Okay. Just to to welcome you all to this discussion we're calling the discussion rather than a debate.
But we hope that you will manufacture a debate with lots of difficult questions.
I'm simply going to welcome you on behalf of the three supporters of the program,
the James Madison Trust, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the European, which I represent here in Oxford.
And I want to introduce two special people.
The first special person is Sir Ronald Grierson, who has joined us.
We didn't mention his name at the beginning of our conference as a founder, father of the Europe.
I'm delighted that Ronnie, you could be with us and see, I hope,
the successful fruits of that little idea you had in the early 1990s to bring people together to discuss issues of of concern and importance,
and also to bring young scholars together with some of the wise heads that are in the room.
The second introduction is simply to introduce our chairman, who will then take over the proceedings,
Peter Luff, who's a very distinguished European ist, if I can call him that,
chairman of the European Movement and very active over a lifetime in many different
guises with a particular interest in environmental and climate change issues.
Peter will take us forward. Thank you. Welcome.
This is an open discussion and it forms part of the of the wider conference on federalism and east and west.
But tonight, the discussion will be open. It will indeed be filmed so people can take away what they want from it.
I hope they get very many questions coming.
We do have probably the two most distinguished speakers we can possibly have on this issue in the Solomons.
David Hurley I've had the opportunity to introduce Peter Sutherland before, but it's pretty hard to imagine one person so many things on their CV.
It sounds like five different.
For those of you who didn't know, Peter was a chairman of Irish Banks, he was director general of Gas and then in the World Trade Organisation.
He was a former Attorney General of Ireland and a former European commissioner
responsible for Commission policy and a former chairman of Goldman Sachs International,
former chairman of BP in slightly less dangerous times.
And I know he is the current chairman of the London School of Economics and is the UN Special Representative for Migration and Development.
So to open the discussion on common ground and federalism in Europe today, I have great pleasure to meet you.
Thank you. And I'm certainly rather pleased that this has been described as a discussion or a debate because it's certainly not a lecture.
But I would like to say by way of preface and that really Grierson, whose interest has been over many years,
will no doubt be massively pleased with such a large Eurocentric list as myself,
as a presenter presenter on this particular topic, because I am going to admit I have an issue that I believe in federalism.
I believe in European federalism. I believe that we have gone too slow, that we haven't gone deep enough in the development of the European Union.
And I'm worried, rather than gratified by the developments which have taken place through the Lisbon Treaty.
But let me start by trying to explain why, even though I imagine that many of you are already converted on the subject,
the issue of values has been linked to the issue of federalism.
In the topic which we're addressing here this evening that I believe is as it should be, because from the very outset,
the European integration movement has been rooted in the concept of value values, European values.
I remember reading once something which was written by Jack Maritime, who was a philosopher who had influence not merely in the European context,
but also in the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
And he wrote in Commonwealth in Washington in 1940 that when the world was ultimately one,
that Europe could only be a stable place if there was a federal Germany rooted in the federal Europe.
And I agree with him.
He went on with other philosophers such as Emanuel Munir, to influence the thinking of the founding fathers, as we call them, of the European Union.
And Schumann de Gaspari Mama in particular.
And I don't know when people who always saw European integration as a moral cause,
they met under the aegis of the Geneva circle in 1951, and some correspondence and notes remain of their meeting.
And at that time, the point was made, particularly subsequently in a letter to Schumann by A.A.
That he was that they were penetrated by the will to develop and realise the new construction of Europe built on foundations related to values.
And those values have been fundamental to the development of Europe.
It's no harm to remind ourselves that the fundamental point that drove them in the first
instance was an attack on what they jointly considered to be the evil of national sovereignty.
And I think using a word as strong as evil and associating us with national sovereignty is really what they were talking about and what drove them.
They had, of course, seen evidence of the excessive individualism of liberalism leading to all sorts of aberrations,
the excessive collectivism of communal communism, leading also to all sorts of evils.
They have seen, above all, the rise of fascism.
