is calling for the global poor to reclaim their independence by throwing off global capitalism. It’s just that Emmerich isn’t doing a very good job of making that point. John Carpenter’s underrated low budget masterpiece, They Live, does a far better job of exploring this notion.

What I want you to do, if you go see The Day After Tomorrow, is to see the film as the third part of a sort of anti-imperialist trilogy that includes Godzilla and Independence Day. In each case, the message is essentially one of role reversal. In Godzilla, man becomes the endangered species that a more powerful animal simply crushes under its feet, and America is saved by the French. In Independence Day, America is colonized by a ruthless and technologically advanced race of capitalists who are ultimately overthrown by state-sponsored terrorists who slaughter countless millions of non-combatants using weapons of mass destruction. And, in The Day After Tomorrow, America is visited by a disaster of its own making, and driven to throw itself upon the mercy of the nations of the third world.

The film has, of course, a bluntly environmentalist message. It is so blunt that I can almost figure out what Emmerich has been reading lately. Clearly, he has been into Mike Davis’ Ecology of Fear, which contains an entire chapter on how LA is regularly visited by tornados. There is also a deeply anti-Bush and especially anti-Cheney message. If he had cast lookalikes in the roles of US president and vice president, he could not have made his intent clearer. We have another Matthew Broderick/Jeff Goldblum figure: the scientist played by Dennis Quaid who tries to warn them, but is ignored until it’s too late. There is also a cheesy family-values subplot involving a divorced couple that hasn’t completely fallen out of love. These elements are becoming Emmerich trademarks.

There is also bad science. The science is hacked together from unrelated bits of climate science coverage in the public press. It is frightfully off-base. But then, anyone going to see a Roland Emmerich film for good scientific extrapolation is too stupid to be worth explaining the real world to. It’s just not that kind of film, and Emmerich does not pretend that it is.

And there are many amazing weather effects. You may well be impressed by them - many of the Belgians I saw in the theatre were - but I have the unusual luck of living through one of the worst hailstorms in US history, with stones the size of baseballs. I’ve been through several tornados, once I even saw one up close. I’ve been in blizzards that would turn most people blue. I’ve not just lived in Canada, I’ve actually lived in the arctic. I’ve even been in a hurricane. Emmerich’s weather effects are a pale reflection, except for the tornados in LA. Those actually looked scarier than the real thing. The symbolic destruction of Hollywood - the annihilation of the famous Hollywood sign - is a cliché of disaster movies.

But, don’t let the blunt, overplayed environmentalist message of this film keep you from seeing the less blunt but unhidden anti-imperialist message. One of the scenes in the film - something I expect is the last shred of a longer movie that didn’t survive the editing process - shows Americans rushing across the Mexican border, immigrating south in droves. He turns illegal immigration on its head by showing images of white folk desperate to cross the Rio Grande. Emmerich’s message here is far subtler and far more interesting than the environmental message: This is what you would look like if you were a refugee. He revisits this theme momentarily at the end of the film, in a cheesy moralistic speech reminiscent of the Bill Pullman’s schlock at the end of Independence Day. In both films, the subtext is revealed at the very end of the movie in a form so abysmally forgettable that the audience usually misses it. I still haven’t decided if Emmerich is having some kind of perverse joke on Americans, or if he just doesn’t realize that this stuff is corny.

I leave to you whether these disparate elements are enough to make you go see this film or to give it a pass. I’ve already said that The Day After Tomorrow is not, in the conventional sense, a good movie. But then, Enter the Dragon is not exactly a classic of cinema either when you look at the writing, the acting or even the martial arts when compared to more recent films. And yet, it is a classic of the genre. The Day After Tomorrow could be a classic of the genre, but if so, it will not reach that status because the director intended for it to be a genre classic. The more interesting question is exactly what genre Emmerich belongs in. Big-budget special-effects action anti-capitalism is almost certainly not what Fox is in business for.

The local consul general added something I thought insightful, which was that the missing piece is a positive vison from the EU of what transatlantic relations -- especially in the military and strategic areas -- should be all about.

According to people working in the corridors, the EU is on its way to supplanting NATO as the locus of transatlantic relations. NATO has survived many premature obituaries in its 50 years, and it’s far too soon to write off an organization with its resources and institutional memory. On the other hand, if this shift gains ground, it’s a big one and will be very uncomfortable for both sides. To touch on only the most obvious point, the US is in NATO but is an external partner for the EU. That’s a huge change.

These tectonic changes make a positive European vision of what transatlantic relations should be about all the more important.

It’s not just a US-Europe question. A staff person from the think tank had been part of a delegation of foreign ministry planning staffs who traveled to Asia recently. They fended off questions about multipolarity, all of which implied disassociating Europe and the United States. saying that Europe and the US will continue to work together in global security. That was good to hear, but the questions won’t go away.

I think we’re still a long way from having definitive answers to the questions that Timothy Garton Ash posed last May, “Are you with us? Are we against you?”