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I am perfectly prepared to believe that arrangements in Port Said were not all that they might have been - only in Switzerland are arrangements all that they might be - but let us just remind ourselves of what, according to the Guardian, actually happened: or, to put it another and better way, what people actually did:

The violence flared after Al-Ahly, one of Egypt's most successful teams, were beaten 3-1. Television footage showed players running from the pitch chased by fans while a small group of riot police tried to protect the players, but they appeared overwhelmed and fans attacked the players as they fled. Fans of both teams clashed and stormed the pitch and dressing rooms.

Surely (if this account is otherwise accurate) the fans who gathered outside the ground in Zamalek should have shouted:

We are fools, we are morons, we are criminally stupid, we are murderously idiotic!

We are like children! We deserve no freedom! We must be beaten with truncheons!

Not long ago I published a little book pointing out that Britain is the most littered of any major country in western Europe and suggesting some reasons why this is so. Almost invariably when I introduce the subject into conversation, the first thought of my interlocutors is that there are not enough litter bins, that is to say it is the fault of the authorities that the British are the slovenliest people in western Europe.

Few people, I suppose, are more willing to criticise our public administration than I, but this is going too far. I regularly drive down the A14 from the M6 to Cambridge - a distance of about 80 miles - and the roadside, yard after yard, mile after mile, is indescribably filthy, with plastic bottles, polystyrene burger boxes, long strips of polythene and plastic bags full of rubbish by the thousand and the tens of thousand.

How many people must have thrown their rubbish out of their vehicles to produce this informal linear rubbish-tip, and how many litter bins would have been necessary to prevent it from developing? One every yard for 80 miles? Would people have stopped - illegally - to put their rubbish in the bins? Furthermore, I ask my interlocutors whether, in the absence of litter bins, they dispose of their detritus in this way? You may readily guess the answer; so then I grow furious, and accuse them of talking - rubbish, the kind of rubbish that leads to, and justifies, the most abject authoritarianism.

The form of the argument blaming the ministry of the interior for the appalling behaviour of the football fans in Egypt, and that blaming the British local authorities for the slovenliness of the British in the matter of litter, is exactly the same. Both are manifestations of man's eternal search for the greatest freedom of all, the freedom from responsibility.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. Most recently, he is the author of Mr Clarke's Modest Proposal: Supportive Evidence from Yeovil, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

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Whatever else made it fitting, it was not its therapeutic quality. Suppose that, six months or a year into their sentence, it were decided that the two convicted men had turned over a new leaf and were unlikely to return to their evil ways. Would we then say it was right to release them? (I disregard for the moment the very impossibility of reliable prediction as to their chances of returning to their criminal ways. Several people are killed every year by people who have killed before and have been released from prison, presumably on the best predictive advice available.)

This means that imprisonment is not primarily a therapeutic manoeuvre. It is not psychotherapy, let alone an operation. Of course it would be very nice if prison had a therapeutic effect, as in a certain sense it does: the evidence suggests that longer prison sentences are followed by lower recidivism rates.

But the recidivism rate after release from prison is the wrong measure of the value of imprisonment, although it is now deeply inscribed as such on the minds of the population, especially intellectuals. The purpose of prison is to provide fitting punishment, to prevent crimes that would otherwise be committed by people who would commit them if free to do so, and deterrence of those who waver as to whether to commit crimes or not. In some cases, a crime is so heinous that it is the fittingness of the punishment alone that should determine its severity or length; and the murder of Stephen Lawrence (as indeed many other crimes) falls into this category. Even had the convicted men devoted themselves after their crime entirely to making books for the blind and helping old ladies across the road, they should still have received the sentences they received.

The editorial has a sentence that particularly caught my eye, for its implies that the newspaper has now been converted to the science, or what is usually regarded as the pseudoscience, of physiognomy. Referring to the fact that the convicted men, now fully adult, were sentenced to lower terms of imprisonment because at the time of their crime they were less than 21, the editorial said:

But it would of course have been preferable if justice not been deferred to the point where the culprits were adults with hard lives etched deep into their faces.