And they brought it to the debate as it was created in the early days,
a thinking which was based upon what I would describe as Judeo-Christian principles.
Principles which were rooted in the dignity of man and the equality of man,
which are principles which are at the very core of our civilisation here in Europe.
And I think there was a Dr. Zhivago that Pasternak wrote, putting it in the words of Zhivago himself,
that what the Gospels tell us is that the Kingdom of God has no nations, only persons.
And this aspect of persons and indeed the concept which was developed in the early days of personal ism.
Was an essential part of what these pioneers were seeking to found.
Jack. Mary Jo, who I referred to earlier, had a role to play also in the putting together of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
And the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had also an effect which was related to that concept of absolute national sovereignty,
something that goes back to the 16th century and its origins.
And the concept that grew out of this was that national states and their powers would be limited in a number of different ways.
They would be limited by a degree of supranational government.
Which of course, was part of the coal and steel treaty and was the beginning of what was to become the Treaty of Rome, economic governance and so on.
And in between we had the fail of defence community, but all were moving in the same direction.
Certainly wasn't intended to stage and intend at least to found a, quote, common market.
Their ambition was a great deal deeper than simply commerce.
And indeed, commerce, as I've indicated, came some distance down the path.
After the failure of Defence and the success of the Cold and Steel Community.
What they were talking about. And the other constraint apart from supra nationalism, was the concept of law and universal human rights.
Again interfering with the extremes of national sovereignty.
And the concept, which came from Catholic teaching of subsidiarity, which was to push down closer to the people,
such decision making as could be taken closer to the individual, the individual or the community in which the individual resided.
So to me, this, at least in logic, was the answer to go down Stella Republic,
which really was the foundation of the concept and intellectually presented at least of national and national sovereignty in 1583.
And it was really a community of values that we were seeking to develop.
Now we're told today that there is a democratic deficit.
That there is no belief. Profound belief in the European project that young people are not inspired by it.
But it is not developing as it should develop.
Well, the reason is clear. All of this has been forgotten, certainly by our politicians.
Forgotten probably as being generous to them. I don't think any of them ever knew it in the first place.
I don't think it's understood. I don't think it's realised.
And with some honourable exceptions present in this room, it's particularly evident that it has not been discussed or understood in this country.
And it is highly regrettable that that should be the case.
It certainly has not been the case in the instance of all the leaders of European institutions since.
There were probably two great presidents of the commission, Holstein and the law and both of them in their own way had a very clear view of values.
I served in the first of all commission and fought vigorously with them on a lot of things that he stood for that I didn't,
including interventionism and economic matters.
But I never had any doubts about his belief in the idea of values and the association of values with what Europe was about.
And coming up to the current time, the players present time jumping through the decades.
We find ourselves arriving at the convention, which produced the constitutional treaty.
Much lamented. And they.
Convention statement, its position. As far as the people have joined the integration process based on their free
decision to declare their intention to create a close and federal European Union.
Already the states have lost their ability individually to secure peace,
internal or external security, prosperity and growth in a globalised world by acting alone.
Sovereignty can only be exercised on a larger scale.
And. I think that. This is something which is clear.
It's clearly true. Professor Christopher Brown has written and practical judgement in international political theory that
Europe was clearly inspired by the political thoughts of those those early founders related to values.
And he included with those values the issue of solidarity.
A sense of solidarity, constantly attacked, I should say,
on good grounds and bad good grounds on the basis that money paid to European institutions has been wasted.
Through policies that have not been properly administered and perhaps not properly designed in the first instance.
Bad reasons where the argument is solely an argument about use structure.
What I put in, I want to get out. That is a complete denigration of the whole concept of solidarity.
It's back to the nation state. My money is mine and will only be spent on what?
My constituents. Can see, touch and feel.
Whereas it was meant to be more than that. It was meant, at least in a small way.
We've never been talking about much in terms of the budget.
It was meant to be much more than that in terms of demonstration of a will to support others and to support their development.
But equally, they have their own obligations, obligations not fulfilled,
as we've seen in recent times in some of the countries that are under particular difficulties in managing their own affairs,
including, I regret to say, my own my own country.
