The newspaper articles welcoming Gordon Brown as the new prime minister all say that one of his undoubted achievements as Chancellor was to keep Britain out of the euro. Allow this blog to doubt how much of an achievement this really was.

Coming into office in 1997, his policy was in favour of euro membership in principle, but with concerns about the economic implications and also the undertaking to hold a referendum first.

The economic issues were refined, if that’s the word, into the famous five tests. The theory was that, when these tests had been judged to have been met, the British people could then be convinced of the economic reasoning, too. The five tests were there to help Britain join the euro.

In fact, the role of the five tests turned out to be to deflect criticism of British non-membership of the euro. “We’d like to join, but we can’t, because the tests haven’t been met yet.” The five tests were a means of keeping Britain out, and this is why the newspapers thank Gordon Brown.

But, there is more to the story than this. First, the economic obstacles to joining were certainly real. Fixing an exchange rate for ever is a serious undertaking and you have to be sure you are getting the rate right. The other EU member states spent 10 years or more in the Exchange Rate Mechanism, slowly adjusting and readjusting the relative values of their currencies. Britain joined the ERM late with the aim of reducing inflation, unilaterally declared a rate of 2.95 DM (rather than agreeing it with the others) and then refused to adjust it when circumstances required. It is not surprising that disaster followed. The rates were supposed to be fixed but adjustable but Britain treated them as fixed.

This goes a long way to explain Gordon Brown’s reticence. He had been in the Labour opposition at the time which had supported the argument for British membership of the ERM. Labour had narrowly lost the general election in 1992, but had they won, they would have been the ones holding the parcel when the music stopped. Frankly, they would probably have been even less likely to have asked for a renegotiation of the exchange rate before disaster struck: Labour was determined to prove its economic competence and lowering the rate would have appeared to have been an immediate admission of weakness. Labour being in charge when Britain was thrown out of the ERM would have destroyed that party’s economic reputation for ever.

So, the economic implications of trying to join the euro were substantial, and Labour was understandably fearful. But even if they had not been so afraid, what could they have done?

After all, joining the euro was a major economic policy effort in its own right. Think back to the strikes that paralysed France in November and December 1995, for example: Jacques Chirac was trying to make France ready for the single currency. Other countries had gone through similar extreme measures. Could Britain?

After 18 years of Conservative government, with Labour having endured years of frustration, was it likely that a Labour government would have made joining the euro a priority? Would they have postponed or abandoned all their other concerns in favour of the single currency? They had won the election on platform of defending the health service and improving education and dealing with lots of other costly problems which, they said, the Tories had neglected. Put in that light, a 1997 programme for euro membership looks rather hopeful (although of course it did not look that way at the time).

Gordon Brown eschewed what he characterised as a short-term decision – to join the euro – in favour of what he suggested were longer-term considerations, namely his broader economic policy. There the story might rest, except for one crucial fact.

That fact is that the eurozone itself is continually changing. With the apparent halt in the progress of the EU27 – the reform treaty will just about scrape through but it is hard to see what next – thoughts among the eurozone countries are turning to how that group might develop in the future. Some of kind of harmonisation of corporate taxation, perhaps, or a eurozone public debt provision, or corporate governance reforms for major companies established in the eurozone. Whichever they are, they will make the eurozone still more different from the rest of the EU and make the eurozone just that bit harder to join.

So when it finally sinks in the United Kingdom that a country with only 1 per cent of the world’s population cannot expect to sit in the front rank of the economic powers, and that membership of the eurozone is the natural solution to this problem, membership of the eurozone will be harder to achieve. Both politically and economically, joining the euro was never easier than in 1997, at precisely the time when Gordon Brown chose not to do so. Far from choosing the difficult long term option over the apparently easy short term one, it may well turn out that Gordon Brown’s decision on the euro was in fact the other way round.

A report from the European Citizens Initiative campaign from the European summit. They are of course happy that the direct democracy provision from the constitutional treaty remains in the new IGC mandate, but that’s not what caught my eye.

Their German affiliate organisation, Mehr Demokratie, took part in a public protest along with Open Europe outside the summit meeting: life-size cardboard cut-outs of the government leaders with their fingers in their ears, not listening. See the pictures here: http://www.openeurope.org.uk/media-centre/article.aspx?newsid=1934

The two organisations make an odd couple. One complains that the heads of government are not listening to public demands for a constitution, the other that they are ignoring public opinion against one.

The BBC news online report on the summit in Brussels reports this:

"The inter-governmental conference is the body that is charged with drafting the EU's reform treaties, traditionally created with the unanimous agreement of member states."

Untrue. An IGC can be called by a majority of member states, and the IGC that led to the Single European Act was created by a majority vote (9 votes to 3) against the opposition of the UK, Denmark, and Greece.