The adjective "hard" is surely a euphemism. If you examine the faces in photographs of people in the past who undoubtedly had very hard lives, much harder from the purely material aspect than those of the two convicted men, such as, say, coal miners, you will not see such "etched" faces among them. Indeed, if you look at the pictures in Mayhew's great book on the London poor of 1851, you will not see such faces either. What the Guardian means when it says ‘hard lives’ is ‘brutal and criminal lives.’

Now the Guardian is quite right in saying that the brutality and criminality of these people is etched on their faces: you don’t get faces like that direct from nature, you get them from biography. And if you saw such men in the pub, or walking down the street, you would do your best to avoid them.

The fact is that Britain is now more richly-endowed with such faces (if richly-endowed is the appropriate term) than any other country known to me. Walk down any street, observe any Friday or Saturday night in any British town or city, and you will see many of them. The faces are brutal and criminal because our culture is brutal and criminal.

Let us leave deeper enquiry aside. What is interesting is that, by saying that the faces of the culprits have their lives etched on their faces, the Guardian is implicitly endorsing the necessity, inevitability and wisdom of prejudice and discrimination. A person who failed to take notice of what is "etched" on the faces of the two convicted men would not be saintly, but a fool worthy to be Archbishop of Canterbury, even if not everyone with the face of a thug is actually a thug.

The desire to have no prejudices is therefore absurd, both because in practice it is impossible and because it is the desire to be a fool. The point is not to have no prejudices, but to be aware of them and also to have the constant mental flexibility to override them if the evidence requires it. That people can put aside their prejudices is, after all, the basic principle of the jury trial. People are not to be convicted because they have nasty faces etched by nasty lives, but because the evidence proves that they did what they are accused of having done. But even if acquitted, we still avoid people with nasty faces, and usually (though not always) rightly so.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. Most recently, he is the author of Mr Clarke's Modest Proposal: Supportive Evidence from Yeovil, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

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All of this is a reminder that the USA is not just diverse, but diversifying and I make no apologies for mentioning again Joel Garreau's 1981 book The Nine Nations of North America because it marks the first sustained realisation that America was not the powerful homogenising machine it had been taken for, but that globalisation and unprecedented levels of geographical mobility were actually pulling the USA and Canada apart. In fact, Garreau has Florida, like California, as containing a "national" boundary within it: the southern part of the state, Miami, the Keys and the Everglades are, along with the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, part of "The Islands", while the northern two thirds belongs in "Dixie".

The implications of all this for the tactics and prospects of the 2012 elections are fascinating and complex. Florida is (demographically) the third largest state in the Union. It is also highly marginal: many people will remember how the punch cards, chads and recounts in Florida decided the 2000 election, but the 2010 gubernatorial election was close enough, the Republican Rick Scott winning by a single percentage point. (Incidentally, my wife is convinced that it was the governor himself who greeted us warmly outside the Naples Community Church on Sunday morning - and it turns out that he is a founding member of that church.)

One can easily construct an argument which suggests a Republican victory in Florida in 2012. As with many other states the number of people describing themselves as "conservative" is rising and it can be safely assumed that they will nearly all vote Republican (though possibly most of them would have done so before they described themselves as such). If it really is the economy (stupid) it isn't going well, though news of the international financial crisis does assure Americans that there are lots of economies in worse shape than theirs.

Florideans are serious whingers, though, and the current figure of 83% of them who think that the USA is "heading in the wrong direction" is a record in time and space. (I know it is a very curious concept that a vast country – supposedly full of individuals - is going somewhere, but I think it can only be understood by remembering that the USA is a contested project as well as a real country.)

The Tea Party is strong in Florida, maybe even stronger than anywhere else. The major ethnic minority is unusually sympathetic to the Republican cause because of the Cuban situation. And all of this seems to suggest life may be very difficult for a Democratic incumbent.

On the other hand, put yourself in the position of an orthodox, conservative Republican in contemporary Florida. Say you want to crack down on immigration and you risk alienating millions who want their relatives to be able to come and go. So you have to go round saying that you oppose illegal immigration (who doesn't?) but welcome legal immigrants - and in large numbers. The slightest hint of racism in your attitude to this question will work in President Obama's favour.

