This blog does not normally get excited over state visits, preferring supranational institutions to intergovernmental diplomacy. Institutions are based on rules, so people can be held to the decisions they have taken, as well as making possible some kind of openness and accountability too. The whole point of diplomacy, on the other hand, is that it exists in the absence of rules: it is about persuasion, not compulsion. It’s fine for governments, but not so fine for the parliaments and citizens who want to hold those governments to account.

Relations between member states of the EU are among the most institutionalised in the world, so a state visit from the president of France becomes even less interesting than one by the king of Saudi Arabia, for example. But the outpouring of criticism of France in the press needs some response.

Stephen Glover, in the Daily Mail, seeks to explain why we can never be best friends with France. He prefers the trans-Atlantic partnership with America, but on some very strange grounds. He writes that:

“When, 50 years ago, the British and French governments colluded over Suez, disregarding the United States, they landed flat on their faces.”

Well, they didn’t fall, they were tripped, by none other than the Americans. It was not an accident or an inevitable consequence of geopolitics, but a deliberate act by the Americans to assert their own interests over those of the Europeans.

This was characteristic, for the American republic has never been a friend of the British empire. See the contempt with which they have treated British sovereignty over Diego Garcia, using it as a base for their torture flights even though they knew that the British government forbade this practice.

The Americans were also quite happy to impose economic sanctions on the British steel industry, which were only lifted when the rest of Europe backed Britain in the demand for redress.

Now, whether or not what the Americans were doing was in the best interests of America is a question for another day (although you can probably guess the answer) but it is time for the British to see where their own interest lies, and it is not across the Atlantic at the expense of Europe.

An interesting proposal arrives for a reform of the UN Security Council, not in terms of who is a member but in terms of who may speak. The “Universal Right of Address” would, according to Independent Diplomat, promoters of the scheme, allow all interested parties to address the Security Council directly: at present, this right is confined to member states of the United Nations.

In his book, “Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite”, Carne Ross, founder of Independent Diplomat, describes the treatment of the government of Kosovo, denied access to the discussions at the UN in which the future of Kosovo will be settled. He argues that decisions of the Security Council will be better informed if they hear directly from the people involved, and the people involved ought to have the right to a say on their own futures.

The idea of a universal right of address is interesting to federalists as it would amount to a step towards federalism within the United Nations. A characteristic of federalism is that, within a multi-level system of governance, each level has a direct relationship with the citizen. In a confederal system, by contrast, each level relates only to the level below. Federalism is the form of multi-level governance in which citizens have a direct stake.

In that context, recognising that there are entities other than member states within the UN system is a definite step forward. It is an out-of-date and undemocratic fiction that the member state is the last word in world politics.

The United Nations Charter of 1945 opens with the words “We the peoples of the United Nations” but actually means “We the states”. Extending the right of address within the Security Council would be a step towards realising the original terms of that Charter.

As Independent Diplomat puts it:

"When most of the conflict in the twenty-first century is inside rather than between states, it's time for the Security Council to deal with this reality."


Read more about Carne Ross here.

Five years on from the unleashing of shock and awe over Baghdad, what have we learned? I’ve written an analysis for the Federal Union news pages, which you can read here, but I am not confident that the right lessons have been properly understood.

The trouble is that different political issues are dealt with separately, rather than seen as being intrinsically connected. It is not possible for any European to come up with a realistic response to what happened in Iraq without thinking in terms of Europe as a whole.

At the time of the war, Tony Blair tried to rally the rest of Europe behind the American policy, while Jacques Chirac tried to gather European support for an alternative policy. Neither succeeded, and we ended up with the worst of all worlds. The Americans duly invaded Iraq as they planned, but without a broad enough coalition to be able to bring order to Iraq once they had kicked the door in.

A common European policy would have been much better, but are we any closer to it?

The Lisbon treaty includes some interesting and useful steps towards a more effective voice in the world – the High Representative and the External Action Service, for example – but it only makes that voice possible rather guaranteeing that it will speak. The decision-making system remains broadly the same: unanimity for policy decisions, with qualified majority voting for implementation.

(As an aside, one might point out that there has been a change in the decision-making system: the requirement used to be unanimity among 12 member states at the time of Maastricht; now it is unanimity among 27, which is likely to be rather harder to obtain.)

The European Convention that produced the first draft of what is now the Lisbon treaty conducted its debates in almost complete ignorance of the crisis that was unfolding in Iraq. (We wrote about it in Federalist Letter to the European Constitutional Convention #8, which you can read here.)