There is no such tradition. Member state governments that luxuriate in the idea that they have a veto over the future of Europe need a reality check. And the BBC ought to publish facts, not government propaganda.

I have sent in a complaint. The reply came back:

"Comments about our stories or services will be passed on to the appropriate editor. Factual or spelling errors will be corrected."

We will see.

There is some confusion in the press today about whether or not there will be a referendum in the UK on the successor to the constitutional treaty.

Tony Blair has laid out four so-called “red lines”, things he will not budge on in the negotiations. He says that, because these red lines will be observed, the future treaty will be smaller than the previous one and so no referendum on it is required. (Read more about this here.)

Gordon Brown, who will succeed Tony Blair as prime minister after the summit this week but before the negotiations kicked off by the summit are concluded, has other ideas. (Read about this in the Daily Telegraph here.)

He has allowed the Europe minister Geoff Hoon, whom I suspect is hoping for a promotion, to disagree publicly with Blair’s position. (He can hardly be sacked now.) For Geoff Hoon, whether or not there will have to be a referendum is still open, depending on the outcome of the negotiations themselves. In one sense, this is entirely consistent with Blair’s position, but in another and more important sense it is very different.

For what is under discussion here is not the ratification method but the contents of the treaty itself. The problem is that a number of other member states are demanding a text more far-reaching than the British government can at present countenance. 18 member states ratified the original constitutional treaty, and they cannot be expected simply to give up on the ideas behind it because the UK tells them to.

Tony Blair’s approach, as ever, is to try to find agreement between the two sides. He talks up the expectation of reaching a mutually satisfactory agreement, because increased expectations will make the desired outcome more likely.

Gordon Brown, on the other hand, resorts not to flattery but to threats. If the rest of the EU does not listen to his position, he will call their bluff and put their desired treaty to a referendum in the UK. When the British vote No, as he is sure they would (particularly if the government was in effect recommending that they should), the whole treaty is again scuppered, and it is harder to see a way back a second time around.

Now, it is possible that this good cop/bad cop routine has been coordinated between Blair and Brown. However, I doubt it. Blair will be long gone from the scene by the time the negotiations come to a conclusion in December this year – the summit at the end of this week will lay out a mandate and a timetable for the negotiations, rather than actually engaging in them itself – and only the great clunking fist will remain.

Rather than trying to reconcile the eurosceptic British public with the needs and realities of modern-day Europe, Brown is going down the road of allowing the former to trump the latter. I don’t think this is the orderly transition we were promised.

The British anti-European newspapers are concerned today about the prospect of the European Union acquiring “legal personality” as a result of the next European treaty. This was Article I-7 of the constitutional treaty of 2004, and the idea still sticks around.

The papers object that the EU might then sign international treaties without the approval of the member states. This is of course nonsense in several directions.

First, any negotiating mandate will be agreed by the Council of Ministers, as will any final deal agreed. The negotiations of any treaty would themselves be conducted by the European Commission, but the member states remain decisive.

Secondly, this system already exists: the European Community has legal personality right now and is an influential actor at the World Trade Organisation, for example. (Read about the confusion over EU jargon here.)

To give the EU legal personality would enable the EU to play the same influential role in other international issues as it does in trade. And that’s important, as those same anti-European newspapers might care to admit, if they read their own business pages.

For example, read Irwin Stelzer, adviser to Rupert Murdoch, in today’s Sunday Times. Commenting on American concerns over China’s trade policies, he remarks that “trade issues now relate as much to national security as to mere economics.” (Read the article here.)

That’s right. But without legal personality for the EU, Europe’s trade policies will fail to incorporate the essential security dimension.

The summit taking place later this week is provoking a lot of discussion and activity among the federalists. The central arguments of the campaign by the UEF are that the summit should commit (1) to agreeing a European constitution and (2) to putting that constitution to a consultative referendum everywhere in Europe on the same day.

Now, there is quite a strong understanding of the idea that a European constitution requires a referendum. If substantial steps are to be taken in the direction of European integration, then the direct approval of the people should be sought. This is the argument of the British anti-European newspapers, for example, although their definition of substantial is rather slight. It is also the argument of Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, although in their case they intend to argue that the steps taken are sufficiently modest so as not to require a referendum.

The federalist argument is more sophisticated than this, however. Not only does it argue that a constitution requires a referendum, it also argues that a referendum requires a constitution. The act – the historically unprecedented act – of putting an international agreement like this to a popular referendum will, of itself, grant that agreement more standing than the mere words it contains might otherwise justify. If this is the case, then the agreement must therefore merit the referendum: a constitutional treaty rather than an institutional one.

The next step in the argument is that the referendum should be held everywhere in Europe on the same day. This will free national government leaders from the fear that the referendum in their own country will turn out to be an opinion poll on their own performance: no, a European referendum will give the debate a very different character and the final choice a very different purpose.