Say you want to reduce Medicare and other age-related forms of social security and you risk alienating the vast retired population of the state, but if you don't say that you can hardly be considered serious on the subject of reducing public expenditure. The standard move on this question is to introduce some kind of means testing, but I know what my view would be if it were suggested that my recently acquired old age pension should be abolished while those who had been less effective in preparing for old age could keep theirs. Homo Floridiensis seems to be hyper-typical of democratic behaviour in wanting to reduce public expenditure in general without reducing expenditure on anything in particular.

On the other hand, you don't need to say too much about the problems of the global economy. The posh, WASPish, university-based radio station to which we listened when crossing the swamps was indefinitely concerned with global issues including the Greek and Italian economies and the fate of the Euro, but the Miami press – in both languages – ignored these issues. Foreign news down there means Latin America. Nowhere in the USA does one feel more in “Las Americas” than in Miami.

Let us assume that the Republican Party can come up with a decent candidate in next year's election. This is a tenuous assumption for those who watched November's pre-primary debate, which looked a lot like Dumb and Dumber, suggesting that there are talented Republicans who have made their judgement call and are hanging on for 2015 when there will be no incumbent and the Democrats might implode. But let's suppose a silver tongued squarer of circles who can appeal to both conservatives and a broader audience.

The economic discontents and the broader malaise suggest voters will be initially sympathetic, but he or she will have to contend with a Democratic Party re-invigorated by the prospect of the Tea Party. It was noticeable in the November 2011 elections across the country that, whereas Republican candidates more or less held their own, "conservative" ballot propositions - on "same day" voting registration, on "personhood" and on union rights, for instance - came crashing to earth.

But the key to what will happen in 2012 is surely the realisation that the most important schism is no longer region, class or ethnicity, but generation. Most "seniors" have done well out of the economic system, but most "millennials", meaning people who have come to voting age since 2000, are facing declining standards of living and severe economic insecurity. The two groups differ even in their conception of American identity: over 90% of seniors are "white" whereas fewer than 60% of millennials are and a quarter of those who are married are married to someone classified as being of a different race. Conservatism does not play well with them. So, the deciding factor in the 2012 election, if it's close, may be generational turnout; we know the seniors will turn out fairly diligently and Obama's fate may depend on whether the juniors do.

Florida has brought the date of its primary forward to January 31. This is much to the annoyance of some elements in the Republican Party interested in a late-entry candidate and also to many other states who have brought theirs forward, fearing they will be trivialised if they are post-Florida. Thus the best spectator politics on the planet has kicked off rather early in 2012.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is My Father's Bookcase: A Version of the History of Ideas, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

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A player for Liverpool called Suarez, a Uruguayan, had apparently used the word negro (black in Spanish) several times during a match to insult a player for Manchester United called Evra. Suarez had fouled Evra by kicking him; five minutes later, Evra called Suarez Concha de tu hermana. Suarez did not hear this; but Evra then went on to ask Suarez why he had kicked him. Suarez claimed that he said "It was a normal foul", while Evra claimed that he said, "Because you are black". According to Evra, the edifying exchange continued as follows:

EVRA: Say it to me again, I'm going to punch you.

SUAREZ: I don't speak to blacks.

EVRA: OK, now I think I'm going to punch you.

SUAREZ: Go on, black, black, black.

The independent tribunal believed Evra's accusatory account of the affair rather than the self-exculpatory account of Suarez. I have no reason to suppose that it was wrong to do so.

But The Guardian's report is clearly biased, in order to stimulate the moral outrage of its readers. For example, it says with regard to Evra having called Suarez Concha de tu hermano, that it was:

... literally an obscene term referring to Suarez's sister but one which is commonly used in Spanish as an exclamation.

This is important, because it is likely that Evra's subsequent question, "Why did you kick me?" was not uttered in the tone of a disinterested enquiry after truth. More likely it was uttered in an aggrieved, aggressive or menacing manner, and this in part accounted for Suarez's manner of reply. After all, the independent tribunal found, as a mitigating circumstance, that Suarez had never been accused of using such language before, though (I am told by someone who follows these things more closely than I) he has not always behaved on the field in a gentlemanly fashion. In other words, he was provoked; and indeed the tribunal found that Evra had started the exchange as another mitigating circumstance, though this was perhaps a little unfair to Evra, since the original foul was committed on and not by him.

