EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, U.K

New Europe: Mapping a continent

If Europe finds it hard to tell its own story at the moment, it does not mean there is not one

It is like being in an accident and emergency reception on a Friday night. To inhabit this place we call Europe is to see nations wheeled in on trolleys from a series of pile-ups. First the banking crash; then the sovereign debt crises of Greece and Ireland – with ambulance crews poised for 999 calls from Portugal, Spain and Italy. Once admitted, treatment can be worse than the trauma: the austerity packages, welfare cuts, job losses. Recovery is slow, fragile and sensitive to changes, like oil prices being pushed up by the revolution sweeping the Arab world. Small wonder that the banks feel "stressed". A good number of Europe's citizens do too.

The poll we publish today is taken from a sample of more than 5,000 people of working age in the five leading EU states – Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Poland – and clearly speaks to a crisis in European governance. Only 6% truly trust their government, and just 9% think their politicians are honest, either in power or out of it. Political anxiety is driven by economic pessimism, particularly in France and Germany, the powerhouse of Europe. Almost three-quarters of the French think they will be worse off a decade from now, and so do half of all those polled in Germany, despite its economic recovery.

If Europe is unthinkable without its nations, and those nations are led by a generation of politicians so lacklustre that the only character who stands out, for all the wrong reasons, is Silvio Berlusconi, does that mean that the grand European project is on the wane, however you define it – as a market, a union, a currency, a set of rules, standards and law? Which would now seem more eloquent of the collective mood – the optimism of Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the EU's official anthem, or John Cage's four minutes and 33 seconds of silence?

Yet sift through the wreckage of discarded European ambition, and all is not quite what it seems. Our poll shows that despite the costs of bailing Greece and Ireland out, those in the eurozone clearly want to stay in it. Despite high levels of opposition to EU migration and the rise of the right, the majority polled are loyal to the EU's founding values of openness and social liberalism. Collective action is far from dead either. The principle of common economic governance and Europe-wide rescue funds entails its own political logic even if the current packages are sticking plasters rather than treatments.

Social democracy may be down but it is not out. A meeting of European socialists in Athens recently put together a distinctly Keynesian-looking alternative to the austerity hairshirt forced on ailing southern eurozone economies by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. Bernard Guetta, writing recently in Liberation, may have been premature in seeing the formation of what he calls a European shadow cabinet, but with presidential elections in France next year and federal elections in Germany the year after, who knows? Public opinion is volatile and prone to large swings. The true length of the mandate it gives national governments is shorter than it once was. Five years at these levels of mistrust somehow feels like an age.

Over the next four weeks, Guardian writers, along with leading voices from Germany, France, Poland and Spain, will comb through this vast social, political and economic terrain. It is essential to map it. If Europe finds it hard to tell its own story at the moment, it does not mean there is not one. Federalism envisaged as the permanent answer to a war-ravaged Europe may be last century's dream. The expansion of Europe may have stalled. But few who have experienced the contagion of chaos can argue that any country in Europe can seal itself off from the sometimes violent winds of change blowing through the whole continent. Even in distress, Europe has simply become too integrated, too big and too close to us to ignore.

Japan: the crisis mounts 

Japan boasts a long-lived people, but those demographics may prove one of the defining features of this crisis

When Japan's prime minister Naoto Kan described the crisis facing his country as its "most severe... since the second world war", his assessment, extraordinary though it was, did not sound at all overstated. As if 10,000 missing residents from one town alone is not calamitous enough for even the most advanced of countries to deal with, technicians were last night battling to save from meltdown nuclear reactors with failed emergency cooling systems. Only a few weeks away from the 25th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident, no one can be under any illusions of what could result if the technicians lose their battle.

Disasters can sometimes pull a people behind their leaders; but they can just as easily dissolve the trust that the electors repose in the elected. In 2005, the Bush administration's bungling of the damage done by Hurricane Katrina swiftly became effective shorthand for a president out of touch with his people. The early signs do not look good for Mr Kan.

Brought in as a rather unlikely change candidate to run a country bogged down in an economic slump lasting two decades, the prime minister's few months in office have left him looking beleaguered – and with plummeting approval ratings. The country's press has repeatedly accused him of weakness in territorial disputes with China and Russia, while his economic policymaking has often been blocked by the opposition in parliament. And now the government and nuclear industry face accusations that they had seriously underestimated the nuclear plants fundamental vulnerability to earthquakes. There are lessons here for Britain's government, too – as environment secretary Chris Huhne acknowledged yesterday in calling for an official report on nuclear safety. The obvious point for ministers to make would be that Britain does not face the same quake threat as Japan. An important point, but it may not sway public opinion formed by TV footage of Japan's crisis-hit nuclear plants.

Meanwhile, the dimensions of this disaster keep expanding: more than 210,000 people evacuated from five prefectures, 3,400 homes destroyed, the coastal area of Miyako and almost all of the town of Yamada submerged. Many of the victims will be elderly. It is the boast of Japan to have a long-lived people, but those demographics may prove one of the defining features of this crisis. In Shintona many buildings withstood the force of a 10 metre-high wave slamming into the coastline at the speed of a jumbo jet; but a number of their elderly occupants could not. A stark reminder that the toll from this tragedy will continue to mount, even after the immediate danger has receded.