There should have been a fundamental and intimate connection between the two: the whole point of the European Union is to enable Europeans to respond better to collective problems. But the pigeon-holing of European issues as somehow distinct from the rest of politics makes this so much harder to achieve.

A writer in the Sunday Telegraph today, commenting on the government’s new National Security Strategy, complains that there is no mention of the threat from asteroids. The likelihood of an asteroid strike is extremely low, but the consequences would be extremely severe, as any dinosaur will tell you. (Read the National Security Strategy here.)

The Americans are working on technologies that might deflect or destroy asteroids on a collision course with Earth, so why aren’t we?

Well, isn’t the answer obvious? It is precisely because the Americans are working on technologies that might deflect or destroy asteroids on a collision course with Earth. Any set of defences of the planet that is good enough will defend all of us. Conceivably we should help the Americans on a coordinated effort, but it would be absurd to try to have a British defence against asteroids. What should we do: try to protect Kent by knocking the asteroids off course into northern France instead?

And that is the real point. The very idea of a National Security Strategy makes little sense in our modern, interdependent times. Anything that is a serious threat to Britain – terrorism, climate change, asteroid strikes – is a serious threat to our neighbours, too. We can only resist such threats by working together with them. A European security strategy or a global security strategy would make rather more sense.

A spotter draws my attention to this comment by Tony Blair, made in connection with his new role with the Climate Group attempting to negotiate a new international agreement to fight climate change.

"What I found, whilst still in office as prime minister, was that countries had their own environmental policy. They talked to other nations of course, but there was no centre where it was brought together."

Read the whole report here and you can read more about the Blair initiative here.

Well, isn’t that half of the federalist case? That political decisions will only be taken when there are political institutions capable of doing so. And, in the case of climate change, those institutions don’t yet exist.

The other half of the federalist case is that those political decisions should be taken in an open and democratic manner, rather than as the result, say, of a freelance politician supported by an NGO engaging in private talks with government leaders out of sight of the voting public. Still, we can’t have everything, and no-one ever said that federalism was a question of all or nothing.

Interesting comment here by Charles Moore on how Britishness is “artificial” (and he means it “as a compliment”):

"It may be that the government’s plan for oaths of allegiance for 18-year-olds in schools won’t work, but I am suspicious of the argument that it is ‘unBritish’ to make a song and dance about Britishness. In fact, a song and dance could be literally, and exactly, what are needed. Being essentially a political rather than an ethnic idea, Britishness is an artificial creation (and I mean that as a compliment). It was the careful work of leaders, thinkers, writers and artists for about 200 years. The concept helped forge a nation out of several once-warring components. It was so successful that it was taken for granted and then, partly out of left-wing ideology and partly by mistake, began to decline. Now that indigenous pupils know almost nothing about our history and our hundreds of thousands of immigrants have a very weak idea of the country of which they are becoming a part, it is complacent to say that special ceremonies are vulgar and unnecessary. We do desperately need to invent rites which help us understand who we are. It is a secular form of confirmation."

I am used to hearing from Eurosceptics that national feeling is somehow innate and immutable and that attempts to create European democracy will always fail, even if the theory is beautiful, because there is not and can never be a European demos.

I often quote Michael Portillo in this context (from a pamphlet he wrote for the IEA in 1998, “Democratic values and the currency”)

“Democracy requires not only the cracy but also the demos, not only the state but also the people. You can create the apparatus of a state at European level, with a common frontier, a single immigration policy, a common foreign and defence policy, and a single currency. All the attributes of the nation state, all its functions, can be transferred to the European level along the Monnet- functionalist model. But what we do not have and what we cannot conjure up is a demos – that is, a single European people.”

Michael Portillo’s argument is essentially that human history, at least in Europe, has come to a halt. Whatever the factors used to be that brought about changes in our system of government no longer apply. It is good to see that Charles Moore, in arguing that the form and nature of our political communities can still be changed, disagrees.

This blog discusses issues rather than personalities (Tony Benn would approve) so don’t be misled by the title. Discussion has started about who will be the member of the European Commission from Britain after 2009. Peter Mandelson, the incumbent, was appointed by Tony Blair when he was prime minister but has to contend now with Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown.

Messrs Mandelson and Brown famously fell out over the Labour leadership contest in 1994 and by all accounts cannot stand each other now. (Peter Mandelson’s contribution to the Blair leadership campaign was covered by a codename, “Bobby”.) The idea that Brown would offer to extend Mandelson’s appointment for another five years is therefore greeted with some astonishment amongst the Westminster press. The story in fact started circulating that Patricia Hewitt, another Blair loyalist and former cabinet minister who left the cabinet when Brown took over, would be nominated in Mandelson’s place.