The newspaper's claim that "the report reveals in forensic detail" and that it "has brought a new meaning to the word transparency" is belied by its summary of the key findings. Here are the first two:

The question is simply whether the words or behaviour are abusive or insulting. It is not necessary that the alleged offender intends his words or behaviour to be abusive or insulting.

Mr Suarez's use [of the word negro] was not intended as an attempt at conciliation or to establish rapport; neither was it meant in a conciliatory or friendly way. It was not explained by any feeling that a linguistic or cultural relationship had been established between them.

Quite a lot may ride on a word: for example, one of the reasons the report into the Lawrence case found that the police were institutionally racist was that they did not completely accept that the murder was "purely" racist in motivation. The police argued that the suspects were criminals who were thought to have committed non-racist violent crimes, and therefore their full motives could not be known, at least not without further investigation. In this, surely, they were right; but the damage done by the investigation's accusation has been severe.

In fact, it is perfectly obvious that the motive behind insulting words is important in assessing the seriousness of a case. It is one thing to insult someone through lack of knowledge of social conventions and quite another to do so with the full intention to offend.

Unfortunately, there is a trend to make the perception of insult (or bullying) the test of whether insult (or bullying) has actually taken place. You are insulted or bullied if you think you have been insulted or bullied, and the only proof required that you have been insulted or bullied is your belief that you have been. No evidence that your belief is reasonable or justified is required; and so bureaucrats, acting in a pseudo-judicial way, have an ever-expanding locus standi to interfere in everyday life.

While in this case the deliberately insulting nature of the words used seems little in doubt, I find it alarming that people are now prepared to go running to the authorities, like children to teacher, over what was, after all, a minor incident that, moreover, was soon over. The very fact that we can run to authorities to ask them to take action over such trivia renders us psychologically fragile and more, not less, liable to insult.

The forensic inexactitude or incompetence of the tribunal, at least as reported in The Guardian, is again shown by a circumstance that is taken to mitigate Suarez's offence: his vow never to use the word negro on an English football pitch again. This, surely, implies that he has not recognised the wrongdoing in itself; for if he had done so, he would have vowed not to use the word anywhere.

There is nothing sacred, after all, about English football pitches; and I am reminded of the notices that appeared in the hospital in which I worked to the effect that henceforth anybody who assaulted a member of the staff in the hospital would be prosecuted. I was pleased, of course; but the corollary, psychologically-speaking if not in strict logic, was that assault in the hospital on people other than the staff, or on the staff other than in the hospital, or indeed in any other circumstances, would not be prosecuted.

There is one final point about the punishment of Suarez, a fine of £40,000 fine and a suspension for eight matches.

Once the commission established that the FA [Football Association] charge against Suarez was proved, the automatic two-match suspension for using insulting words was increased to four because of the racial element.

Now it seems to me a questionable proposition that a racial insult is automatically twice as offensive as, or worthy of twice the punishment of, any other. But there is another question: is Evra now to receive an automatic two-match suspension because he used insulting words to Suarez? That Suarez didn't hear them does not matter: Evra used them, and the circumstances in which he used them suggested that he intended them to insult.

It seems preposterous to me that footballers of all people should be expected to speak like choirboys; but unless Evra is sentenced, it is clear that we live under a regime of racial justice. It does not matter that this racial justice is intended to protect, not harm, minorities; the point is that it is not race- or colour-blind. Moreover, unpleasant gestalt switches have been known to happen. The over-zealous rooters-out of racism and the BNP have more in common than they probably would like to admit, among it a highly racialised view of the world.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. Most recently, he is the author of Mr Clarke's Modest Proposal: Supportive Evidence from Yeovil, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

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The exhibition falls into two parts. There is an open-air section which takes visitors through much of the complex in and around the dreaded Prinz Albrechtstrasse. The problem with it is that because virtually everything was levelled during and after the war, it requires a real effort of the imagination - and this is true of the whole former Wilhelmsstrasse quarter - to recall that this was once the hub of the whole of occupied Europe.