But I think that one can also, if I may yet again referred to it to a religious source.
John Paul The second on the 2nd of May 2004 said that if the soul of Europe is still united in any way today.
The reason is that it refers to common human values.
If we didn't share values, how could we possibly be where we are today?
How could we stand together if we didn't actually agree?
The basic values that are set out, incidentally,
in Article two of the Treaty on the European Union as follows The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy.
Equality. The rule of law and respect for human rights.
Including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.
These values are common to the member states in a society in which.
Pluralism, non-discrimination. Tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.
What a profoundly magnificent expression that is.
I once said, and I've never regretted it,
that the European integration process is the most noble political endeavour in a thousand years of European European history.
And that's what it is. But very few people see it.
And very few people have explained to them. But the nobility is in the sharing of sovereignty.
And the sharing of sovereignty is the key to the distinction between the European
Union as an entity and anything that has preceded it or anything that has followed it.
So it is an enormous achievement and serious breaches of those fundamental values now can lead to sanctions.
Whether they will or whether we're talking here of. Platitudes, which Europe is also pretty good at, remains to be seen.
But the mechanism at least is in the treaties to give voice to and deal with some of the issues
that would arise if there were a breach in the fundamental obligations undertaken by membership.
So to me, the issue of values is a key to any prospect that we have for further integration.
And I think the fact that we have maintained these values in all of the European states
and enhanced and deepened them is not solely attributable to European integration.
But it is a significant effect nonetheless of European integration, because I,
I can't but feel having regard to the lamentable history of our continent.
That somebody would have breached some of these fundamental norms if they were not within the discipline
and the peer pressure and the identifiable legal obligation of being members of the European Union.
So we are where we are today. And the question then, I suppose, that I have to answer is.
What has the Lisbon Treaty done to improve the situation of those such as I, who believe that European integration is a cause that is worth pursuing?
And I must start by saying in regard to this more practical, the more practical issues.
That I am not happy. Although I fought hard, even in a state of some debility for the Lisbon Treaty in my own country.
But I'm not happy with what we have got. I'm not happy with what we have got politically.
I believe that the idea of a European president was a bad one.
It was not thought out. I think it's confusing and I think it creates significant confusion in terms of leadership dynamics.
And it is already evident that the tensions that it gives rise to are not conducive to the best possible presentation of Europe.
I think I can say that notwithstanding the fact that we have the best possible man as far as I can see in the presidency of the council.
He's a person who. Is not likely to.
Forget or ignore the important aspects of the institutional privileges of the Commission.
And he is somebody who is not likely to try to undermine him deliberately.
But I think that that was probably not something it was not thought through, I think, as well as it might have been the presidency.
I think that we have. At least today's less than convincing evidence that the workings of our foreign policy mechanism intergovernmental though it is,
and I understand the reasons why it is and for the foreseeable future would in any event have remained purely intergovernmental.
But it's not working. I'm not going to comment on the capacity of the High Representative.
I just don't know her well enough to judge.
I would have preferred, I must admit, a more prominent personality playing the role and imbuing the position with an
authority by virtue of the identity and history of the individual concerned.
I think it would have created a status on the world stage that would have been helpful to a rather difficult position,
which requires a great deal of prior agreement, obviously with the Member States before the positions are taken and so on.
But I'm not content with it. The current situation, of course, the Lisbon Treaty did bring in some.
Advances. Not substantial in terms of wealth, justice and home affairs.
I think one can say the abolition of the pillar principle has been a good thing.
I think the majority of voting that has been increased is a good thing.
I think that we have, as we had before us, a partially federal entity which is neither intergovernmental nor federal.
We have still the external trade and competition areas which could be considered to be part of a federal structure.
We have other areas which remain intergovernmental.
I think one can say. Then it may go a little too far, but not much further than is necessary to say,
as one eminent writer has, that the Lisbon Treaty marks a halt to the ambition of the Federalists.
But it hasn't altered the ambition of my ambition.
