This blog has reported before on the commitment by the Conservative party to leave the EPP in the European Parliament, and also on William Hague’s recent speech on his party’s view of Europe. Since then, the bid to leave the EPP has reached a conclusion. (You can read about it here.) At first sight, it looks rather clever.

To recap, David Cameron promised, when a candidate for the leadership of his party, that Conservatives should say the same thing in Brussels that they say in London, and that therefore Conservative MEPs should not be members of the EPP. There were profound differences, he said, between them, and it made no sense to sit together.

William Hague, shadow foreign secretary, was despatched to Brussels with the mission of making this happen. But easier said than done. It is actually quite hard to set up a new group in the European Parliament, and sitting as independents did not appeal. There was a lot of scepticism about whether this could be done, or whether David Cameron would be forced to break the very first promise of his leadership.

On first scrutiny, he has handled this rather well. His plan is to create a new group in 2009, but to stay with the EPP until then. That way, the MEPs who refused to break their manifesto commitment to the EPP are able to keep it, but the party is inoculated against the charge of saying one thing in Brussels and a different thing in Westminster.

The price of this, of course, is that they are forced instead to say one thing in Brussels and mean another. At a stroke, the 27 Tory MEPs have become lame duck members of the EPP. Their ability to wield influence in the group must surely be diminished now that they have handed in their notice to leave.

Of course, it is not clear what will happen to them when they do leave. They have a joint agreement with the Czech Civic Democrats (read it here), but to create a group in the European Parliament needs five parties, not two. Where will the others come from? You can be quite sure that the EPP will be fighting back, trying to dissuade any potential defectors. (I am sure they have been doing this, already.) If it were possible to find the other three parties needed, it would probably have happened already. So the Tories have traded the certainty of influence now for the possibility of influence later.

Think forward to the 2009 European elections. What if the party groups finally get organised to put up candidates for Commission president? There will be a EPP candidate, a socialist candidate, a liberal candidate, and so on. Whom will the Tories support? Will they nominate their own? They could hardly support a Christian Democrat, having just walked out of the party group. The Conservatives would be silenced, just as the moment of democratic decisions finally arrived. If that really is the plan, it suggests that losing influence in Europe doesn’t bother them very much.

On the plus side, the issue has disappeared from British politics. And that, surely, is what he wanted above all. David Cameron made a promise, and he has kept it. He said he would leave the EPP in months and not years, and that timetable is kept: 42 months, to be precise.

To the launch of a new book by the Henry Jackson Society, “The British moment”. The book is based on the belief that foreign policy should be based on values rather than interests, and that Britain in particular should adopt such a policy. We should have a different approach to dealing with democracies from that we take towards autocracies; other states should not be treated as simple black boxes. (The society takes its name from the American senator Henry Jackson, who took this view during the cold war. Read about the society here, and you can order the book here.)

Now, I like the idea that foreign policy should be based on values and not interests. Put another way, our interest is served by the spread of our values. And the suggestion that one country’s constitution is of interest to its neighbours appears in the work not only of Henry Jackson but also of Altiero Spinelli. (Read this section in the Ventotene manifesto.)

But what are those values? How are they defined? Where are they applied? The Henry Jackson Society doesn’t say. I tried to find out what they are by working backwards from the policy recommendations, but without success.

For example, what can one learn from a stance on Iraq that claims to be not “pro-war” but “post-war”? The war is still going on, in case they hadn’t noticed. Actually, they have noticed, and their view is that the allied forces should stay “for as long as the new Iraqi government wishes them to stay.” Well, that’s a clear position, but it doesn’t really answer the question about values. All they are doing is asking a foreign government rather than our own to take decisions about the deployment of our forces: I am asking about the principles by which any government might take such decisions.

The reason why this question needs answering is the possibility that the presence of foreign forces is a greater destabilising factor than their absence. (This is what the Euston manifesto people do face up to, either.) In the case of Chechnya, the authors take the view that “Russia’s brutality in Chechnya has effectively generated an Islamist insurgency in the region.” If the Russians might be doing this, why not the Americans? I don’t know what the Henry Jackson Society wants.

On Europe, we learn from the rejection of the constitutional treaty that “Europeans oppose an unrepresentative supranational government overriding the wills of our national parliaments.” Worse, “The break-up of Yugoslavia and the war that followed should serve as salutary reminders of the sort of nationalist backlash that supranational federalism can provoke”. However, in Africa, the opposite is true:

“It is a positive development that the Organisation of African Unity, with its rigid insistence on state sovereignty, has given way to the African Union, which explicitly recognises a common continental commitment to democracy and the right of African states to help their neighbours secure security and good governance. Trends such as these should be supported.”