The covered exhibition in the new building is a straightforward narrative, with the aid of photographs, administrative diagrammes, archive film footage, sound recordings, witness statements and document facsimiles. There are no concessions to modish heritage approaches such as dramatic reconstructions or interactive gimmicks, nor are there any original artefacts, apart from the foundations of the buildings themselves.

If this sometimes makes it difficult to relate at a human level to the enormity of what is being portrayed, then this deficiency has been more than made good by a shattering special exhibition on the deportation and expropriation of the Jews of the South-West German town of Loerrach in late 1940. The forty-odd photographs taken by a participant in the round-up show not so much the hostility of the population as their indifference and complicity: from the curious children who watch as elderly Jews are forced to load their remaining possessions into lorries, to the friendly wave from the drivers to local girls, to the frantic participation in the auction of the household effects left behind by the deportees - the only time when the population come to life.

Just as the Topography of Terror is not just another Third Reich museum, the new exhibition at Friedrichstrasse is not just another GDR or Wall museum. It deals specifically with the topography of another terror, namely the mechanics of legitimate travel across the German-German border, and it is located at the main crossing-point, in a GDR-era building whose associations were so traumatic that it became known as the Palace of Tears. It seeks to capture the "control", not the "border" or GDR experience, and does so very well.

I remember the place from occasional trips before the fall of the wall, and the photos and witness statements brilliantly evoke the labyrinthine nature of the station, while the preserved passport and customs booths, the scenes of daily intrusions and humiliations, still send a chill down the spine. A fascinating side-bar is the whole subculture of shops and eateries which catered for travellers - mainly for those with prized western currency - and were heavily penetrated by the regime's security services. One of the most interesting exhibits is an original restaurant diary in which the Mitropa waiters kept a record of the comings and goings of customers.

The coincidental opening of these two museums on state instruments of oppression within the same year raises questions of comparability. Both regimes were dictatorships and both subscribed to totalising ideologies, but there the parallels end. The RSHA was about the business of mass murder - the comparison might be with Stalinism and the Lubianka in the 1930s - while the Palace of Tears was a place of great sadness, certainly, and often of great brutality, but was never a human abattoir.

Looking back at the Third Reich and its perpetrators, Hannah Arendt famously spoke of the banality of evil. Even now, the ruins of the RSHA are pervaded by an overwhelming sense of evil, whereas the Palace of Tears laves one only with an inescapable aura of banality and crumminess which the GDR has proved unable to shake off.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

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All this will deeply affect Britain, of course, as the disintegration of the Eurozone and a deeper recession or even a depression, will drag Britain down too. This is well known. What is much less discussed, however, is the political and strategic consequences. If the euro falls, and the ties of Union slacken, the whole ordering principle of European politics will be overthrown. At the very least, Germany will gain in power, either through the re-introduction of the Deutschmark or through dominance of a tighter new common currency area. This would not be a bad thing if Berlin were prepared to take more responsibility for common European security and ideological positions, but so far she has shown little sign of that.

The Union, in other words, may be disabled at its centre. For this reason, London must take a deep breath and - having saved herself through her own efforts - help Europe to save itself by following her historical example and adopting the Anglo-American principles of closer union, debt consolidation and a robust common defence, by establishing a complete political union. The Germans will bring to the table their economic and fiscal power, the French their bomb and UN Security Council Seat, and the Celtic and Mediterranean fringe their debts, skills, markets and sunny dispositions. There are risks in following this path, but the alternative is worse.

This new arrangement will need to be embedded in a new global security architecture. The Eurozone would become a revamped European Union, though I would prefer the appellation "Democratic Union", as it would set the right tone, would recognise the fact that important European states were not part of the Union, at least for now, while there might be areas outside Europe to the south and east which will join the Union in future.

The new Union would join NATO as a single state with one army. The remaining members of the existing EU would repatriate certain legal and other powers, and then join the rump EU/DU in a European Community which would be a free trade area and a close military alliance. Britain and the EU/DU would then join with Canada and the United States to form the North Atlantic Confederation, with its existing military arm NATO.