Many of them I know and we will try to go on.
But it certainly created a pause, and perhaps more than that not helped, of course,
by the history of the referenda in France and the Netherlands and later in Ireland.
But the French and the Dutch ones in particular, neither of which produced evidence of antipathy per se against the European Union,
although of course some of those who voted no were voting no because of their perception of an increased deepening of the European Union.
But most of them were voting against Turkish migrants or against Chirac or whatever.
And migration policy in the Netherlands and so on.
So but whatever about that,
the loss of the original constitutional treaty and the changes that were introduced by the Lisbon Treaty certainly significantly reduced.
The power and the dynamic for integration is as it should have developed, in my view.
And. Let me say a word, however, about the real issue of European integration today.
It seems to me that the future of the whole European project, as Mrs. Merkel said last May,
is dependent now on the successful resolution of the eurozone problems.
This now goes to the very heart of the European endeavour.
And I don't think it's an exaggeration to say, as she did, that we're playing here with the future of the union itself.
And the difficulties are already self-evident in regard to this particular issue.
For reasons related to the original negotiation of the Growth and Stability Pact.
And indeed issues related to national sovereignty and the retention of national sovereignty in those negotiations.
We have ended up with a treaty which is less than adequate in terms of maintaining
discipline as between the budgetary strategies and implementation of the member states.
The fact that disciplines were not put in in the first place.
Mechanisms for discipline, oversight, transparency and ultimately sanction were not included.
Has left. The European Union in a feeble situation in the context of addressing the challenges
which it now faces in regard to the countries which are in substantial deficit.
The course of events that has led to these deficits, of course, includes the fact the first overt breach.
Of the budget deficit figures. And the big claim of right in doing so came from Germany and from France.
But those of us who find ourselves in a far more invidious position today because of more egregious breaches of those disciplines,
can hardly claim justification for this. And certainly I don't.
But we now have a situation where. The insecurities of the market and the capacity to take out individual states by market pressures.
Can lead to instability of a dire kind within the member states.
And sometimes in instances when the particular state of economic debility is capable of remedy without external intervention.
Now, this, to my mind, is an extremely serious situation.
And in particular, I would say that we have a situation where the means available, notwithstanding the substantial.
The support of the European Financial Stability Fund can.
And the availability of 750 billion to support in one way or another, the member states who are in difficulty has not been adequately put together.
The actual interest charges that are payable in respect of any recourse to it are such that nobody to date has sought
to use it as a mechanism for shoring up the difficulty that they have in raising money through the bond market.
What we need to do, therefore, is to create.
Or to amend the capacity of the.
Fund in a way which allows for the recourse of reasonable rates of interest.
To that fund. Of borrowers. Sovereign borrowers which will provide stability in markets.
Sovereign borrowers who are strictly held to a clearly defined obligation in terms of
reduction of budget deficit and the maintenance of stability in their national accounts.
I think that that will come. I think it will come sooner rather than later, and that we will have a means,
hopefully without another crisis ensuing in the interval beforehand that enables this to happen.
I think, too, that the task force which will be reporting.
Under President Van Rompuy. On the discipline issue into the future.
I think that it will come in with a report and I think it will have implications.
For the member states. But implications which will not go so far as to require them to have a referendum in such countries as.
Which demand referenda in respect of constitutional change relating to the European Union.
I think that there's a sort of a weariness with referendum, which is understandable.
And we've gone far enough in the first instance and not been paralysed by the issue of national sovereignty, with which I started this discussion.
We wouldn't have the problem that we have today is would have been passed in the original truth and true to the original treaty.
So to me. Values, as I said from the beginning, are the core of what the European Union is about.
But today. Hopefully tomorrow.
They are not challenged in substance by any member state.
They are part of a debate to be had about the accession of Turkey into the European Union.
Because Europe will have to be satisfied.
That those fundamental values that I've enumerated and discussed, including all the aspects of equality which are part of it.
But those issues are properly dealt with. I would hope that they are.