So is protecting national sovereignty a good thing or a bad thing? It’s quite a fundamental question – in the eyes of this blog, perhaps the fundamental question – but it’s a subject on which the Henry Jackson Society is silent.

The problem of Europe is deeper than just their view of sovereignty, though. Their proposed British policy towards China, trying to ostracise it in international institutions, is “a strategy that may entail mobilising EU support.” Now, one of the main reasons why EU support is hard to mobilise at present is the lack of a suitable institutional mechanism through which to take and implement the necessary decisions. The remedy? The constitutional treaty, but that’s something which the Henry Jackson Society seems not to have wanted.

I was tempted in this blog entry to be very critical. I mentioned to a friend that I was going to an event intended to honour what they call “the noble tradition of liberal interventionism.” “Nonsense,” he said, “dangerous nonsense.” And in some senses he is right.

Regarding Iran, we read that “A ‘ground invasion’ of Iran, on the Iraq model, should be ruled out for the moment.” Reassuring words, those, “for the moment”. But looking to other parts of the world – Africa, say, or China, they are much closer to the mark.

On China, they say that:

“Britain’s interests are best served by the containment of China in a liberal-democratic world order, rather than through an attempt to match China’s military might or stifle its economic expansion. This means putting values to the fore.”

Quite right. But what is a liberal-democratic world order? What is it made of? What does it look like?

The book allows itself to tilt at “windy multilateral rhetoric” (meaning Francis Fukuyama’s recent book, “After the neo-cons”) but actually there is more to multilateralism than they give it credit for.

Fukuyama himself writes of the importance of institutions in his book, and says that they are very difficult to establish. But the experience of the European Union is that they matter:

“One of the most successful engines of institutional reform has been the European Union’s accession process, which has transformed the institutional landscape in Eastern Europe and beyond.”

Those institutions take time to build, and will be built in stages, but there must be no doubt that their construction is nevertheless the objective of policy. This is the method of Jean Monnet that has taken the European Union as far as it has gone today.

Let us adopt democracy and human rights as our values, yes, and let’s build the system of governance that will protect them. As Spinelli remarks in his essay “The United States of Europe and the various political tendencies”, it is perfectly natural to say such things within an existing state, but it becomes a shock to say them at international level. It must not be a shock, it must become normal.

I don’t think it is Henry Jackson who should be the inspiration of our foreign policy, perhaps, but Altiero Spinelli and Jean Monnet. Values, yes, but also the means and the methods to achieve them.

Reading the debate about the Nat West Three, there are a number of interesting points that can bear a bit more discussion. (The origin of the case is the extradition of three bankers to the United States for alleged offences relating to the collapse of Enron, for which they have not been charged in the UK. Read more about the case here.)

The first is the way in which the debate has centred on the unbalanced nature of the extradition treaty with the United States. For suspects to be extradited to the UK, the American courts need to be shown “probable cause” – this is a term in the Bill of Rights itself. To send suspects the other way, the standard of proof is much lower. There has been some confusion about exactly how much lower – different government ministers have made conflicting statements on the subject during the past week – but there is certainly a difference.

As a result of that of balance, it has been argued by the opposition in parliament that the treaty should be suspended. (You can read the debate here – it is rather fascinating.) I have some quibbles with that.

The tone implied in that argument is that we are doing the Americans a favour by being willing to extradite suspects to the US and that they should return the favour to us. While this statement is correct, it is not complete. There is also the fact that we are doing ourselves a favour by willing to extradite suspects to the US.

If we think that an act, for example theft, is wrong and should be punished as a crime, it is wrong whether it takes place in the UK or in another country. Now, we accept that if the offence takes place in another country, it is down to that country to decide whether or not to treat that theft as a crime, but if they do, we are willing to help them. After all, the victim of that theft in another country might conceivably be a British citizen. We are against theft.

(There are of course some offences that we think are crimes that should be punished, even if they happen in other countries: war crimes, for example, and sex tourism.)

The fact that another country might not render suspected thieves wanted in Britain for prosecution should not, in principle, discourage us from helping them punish their alleged thieves who have fled here.