The North Atlantic Confederation would then join with the other great democracies, such as Australia and New Zealand and possibly South Africa, to form a Democratic League. Membership of the League would be limited to democracies who are committed to the defence and export of democratic values worldwide. This would for now exclude some existing democracies such as India and Brazil, which are still in the realist stage of development. Such a re-configuration would help to stabilise Europe, integrate Germany, and harness the potential of the continent for the common good.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

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This was the time, after all, when such books as Ross Munro and Richard Bernstein's The Coming Conflict with China (1997) and Humphrey Hawksley and Simon Holberton's Dragonstrike (1999) were on the bestseller lists and widely discussed in the broadsheets and magazines by the commentariat. In good part, however, Tarnoff and Christopher's rhetoric also reflected the fact that the United States had emerged victorious from the Cold War, but was unable to persuade its allies to accept her leadership over Bosnia.

The similarities between the two cases are obvious. Today, Washington feels that her allies - with the exception of Britain - have not being doing enough in the common struggle against terrorism, especially in Afghanistan. As the outgoing Defence Secretary Robert Gates pointed out in a parting shot, the Europeans policy of running down military expenditure has rendered them largely incapable of effective action. Some US observers have asked, where have all the soldiers gone.

Above all, the United States is furious with the European Union for its failure to address the sovereign debt crisis, which is threatening to de-stabilise the whole global economy at a time when the United States and other countries may be seeing light at the end of the tunnel. In this context, the eastern turn reflects the hope that Washington will find better partners and investors in the Asian economies, who have so far weathered the storm in much better shape. It also reflects an expectation that the conflicts in the Middle East have been settled, or at least contained, allowing the United States to address new threats and opportunities on the horizon.

This strategy is based on two questionable assumptions, however. First, only a few years after Washington hailed the eastern Tiger economies, the entire region was wracked by the Asian economic crisis of 1997-1998. Who is to say that the Asian economies will not soon experience a similar meltdown? Indeed, recent reports from China increasingly suggest that all is not well.

Secondly, it must be remembered that the Clinton administration was soon forced to eat Christopher's words and take control of the Bosnian situation before it spiralled completely out of control due to European incompetence. By 1995, the administration's troubleshooter, Richard Holbrooke, was writing that

the United States in a European power.

Moreover, the very extent of Europe's problems means that Washington will soon have to make the old continent its top priority, whether this be the economic and fiscal fallout from a eurozone collapse, or the attempts of Russia to move into the vacuum by putting pressure on the Baltic states or other parts of the old Soviet empire. Europe, as Winston Churchill said almost exactly 100 years ago, is still where "the weather comes from". All this suggests that time will show the current preoccupation with the East to have been not the start of a Pacific Century but a mere Pacific Phase.

The author thanks Mr Eddie Fishman of Cambridge University for advice in the drafting of this article.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

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The film begins with a line of men trudging into the Black Mountains in bleak North Wales, trying to escape the clutches of the advancing Germans. They leave their womenfolk in the isolated Olchon Valley to face the small German advance detachment under Eastern Front veteran Captain Albrecht Wolfram (an excellent Tom Wlaschiha) alone. They are unaware of his real mission, which is to find the medieval Mappa Mundi, which the British have hidden nearby and the Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler covets in order to prove some abstruse racial-historical point or other.

At first, relations between the two are very strained, but the arrival of snow marks not only the shift of the seasons but also forces occupier and occupied to work together. What results is more of a cooperation than a collaboration, as the Germans help with the farmyard tasks, and the women in turn provide them with civilian clothes. This is because Captain Wolfram - who locates and conceals the map early on in the film - is in no hurry to complete his task, partly because he wishes to sit out the rest of the war and partly to frustrate Himmler.

As one might expect, a romantic interest of sorts develops between Wolfram and local girl Sarah Lewis (Andrea Riseborough), and it comes as no surprise that local "stay behind" units become active against the Germans, but the film is never predictable. Despite its title, the only active resistance is the futile shooting of a horse belonging to a woman mistakenly identified as a collaborator. There is no showdown, either triumphant or tragic, between the partisans and the occupiers. We never see most of the men again after the first frames, and it is possible they got away, but a casual conversation also suggests that at least some of them may have been shot by the Germans. There is no certainty either way, reflecting the agony of occupation the world over.