Personally, I have no objection and see a lot of advantages to Turkish membership of the European Union,
but only if there is a clear understanding of compliance with basic principles.
And I must say that I get a little bit sick of listening to lectures about letting Turkey in from the
United States when one doesn't seem to feel quite the same momentum in their dialogue with Mexico.
Free movement of people is an important issue. So is a constitutional status which we are trying to hold on to in Europe.
I also find it rather offputting that if I may be negative to my hosts in Great Britain.
But we are told that we are going to have referenda about any changes that may occur in Britain in the future.
But we will not have referenda apparently about any accession treaty.
It might well lead a more cynical observer than myself to the conclusion that the reason for this is that some,
at least in the political firmament, are automatically in favour of any accession, any enlargement on the basis that it dilutes the European idea.
So we don't have a referendum on that, even though one can hardly say that the accession of 71 million people is an irrelevance.
From a constitutional point of view or the representation in the Parliament or anywhere else in the European Union.
But that's the only conclusion I can come to. Apparently, that is not an issue for a referendum.
So we're back to where I started.
This is all about values. And if the real challenge, as I see it, is the challenge of the single currency,
the issue of solidarity, the issue of the nobility of the aim of European integration.
Remains the key. Either we believe in it and live up to it, or this challenge will not be one that we will overcome.
I hope that we can be optimistic, but the challenge is very real.
And it's by no means certain as to how it will conclude.
Thank you very much. These are speaking as a federalist in a country where the very word is more taboo than common obscenities.
Very often it's been an inspiration to have you on our side.
I must say that your service has been very useful at times and is trotted out when people are
going to accuse federalists of being impractical idealists without any reality in the real world.
So they claim to be chairman of BP and be an idealist. The first night at the club David party leader discussant.
David as well as as the most distinguished former diplomat,
previously UK ambassador to the U.S. and to the UN as a member of the House of Lords and the European Union Subcommittee on Home Affairs,
and indeed very much an analyst and a thinker on international affairs generally and the role of diplomacy.
Well, thank you very much. And I see that I was listed as a commentator on Peter Sutherland's splendid address.
A difficult thing to do, because ever since we worked together in Brussels in the 1980s, Peter,
as part of one of the federal institutions of the European Union, the Commission and I,
as part of one of the confederal institutions, the Committee of Permanent Representatives,
we have tended to agree a lot more than we disagreed, for instance, over Britain and the euro.
But I think you may notice one or two scintilla of difference in our views on the issues we're looking at now.
And so rather than anchor my remarks to directly in his lecture,
I'll just offer you a few random thoughts on the European aspects of the three main themes
that have been identified for these next two days of discussion the challenges of adaptation,
of identity, and of legitimacy. I take them, if I may, in the reverse order.
First. Then the challenge of legitimacy.
A lot of ink has been spilled on such concepts as the creation of a European demos of the democratic deficit, as it's called,
and of such distinctly federalist federalising ideas as pan-European parties for European Parliament elections.
European wide referendums on major constitutional reforms and absolute control by the European Parliament over top European appointments.
Clearly, that is one way of answering the legitimacy challenge.
But I have to say that I don't think that any of those ideas has gained much traction.
And it really is hard to believe that they will do so in the near future.
Voters at European Parliament elections one can regret it.
I do vote largely on national issues.
pan-European manifestos general to the point of meaninglessness.
No one is going to accept ratification of major constitutional changes by Europe wide voting.
Personally,
I believe that referendums and here I must say I do agree very much with Peter that referendums are an extremely dangerous diversion for Europe,
even for a whole raft of reasons.
And that goes whether you're talking about referendums on a Europe wide level or at a national level.
I find the whole case for referendums very unconvincing.
I do not accept that they are a superior or modern form.
Update of representative parliamentary democracy.
You have the problems of low turnout, very likely if there are referendums and it has been the case so far on them,
you get a lower, much lower turnout than you do for national elections, for parliaments.
You have the fact that voters in their to some way address quite different questions from the ones on the order paper that they're asked to do.