It is a bit like the arguments that are sometimes used in favour of free trade in negotiations. A tax on imports is mathematically equivalent to a tax on exports, and who would unilaterally tax their own exports? The best approach, so goes the argument, is to open up one’s own markets unilaterally so that, at the very least, one’s own citizens can benefit and, perhaps, that other countries to follow suit. When it comes to the actual negotiations, though, as the difficulties of the Doha round show, no country follows such a strategy in practice.

As Conservative MP Dominic Grieve said, “It is only when countries on both sides look to their own advantage that one gets an agreement that is binding and durable.”

The disadvantage of unilateral action in this field is that it robs the country that takes such action of much of its negotiating clout in future. It can’t ask for much of a quid if it has already spent its quo.

A multilateral framework for extradition, such as that practised by the European Union, avoids this problem. The pressure on each member state from all the others to stay in step during the negotiations is much greater than that which can be exerted by a smaller country on a larger one.

The second point is, the unbalanced nature of the treaty notwithstanding, the standard of evidence demanded is too low. This is a second complaint in parliament: if there is not enough evidence to prosecute in the UK, then there should not be enough evidence to extradite somewhere else.

Again, there are further questions to be raised. The whole notion of extradition arises because of the division of the world into different criminal jurisdictions. A criminal wanted for trial in Liverpool does not have to be extradited from London, merely put in the back of a van. Federalism is naturally interested when national borders take on a legal or political significance.

It is wrong that a criminal should escape justice because of the intervention of a national border, but also wrong that a suspect should face injustice because a country hands him over to an unfair judicial process. These are the two principles that apply, and the tests involved in the extradition process are there to strike the balance between them.

The best way to ensure that extradition can proceed effectively is to have a common and shared set of human rights standards. That will minimise the risk of an unfair judicial process. Again, take a bow, the European Union.

By contrast, the controversy over Guantanamo Bay has not helped the American image in this regard. Still, it’s in their hands to change things, if they wish.

It was also good to note in the parliamentary debate the acknowledgement of the role of the European Convention and the European Court of Human Rights. They make it possible to have a faster, more effective extradition process within Europe. Of course, these are the “foreign” convention and “foreign” court that some Conservatives have been railing against in recent weeks. Perhaps now, they start to see their value.

I went to the Second European Citizens’ Convention in Vienna last week, and said a few words in a discussion about how a future constitution might be ratified. An earlier speaker, Sergio Pistone, had spoken of the importance of majority voting, rather than unanimity, in enabling the American colonies to adopt the constitution of the United States of America in 1788. Undoubtedly majority voting was important, but there was something else, too.

The colonies also had a strong sense that they had to work together and that they had no alternative. They had fought for their independence from Britain together, with the assistance of other European powers. What had started as a colonial rebellion, within the context of traditional English-style debates about politics and the origins of political power, had turned into a full-scale intra-European war. The newly-independent United States knew that unless they could unite, they would suffer from the fact of their divisions in the future. Conflicting interests of the different European powers had found expression in war on their territory: they had to make sure that this could not happen again.

This meant that their need to find a way to work together outweighed their concerns about the detail of the way in which it was proposed that they should work together. And they all knew this. It became clear to North Caroline and Rhode Island that they would not get any other deal from the other states, and the overriding need to be part of the American federation won the day.

If the demand for majority voting rather than unanimity in adopting the European constitution is to have the same effect in unblocking the process of ratification, then we must also create the same sense of need to unite. The obstacles to unity in Europe are not merely technical but are rooted in the very sense of what it is to be European, namely the deep and profound diversity of our continent.

Here are two examples of the problem.

First, consider the Iraq war. Europe was divided. The British wanted to rally the rest of Europe behind the American policy; the French wanted to rally them against the American policy. Neither got their way: at such a profound moment, European attempts at agreeing a common policy failed. If the European countries could not agree on a foreign policy, they would not be able to agree on a constitution.

A second example is taxation, its level and the uses to which it is put. Mr Donfut [an earlier speaker from the Belgian government] spoke of the need for agreed minimum levels of social provision, with dedicated resources to match and some measure of harmonisation of fiscal policies. Without taking a view on this proposal myself, it is enough to observe merely that this is not the consensus view in all of Europe. In fact, it is quite controversial. The point is that European countries do not agree on this issue at the moment. If they cannot agree on a tax policy, they cannot be expected to agree on a constitution.

So, while the recognition of the majority principle in adopting the European constitution is important, it is not enough. There must also be the recognition of the need for Europe to unite. I have given two examples of where that recognition does not yet exist, and no doubt there are more. We have to win this argument – about why Europe should be united – before we can win the argument about how it should be united.