So, the two demands – for the constitution and for the referendum – are not separate but linked. And the starting point for the demand for the constitution is the text of the constitutional treaty that was rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005. At the time it was agreed in 2004, it represented the consensus of national governments throughout the Union. Some of those national governments have since changed hands – in Poland and France, for example – and others in the same hands have simply changed their minds – in the UK. But nevertheless the constitutional treaty is the starting point.

It will have to be amended in order to take into account the criticisms expressed in the referendum results in France and the Netherlands, and no doubt there will be other changes too, but the federalist argument is that such changes should in general be kept to the minimum. They need to be enough, but not excessive. The federalists are not engaging in a detailed discussion of the content of the next treaty beyond that: different individuals and groups have floated possible ideas, but the core position of the federalists rests on the principle rather than the content.

This of course provokes an important question: what if the next treaty is a substantial retreat from the constitutional treaty of 2004, so much so that it might no longer merit a referendum? There will be a decision for the federalists to take about whether the changes to the text are so great as to mean that a referendum is no longer appropriate. That’s not a decision that can be taken now, but depends on the outcome of the negotiations. The summit might set down some lines for these negotiations, but they will go on for some months afterwards. (There have been some strong criticisms of those negotiations, too, which you can read here.)

My final point is that we should not write off now the prospects of the right outcome from the summit. There are some in the federalist movement who have already done so, but that position invites a reflection on the broader notion of what it means to be involved in politics.

Next season, I hope that Manchester United win the Champions League. I will be spending some evenings in the pub or in front of the television watching them play, cheering them on. But all the time and attention I might give them will make no difference to whether they win. What matters is whether Ronaldo and Anderson gel, whether Wayne Rooney keeps his temper, whether Rio Ferdinand keeps his concentration, not whether I happen to be watching them. I am a fan, not a participant.

It seems to me that those federalists who have written off the convention/summit constitutional process already are settling for the role of fans rather than participants. Interested in European politics, reading about it, talking about it over a coffee, but not engaged in making a difference.

Far better to realise how much is stake and how much still remains to be decided. Football is a spectator sport, politics is not. Sir Alex Ferguson and Carlos Queiroz have my confidence: Tony Blair and Gordon Brown do not.

Janet Daley wrote in the Daily Telegraph earlier this week (read it here) that the British people will not "accept rule by unelected continental bureaucracy and ministerial fiat, which is alien to their history." Quite right, but who is asking them to?

Taking "ministerial fiat" first, most of it is exercised in Westminster and Whitehall. There was an attempt to break this open by taking the regionally-administered Whitehall functions and making them accountable to elected regional assemblies. That failed in a referendum, and I don't recall Janey Daley as a prominent campaigner for a Yes vote. Some ministerial discretion flourishes in Brussels, true, but the case made by this website is that that should change. There's a paper published by the Federal Trust which analyses the decision-making trail using reform of the EU sugar regime as a case study. (Read it here.) What ministers (and their civil sevrants) got away with is shocking. The Council of Ministers needs to complete the transition from acting as a ministerial committee to acting as a legislative assembly. Will Janet Daley endorse that?

Next, "unelected continental bureaucracy". There's a simple answer here: rule should be by elected politicians, not unelected bureaucrats. That's coming, by stages - President Barroso is a career politician (he was formerly prime minister of Portugal) and was "approved" in office by the European Parliament. The constitutional treaty would turn this approval process into an election, doubtless to Janet Daley's satisfaction.

The only bit of Janet Daley's outburst that I can't dispose of is the word "continental". Well, if Britain is to forge a close international partnership with the countries with whom it has the closest interests - economic, social, environmental, security - the continent of Europe is where it will find them. Even I can't change the map.

But there is a good point in Janet Daley's article nevertheless, that elected politicians should always keep in mind the interests of their electorates. They tend to get voted out if they don't. One weakness of the EUropean Union at present is that there is not enough of this kind of calculation in the debates. When there is, of course, is when there are calls for the Commission to defend the Italian shoe industry against cheap imports or when the CAP is stoutly protected: even Janet Daley does not always like what popular electoral politics might bring.

But asking Europe's leaders to copy George Bush is a bit much. He is now effectively a lame duck president, serving out his second and final term, unable to stand for re-election, largely repudiated by the candidates from his own party, let alone those of the opposition. There are better models from America for European leaders to emulate, more noble and inspiring examples of political action and vision. Presidents Jefferson and Washington, for example, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Ambassador Benjamin Franklin. Politicians who united a continent whilst respecting state diversity, introducing precisely the kind of political accountability that Janet Daley now longs for. Why settle for the worst of American presidents, when you can settle for some of the best?