That is quite obvious. The French referendum on the constitutional treaty.
I have a house in France I live near. I lived there.
I was there at the time of the of the referendum. They were not, of course, voting at all about the treaty.
They were all sent copies of the treaty.
And my neighbour Farmer said that she had thrown it in the wastepaper basket because she could find no use for it.
But she knew what it was about. What was it about? Plastered all over our local town was signs saying no and our constitution as discard.
It was as simple as that. It was actually about Chirac and Giscard, neither of whom were names to conjure with.
And I think it shows how very flawed these sort of referendum approach is.
They don't settle matters once and for all. After all, the 1975 referendum in this country on Europe was meant to settle matters once and for all.
Took about two years for the Eurosceptics to pick up the councils again, and they've been bashing away ever since.
And so they don't achieve that kind of finality.
They can be very divisive indeed.
And though I know this is a rather cynical argument to use,
it is perfectly clear that if the euro had been put to a referendum in any country in Europe, it would have failed.
And certainly in Germany it would have failed.
So those who believe, as I do,
that the decision to move to the euro was the right thing to do and who strongly believe that it needs now to be sustained,
just have to remember that it's really difficult to be both a protagonist of referendums and a protagonist of the euro.
So legitimacy, which is of course, a crucial requirement for the European Union, will need to be found.
I would argue elsewhere than in outright clear federal approaches or in referendums.
It's interesting that Lisbon, the new Lisbon Treaty, both gave national parliaments a role for the first time in a European treaty.
And at the same time gave greatly enhanced powers to the European Parliament.
Perhaps that does cast doubt on what previously was the conventional wisdom,
which is that the struggle is between national parliaments and the European Parliament over a piece of turf.
In actual fact, there are large areas the European Union is active which fall between the two and into a kind of democratic vacuum.
That is certainly true of common foreign and security policy. Tell me which national parliament actually controls that?
None of them do. Does the European Parliament? No. Are we going to let the European Parliament do it?
No. The Member States are not going to. So you'll have to find some way of combining things.
And I think they that could be through an active use of the provisions in Lisbon on subsidiarity and proportionality,
through some imaginative working together of the national parliaments and the European Parliament.
We could find a better way through to towards some legitimacy.
And I hope we will make that work.
It is quite interesting that when people in my select committee in the House of Lords looked at the implications of Lisbon,
almost the first thing that was said unanimously was we need closer working relationships with the European Parliament,
not we should grab back things from the European Parliament, but we must learn to work together with them.
Well, we haven't actually done that yet, but we've talked about it and perhaps we will eventually get round to doing it.
People do move in a slow way and I would like to see, for example,
there is now a question thought being given to finding some way of getting some legitimacy into the decisions taken on the
common foreign and security policy and perhaps something a little bit like the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Senate.
The US Senate could emerge without a treaty base,
but with both national parliamentarians and European parliamentarians participating and the High
Representative using that as the chief creator of legitimacy for the policy that she is trying to put forward.
I also think that it would be one other step towards legitimacy would be to give the members of the European
Parliament in all countries a much closer geographical link with the people they they they represent.
The fact that a lot of them are voted in on national lists and have absolutely no geographical link whatsoever.
And that in this country, for example, although we have proportional representation, it's on the appalling closed list system.
I think that there is way,
if we could find ways in which members of the European Parliament could have a closer geographical link to the people they represent,
that would be an increase in the potential legitimacy then the challenge of identity.
Now this is a hard one to again, many of is not, I think, susceptible of sweeping federalist approaches.
Europe is not going to become a pure melting pot like the United States either for its own citizens,
indigenous citizens, or for the immigrants who come into Europe.
There's just too much history, too many languages, too many cultural differences are involved to think that the melting pot will work in that way.
There's no sign. It's that that that is what ordinary people want and plenty of signs that they don't want it.
So diversity in identity, unity and diversity, whatever way you like to say this,
this slogan of of of Europe, I think will have to continue and we will have to make a virtue of it.
We are, I suspect, close to a very major.
