I was at an interesting discussion on Thursday evening on Marx and modernity. I went along not knowing much about Marx - I seemed to be the only one present who hadn't studied Capital in great detail, but that didn't matter. The point wasn't the uses to which Marxist thought have been put, but the context in which that thought first emerged.

Karl Marx started out as a radical journalist in the Cologne in the 1840s. He wanted to write about the changes going on in the world around him and why they were happening. The Prussian authorities (the Rhineland was part of Prussia, then) seemed content to allow him to write about events in other countries - France, Italy, and so on - but not about events at home. His readers must have received rather a skewed view of the world - everywhere there is chaos, but here.

And the 1840s must have been an exciting time to write about. There were nationalist tensions in Germany, Italy and Hungary, for example (in those days, nationalism was on the same side as democracy, as the alternative to hegemony and empire; the debate about the future of Europe is still living with the consequences of this today); a customs union had been created to cover most of Germany; large-scale European emigration to the New World was getting under way; and perhaps most important of all, the Industrial Revolution was spreading across Europe.

We think of the Rhineland and the Ruhr as a region of industrial development. Back then, it was still rural. Krupp had been founded on a greenfield site in 1810 and was still growing. Huge changes were going in politics and economics - in Prussia as much as, if not more than, anywhere else - and Marx wanted to study them.

I am not going to rehearse where he might have gone wrong - the point here is the context, and the context is that these things could be studied. Economics and politics were human endeavours that had been created and could be changed. Immutable forces such as monarchy and the church were no longer immutable. Poverty was not an inevitable part of a life but the result of one particular distribution of wealth within society: there are other ways of distributing wealth.

All these issues are familiar to us today, only the immutable forces have changed. The church and the monarchy have been replaced by globalisation and the market. Society and the public interest are asked to prostrate themselves before these new forces. Most readers of this blog will share my dislike of this argument.

The global marketplace is only unregulated because our political system has chosen not to regulate it. A choice has been made not to do so: the alternative choice can also be made. The division of the world into sovereign states is likewise a choice. Sovereignty can be pooled - it does not have to be absolute.

If you want an exposé of the latest misadventures of the neo-conservatives, I can recommend that you read the latest piece in the Guardian by David Clark. You can find the link by clicking here.

David Clark has proved to be one of the most articulate and insightful critics (in the best sense) of the Blair government and its policies. His warnings about the neo-cons deserve to be taken seriously.

An argument we often have to face is that only by signing up with George W Bush are we able to defend and export the values of liberal democracy. That is what the neo-cons and their friends tell us. I disagree. I would argue that the antics of the neo-cons do more harm than good.

Liberal democracy depends not only on what happens within the state, but also what happens between states. Democracy and the rule of law belong there, too. The evidence of Guantanamo Bay shows that the neo-cons do not agree.

Establishing the principles and habits of liberal democracy at international level is much harder than at national level – no-one can deny that – but that does not make it less important. Multilateral institutions take time and patience to build. In claiming to be democrats while setting about undermining those multilateral institutions, it is the neo-cons who have some explaining to do.

A brief business trip to Brussels today. The weather was dreadful. Sudden heavy downpours and generally grey skies. The weather always seems to be bad in Brussels, similar to London but always worse.

If it’s hot in London, it’s unbearably hot in Brussels. If it’s cold in London, in Brussels it’s freezing. Windy weather becomes stormy, rain becomes torrential. I don’t know why it’s always like London but worse, but that’s the way it always seems.

Maybe our Eurosceptic friends have an explanation. Yet another europlot against the British, perhaps.

"There is an imbalance between civil servants and politicians. People say that I breached a trust - well, leave aside the fact that this has gone through the Cabinet Office machine, there seems to be no bar whatsoever on politicians writing books that cover areas in which they are dealing with civil servants. Yet civil servants are supposed to take a vow of indefinite silence.”

Sir Christopher Meyer, reported in the Independent on Sunday, 13 November 2005

Well, yes, there are differences between politicians and civil servants and it wouldn’t seem wrong to me if one of the differences was that politicians can publish their memoirs and civil servants can’t. Politicians are, after all, elected by the public and are accountable to the voters for their actions. The role of a civil servant is to advise but not, in the end, to take responsibility before the voters. Civil servants may be important, they should not get carried away with their own status.