Resistance was shot on a budget of about £1.2 million, which is very little for a period film, particularly one with some special effects (mainly Wolfram's flashback battle scenes). It is a remarkable debut for Director Gupta. The author of the original novel of the same name (2007), Owen Sheers, who also co-wrote the screenplay, describes the film as a "bold adaptation" of the original. Unlike the book, which operates in the third person, and provides insights into the minds of all the major characters, the screen version is centred around Sarah Lewis. We are captivated by her dilemma: an intense loyalty to her beloved husband in the hills, the need to get by in the valley and a troubling attraction to Wolfram. As her idyll collapses around her with the imminent arrival of the Gestapo, and the "real" occupation, Sarah declines to join the captain on his escape to Ireland, but takes to the hills instead, after burning the map. We observe this with ambivalence, because her gesture of resistance is also an act of vandalism against the past.

The most striking scene in the film, however, is the exchange between the partisan leader Tommy Atkins (Michael Sheen) and his young , taciturn and possibly slow-witted recruit George Iwan Rheon). It is not actually in the novel. It has been added to sharpen the central theme of the film, which is choice and the costs it imposes. We know, of course, that Sheen is right: the resistance he advocates is the only possible one both politically and morally. We are disturbed, however, by the consequences of George's actions: dead horse and distraught owner.

Likewise, Wolfram does the right thing in hiding the map from Himmler, and keeping the war out of the Valley, but his determination to do so means that he is compelled to shoot the injured British partisan Michael Sheen in cold blood rather than risk blowing the gaff by handing him over to a POW camp.

Sarah too, effectively commits suicide at the end - she enters her death into the family bible - and we are left wondering whom her "right" choice has actually benefitted, not her probably dead husband and certainly not herself. In its quiet, poetic way, therefore, Resistance reminds us that under a brutal occupation there is always a choice, but that none of the options are good and that even the best can be lethal.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

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The other extreme, which is to use the crisis to demand the repatriation of powers from Brussels in a legislative Dunkirk, is not helpful either, because it would suggest to our European partners that we are completely turning our backs on them. Inaction is rarely the right choice, but all we can do for now is wait.

The country at the centre of the storm, Greece, is fond of invoking 1940, the year when it rejected the Italian ultimatum. Here, however, the analogy is not merely strained but harmful, as the hysterical anti-German propaganda of the past two years in Athens attests. There is no desire in Berlin – or at the Stammtische of the Federal Republic - to dominate the Greeks or any other European people, quite the reverse. The problem for Greece – and the rest of the PIGS – is not that the Germans have been bossing them around today, but that they failed to do so for so long. Nobody forced them to join the Euro and it is reasonable to ask them to make sacrifices to escape a predicament for which they themselves bear the primary responsibility.

On the other hand, the consternation caused by Greek Prime Minister's announcement that he would put the most recent "bailout" deal to a referendum in the New Year was further proof, if any was needed, that the European Union has a problem with democracy. Under heavy pressure from Frau Merkel and Mr Sarkozy, Mr Papandreou rowed back from his original plan, suggesting that the vote could be brought forward, or even avoided if a coalition government could be formed which would sanction the even greater cuts to the public service which the agreement requires.

This shows that neither he nor the European leadership have understood that the crisis will not be solved without a referendum not merely in Greece but in every country of the Eurozone.

At the moment Europe is bedevilled by democratic involvement of the worst sort: a cycle of Irish referenda, Bundestag votes and German regional elections, each of which hold up the process unilaterally. Some Europeans are asked at different times to vote on different proposals, and others are consulted through their democratically elected governments, but at no point have they been consulted simultaneously on the same fundamental issue, which is how much of their national sovereignty they are willing to trade for increased security and prosperity. Yet if the common currency is to be saved then all the peoples of the Eurozone will have to agree on the solution: those in rich countries to the use of their taxes to support "Eurobonds", and those in the poorer countries to bear the austerity measures necessitated by continued membership.

Nothing less than a collective popular act of refounding the Union, or at least of the Eurozone, will do. In short, Mr Papandreou may have chosen the worst possible moment to consult his people, and he may have done so for entirely opportunistic reasons, but he had the right idea.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.