Wrong turning on the identity issue, which is the challenge that arises over immigration.
They're not the rise of a number of right wing parties in France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Hungary, the UK,
which want a fortress Europe approach and rejection of multiculturalism is, I would say, a very dangerous development.
And of course it is an attempt to define identity in an entirely negative way, negative and defensive.
Personally, I find it morally objectionable, but even if it isn't because of the demography of Europe, it looks to me as being economically suicidal.
And it's good that a number of businessmen are now speaking up about that sort of issue.
So I personally think that the answer to dealing with these pressures from immigration, the pressures, the political pressures,
will be a resumed economic growth, obviously, and a much more imaginative approach to assimilating immigrants who come to the European Union.
But politicians, I would say,
will need to be a lot braver in standing up to these populist right wing pressures which seek to define European identity on a narrow,
inward looking, defensive basis. Now, what I have said so far, that identity sounds a bit negative,
and it is I suspect that all the efforts that have been put into defining a
European identity as such as a kind of successor to separate national identities,
has been an attempt to answer their own question if achieving a European identity is juxtaposed as an alternative to national identities.
And I believe it is doomed to failure for the foreseeable future.
But this would not necessarily be an outright victory for renewed nationalism.
After all, in many parts of Europe, in Scotland, in Wales, in Catalonia, in the Basque Country, in Brittany and Corsica,
in many parts of the Balkans, national identity is under threat and being challenged from below.
Whether or not the supporters of the regional identities aspire to a separate nation state, it is being challenged from below.
So I would suggest that whether we like it or not, and if we are to avoid the Balkanisation of Europe and the rejection,
the outright rejection of a federalist approach to identity,
then we will need to aim for what I would describe as a multi-layered approach
to identity with each citizen encouraged to embrace the same time regional,
national, European and dare I say it, global layers of identity.
This diffusion of identity will anger some, and it is certainly not a simple one to explain or to articulate.
There have actually been a few little difficulties about that sort of identity issue
in this great university in recent times between the colleges and the university.
So it's not a simple one, but it does seem to me to offer the only peaceful,
consensual way of handling the crosscurrents of the world we live in when we are talking about identity.
Now for the third challenge, the challenge of adaptation, which is what up to now the European Union has been good at, has done best sharing,
as it has done a remarkable capacity showing, as it has done a remarkable capacity for recovering from what at the time seemed to be damaging crises,
for fashioning complex compromises, which may seem to some to federalist idealists and to radical Eurosceptics in particular,
like messy fudges, but which have actually proved the effective glue which enabled the EU to move ahead, to prosper and to become stronger.
This failure to understand the history of crises in the European Union and how
these crises have been overcome is odd since they all happened not that long ago.
I think it does say something about the shortness of our memories now collectively.
So what were these crises? The French empty chair, 65, 66, the vetoes of enlargement to let the UK and the other countries with it in in 1963 and 67,
the leadership vacuum in the world economic crisis after the Yom Kippur War in 1973,
the great British budget war of the 1980s, the divisions over Bosnia and Iraq.
All these were overcome. They have been overcome and largely remedied.
The empty chair was filled. The first enlargement took place in 1973.
The EU emerged from the hyperinflation and the unemployment in the 1970s eighties.
The budget was war led on to the single market and the single currency.
The foreign policy splits led on to the Lisbon Treaty with the new foreign policy instruments,
the double hatted High Representative and the full time President of the European Council and the External Action Service.
And I would be quite a lot less negative than Peters about that.
These are long term projects, not ones that can be judged within a few months.
And I have heard quite unlikely people saying quietly that, for example,
the way that Cathy Ashton handled the very difficult dealings over the International Court of Justice ruling on Kosovo a few weeks ago,
which led to a resolution of the General Assembly, which seems to have set all sides on a path towards negotiation.
And discussion was actually a an example of how very well that sort of thing can be done on a European basis.
That's just one small example, and we are in very early days at the moment.