Here is a thought about the proposed new president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick. He is expected to take over from Paul Wolfowitz, who is being driven out of the bank under the weight of a personal financial scandal. Mr Wolfowitz denies having done anything wrong, but he would say that, wouldn’t he.

It was odd that Paul Wolfowitz could ever become president of the World Bank (read about it here) – he was hardly popular or respected around the world given his role as an architect of the Iraq war (this unpopularity no doubt came back to haunt him as the different national governments with an interest in the World Bank sat on their hands rather than coming to his defence) – but it is a position that is effectively within the gift of the president of the United States. George Bush appointed Mr Wolfowitz, and in turn has appointed Robert Zoellick.

It makes something of a mockery of multilateralism that such an important institution has its leader chosen by a single member state. It undermines the credibility of the World Bank and its leadership. Mr Zoellick will take office with his legitimacy weakened from the outset. But here is a suggestion of something he can do that will start to re-establish hi8s position.

He should visit some of the national parliaments of the member states of the World Bank to hold confirmation-style hearings at which he can present and debate his plans for the future. Better still, he should convene a special meeting of parliamentarians in Washington DC to which those different national parliaments can send delegates. This will strengthen the accountability of the World Bank as a whole and confidence in his own appointment in particular.

He takes over at an unfortunate moment in the history of the World Bank, with its leadership isolated and discredited. It is in his hands to put this right.

The latest stage in Tony Blair’s farewell tour – his speech in South Africa last Thursday – is one of the most frustrating. (Read the speech here.) It is one of the moments when the gap between motives and methods becomes most pronounced.

Tony Blair cares about Africa, you see. It hurts him that so many Africans live in poverty, threatened by disease, endangered by conflict, and he wants to do something about it. At the very opening of his speech, he declares:

“I believe in the power of political action to make the world better and the moral obligation to use it.”

Now, this blog has been rather unimpressed by Tony Blair on previous occasions, so I am going to try and adopt a different tone. Partly that’s because I agree entirely with his sentiments about the need for political action. I think it is appropriate to try and change things that are bad about the world rather than simply to examine them and wring one’s hands. Isn’t that what politics is for?

There are schools of thought that reject this view, one on the grounds of the pre-eminence of national sovereignty, another on the grounds of practicality. Tony Blair is swayed by neither of those: in the former case, to his absolute credit; in the latter, I’m not so sure.

First, on sovereignty, the case is straightforward. So many things that happen in one country can spread to others. Much better to intervene at source and prevent such things from starting. The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 led to instability in the entire region and made the war in the Congo so much worse. Under the rules of state sovereignty, that’s a pity but no more than a pity. Better in my view to rewrite those rules.

The grounds of practicality are harder. Take the military intervention in Sierra Leone. That country is now a more stable place than it was before British soldiers were deployed there in 2000, but remember that the first deployment of soldiers was not in order to stabilise the country but to protect foreign nationals. As it turned out, a military mission that was launched for one purpose turned out to be maintained for an entirely different one. Establishing the bona fides of any military intervention is difficult.

Furthermore, where is the capacity to repeat the intervention elsewhere? British armed forces are already stretched beyond limits in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Blair shows no sign of strengthening them in the way that might be needed. We’re getting Eurofighters and the Trident replacement, not the kind of military capacity to do the jobs that Blair says need to be done. The limits on Britain’s ability to act are to a considerable extent self-imposed. That’s not a very convincing argument against acting.

And lastly, or perhaps this should be first, do interventions of this kind actually work? The notion is one of going round Africa, fixing up problems one at a time according to our own definitions of “problem” and “solution”. It’s not easy to disagree with this idea, but it is hard to see how it works in practice. Alan Beattie in the Financial Times on Friday was very critical of Blair’s record here, increasing aid, championing individual leaders, calling for more trade access. Aid is near the limits of what can usefully be spent, individual leaders turn out not to be rooted in Blair’s idea of democracy after all, Africa already has the best trade access of any country. Niall Ferguson in the Sunday Telegraph today is even crueller. Possibly the biggest beneficiary of the Blair approach to Africa is the self-image of Mr Blair himself.

But I was trying to adopt a different tone this time. So here are some good things about Tony Blair’s speech:

- his rejection of national sovereignty as a reason not to act – I’ve already remarked upon it once but I’ll say it again because it’s important
- his backing for the African Union, both as a peacekeeping force and as an institution in its own right – closer links between the EU and the AU, for example
- his call for a rethinking of rules of origin for preferential imports, so that trade between third countries does not become a reason to keep imports from the poorest countries out of European markets
- more aid – there are limits to what can usefully be spent, but those limits have not been reached yet
- African representation on the UN Security Council – it will be interesting to see whether this means Africa as a whole, or merely one of the larger countries from Africa

So, some good points to say about Tony Blair in Africa. And the person who benefits most from this? Probably me.