Perhaps the rarefied air of high-level secret diplomacy, where accountability to the public hardly gets a look in, has blurred the distinctions between elected and unelected officials. If so, the public embarrassment now being heaped on Sir Christopher might help to concentrate minds in the future.

A couple of weeks ago, I was able to attend a conference on the defence of sovereignty in the 21st century. It was an academic conference, not a political event, so it was intriguing that one should be held with such an approach. I think it’s a good thing, not a bad one, that the academic study of politics results in political opinions. I find it baffling that people can study political issues in any kind of depth without reaching conclusions on those issues.

The old blog I wrote on yes-campaign.net had a few entries on sovereignty, so I won’t try and repeat them here (there is a link on the left-hand side on this page if you want to go back to and have a look at them) but there is something that sprang to mind that I want to write down here.

One of the speakers explained that in a world based on the notion (and defence) of sovereignty, each state had the right to decide its own system of government. I asked about how to deal with cases where the system of government chosen by a state has an adverse impact on other states. Well, it was explained, each state does not have the right to take decisions that have such an impact. Fine, but this means that states are not absolutely sovereign, even in theory, and do not have the right to choose their own systems of government. Altiero Spinelli wrote in the 1940s of how one state’s constitutional system is of vital interest to its neighbours, and he was right.

Left unsolved from this explanation that there are limits to sovereignty – from someone who wants to defend it, remember – is how to decide what those limits are. A rejection of the idea of authority over individual states leads to the conclusion that each state decides those limits for itself, in which case we don’t really have limits to sovereignty at all.

War inevitably is invoked at this point as the last resort in deciding these questions. And as a theory it looks like a good description of the way we live now. However, federalism is not just a description of the practice of federal government but also an expression of the values of federal government.

Federalism does not presuppose the end of state violence, but it insists that such violence becomes legitimate only to the extent that it upholds the federal order. (It is akin to the actions of a police force, not an army.) A world of state sovereignty treats state violence as legitimate if its perpetrators think it is. This is a much lower hurdle to cross.

On Remembrance Sunday, a day when we remember the millions who died in the world wars, the aim of making state violence less necessary rather than more seems to be the right one.

I see that Conservative leadership contender David Davis has renewed the call for only English MPs to vote on English-only matters in Parliament (reported on BBC News Online here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4424370.stm).

You can understand what he is getting at: right now, Scottish MPs can vote on English domestic legislation (on health and education, for example) but English MPs cannot vote on its Scottish equivalent. (Neither can Scottish MPs, for that matter.) Devolution has put health and education in Scotland into the hands of the Scottish Executive and the Scottish Parliament. Unfair, say the critics, and they've got a point.

But creating two classes of MP in Westminster is not the solution. Imagine the chaos if the Davis plan were to come to fruition. A government that commands a majority in the Commons on the strength of MPs from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (as the present one does) would be unable to implement its legislation in England. The opposition would be able to prevent anything from being done. They could not be able to achieve anything themselves as they would lack the parliamentary time (a gift from the Leader of the House who is appointed on the strength of the whole Commons, not just the English part).

We saw on Wednesday, when the 90 day proposal for detention without charge was voted down, a government unable to govern. Under the Davis plan, that situation would risk becoming the norm, not the exception. The resentment between the English and Scottish political systems would surely grow, which is hardly a sensible outcome for someone who professes to want to defend the union.

Much better would be a policy of devolution all round, creating regional government in England with powers comparable to those in Scotland. This is the answer to the so-called West Lothian question. The obstacle to this proposal is one of practical politics: the first steps towards it in the north-east of England were rather ruined by a half-baked proposal and an unsuccessful referendum campaign.

Solving these constitutional problems is going to require a rather substantial effort on all sides in politics. Dreaming up solutions during the Tory leadership campaign risks making things worse rather than better.

This blog is taking over from the blog I used to write on yes-campaign.net. The blog and the comments on that site were interesting, but the ratification process for the constitutional treaty has stalled (if not halted altogether) and I want to keep the notion of the Federal Union blog going. There is a lot more to the pro-European debate than just the constitutional treaty, and there is a lot more to the federalist debate than just Europe.

You may have to forgive a few teething troubles in the technology with this new blog system, but I hope that we can carry on the useful and interesting debates that we enjoyed earlier in the year.