Now that historical record of handling crises is one of the reasons why I would suggest with some confidence
that the EU will emerge relatively unscathed from the present economic and financial crises which are both,
which are once again involving a leadership vacuum, because that's what we really have at the moment,
and also major financial and economic weaknesses and traumas.
To those who expressed doubt on the basis of financial and econometric analyses, I would suggest do not forget the politics.
All those earlier crises were overcome by a combination of technical fixes and political will.
So will this one be if it is going to be overcome, which I think it will.
But clearly adaptation has to go a great deal further than that.
Are. Union is living in a world where its capacity to influence the other main players is in relative decline and where
major international decisions can no longer be fixed simply by getting together with the US and the Japanese,
as used to be the case in the gaps in the WTO. When Peter Sutherland directed it said In such a distinguished way and with which he is so familiar,
we live now in a multipolar world in which the principal emerging states like India,
China, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Indonesia are becoming essential players both politically and economically.
So they must to become part of the decision making processes which precedes the finding of global solutions to the global challenges we all face.
That was the logic of the, in my view, distinctly belated foundation of the G20.
Now the EU will have to go further making room for these new players,
and in our last session there were some suggestions that the EU would not be prepared to do that.
Well, I don't imagine they will actually go rejoicing, but I think they'll go and not just in a token way,
in a whole range of institutions the IMF, the World Bank, the UN Security Council, to identify only the most prominent cases.
Can the EU summon up the will to do that, to accept a reduction in its own in its members roles?
I believe so myself, although the process will be painful and not without setbacks.
But the bottom line, surely,
is that the European Union has a greater stake than any of the other main players in their being an increasingly rules based international order,
and it is at greater risk from any drift towards new world disorder.
So I believe they will have to accept the logic of that, which is that to strengthen the international institutions,
the emerging countries must be given a greater say in them.
And that, of course, begs the question whether the other countries, the emerging countries,
India, Brazil, China and so on, will be ready to move in the same direction.
And I don't want to get into that because I will be here all night if we got into that discussion.
But and that is a wider debate, which may come later in this series of meetings we're having.
But I think it is quite important because, of course,
there is a possibility that the Europeans and the West generally will show a willingness to share the decisions,
but that the new emerging powers will not want to take them.
And that is a real risk. But let's not that's not our responsibility so much.
Now, kind of, you know, and I would say can adaptation for the EU stop where I just described the various aspects of it.
It will need to to face the challenge of new accessions if it is not to find its own neighbourhood becoming a less secure and a less prosperous place.
And that means bringing in step by step, the Balkan countries.
It means overcoming the divisions over Turkish accession, and it means opening the door at least a crack to the Ukraine.
None of that will be easy, but over time, I believe myself it will be done.
Now, can all those adaptations be achieved within the existing decision making machinery
and within the existing treaties with Lisbon as the most recent set of changes?
Well, I hate to say this in this categorical way, but they will just have to be,
because I just cannot see substantial new institutional changes to treaties being ratified by those 27,
soon to be 28 with Croatia Member States any time soon.
Between the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties,
the European Union got into the bad habit of making elaborate and substantial changes treaty changes to achieve objectives,
many of which could in fact have been handled within the existing treaties and machinery,
as was done extensively between 1956 and the Single European Act in 1985.
We'll just have to learn to do that again, in my view.
No bad thing since the seemingly unending series of treaty changes from my stroke to Amsterdam to niece,
and eventually to the failed constitutional treaty in Lisbon.
Well, part of the explanation for public disenchantment with the EU.
Well, I've set out a more confident answer to the challenge of annotation than to the other two challenges.
Of identity and legitimacy. That's partly no doubt because I was a practitioner and not a political philosopher.
I have to say that I did particularly badly in the political philosophy paper in my finals here at Oxford 51 years ago.
But it is also because of the three.
It is the more susceptible of clear answers, although even these are a bit risky.
Fortunately, and this is by absolutely last point, and that is surely one of the great achievements of the European Union.
These issues can now be debated across Europe and more widely outside Europe in a rational and tolerant manner,
which was not precisely the way they were addressed in this continent during the first half of the last century.