This story has been discussed entirely in terms of personalities: who Gordon Brown does and doesn’t like. But from the point of view of this blog, that’s hopeless. The acquisition of political office – and that’s what being a member of the European Commission means – should come from the ballot box, not from attending the right cocktail parties.

The Lisbon treaty, of course, takes a big step in this direction. The choice of president of the Commission will be made “taking into account the elections to the European Parliament” (article 9D(7)) and the other members of the Commission shall be nominated by the member states “by common accord with the President-elect” (also from article 9D(7)), so it is not necessarily up to Gordon Brown to renominate Peter Mandelson or replace him with Patricia Hewitt, even if that is what he wanted to do. The voters, at long last, get a say. That’s an issue.

EUobserver reports a new threat to the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, arising from the Aaland islands. An autonomous part of Finland, the Aaland government is apparently demanding the same right that Sweden already has to sell snuff. Snuff is banned throughout the EU for public health reasons, but Sweden insisted on an exemption as part of its accession to the EU in 1994. Now the Aaland islands want to follow suit, and are apparently threatening to torpedo the treaty in order to get what they want.

But what has snuff got to do with the changes made by the Lisbon treaty to the institutional arrangements of the European Union?

The answer is nothing at all, except that a revision of those arrangements gives the opportunity for all kinds of other issues to be thrown into the pot at the same time. And, if someone else wants to do it, they are entitled to do so, just as we reserve the right to do so ourselves.

This is what unanimity means. Any decision, on anything, can be overturned art any time. Even if the issue at stake would normally be dealt with by Qualified Majority Voting, it can be attached to some other issue that is decided by unanimity.

Substantial changes were made to the Common Fisheries Policy in order to secure Spanish agreement to the Scandinavian enlargement in 1994. John Major tried to link all kinds of issues to the ban on exports of British beef during his famous “beef war” in 1996. These linkages are common, and are one of the reasons why the legislative process in the EU is complicated and obscure. A more transparent way of making and amending legislative proposals would expose these linkages to the light and probably reduce how many there are.

But if member states want to be bloody-minded, there is nothing, save a sense of shame, that can stop them.

Interesting talk from Professor Tim Lang this evening on food security. (Read him on the Quotebank here.) He was spelling out the state of the world’s food supply and suggesting a few of the things that need to be done. A number of the points he raised were outside the scope of this blog, but there was enough about the seductive delusion of nationalism to set me thinking.

A compelling analysis looks at how much land it takes to feed each of us, according to the types of food we eat. Beef takes up more land than pork to produce the same amount of food energy, for example, and wheat takes up more than potatoes, so you can measure the land area represented by the contents of your basket in the supermarket. And if you do measure the land area in the overall British shopping basket, you find that we are taking up so much land that, if everyone else around the world did the same, we would need five more planets the size of our own to grow all the food we are eating. Tim Lang called this “six planet living”.

One of the attractions of this form of analysis is that it does not look at what we grow here in this country but what we eat. That is the definition that really matters. One of the problems of the discussion about climate change is that Britain can claim the “credit” for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions because many of the goods we buy are now imported rather than made at home. Consumption patterns haven’t changed: we have merely exported our pollution. For those wedded to the national way of thinking, it may make some kind of sense, but actually it is the way to avoid dealing with the problem properly.

Now, whatever you think about food in general and environmental policy in particular, the six planet figure means that the British diet is only possible because most other people do not eat it. Thinking about the reputation of British cooking, maybe that is a good thing, but as a serious point, many people do not have enough to eat and actually cannot have enough to eat as long as things go on as they are.

So, what should change? Some people argue that the solution lies in the exploitation of technology to the full, to reduce the land area required. Others argue that we should eat different food and change our diet, which principally means eating less meat. This blog isn’t the place for that discussion, but there is something more to remark here. It is not enough to address food production and consumption without also addressing the framework for political decisions, too.

For one of the likely consequences of any new food policy is going to be changes to the way that we ourselves live. That’s not to say it is good or bad, merely that it is a fact. But can people be asked to make these changes without the confidence that they will make a difference? To be sure that they will indeed make a difference requires a means of delivering change in countries other than our own. A purely national way of thinking will not allow this. Tim Lang talked explicitly, if only briefly, about multi-level governance as a factor in solving the problem of food supply, but that is still a controversial idea in Britain. Although anyone who thinks that the UK can secure its own food supply on its own is truly living, if I can use the metaphor, on another planet.

The House of Commons will be debating this week the call for a referendum on the Lisbon treaty. There are two questions at stake, even if the Speaker in his wisdom will only allow one of them to be put to the vote.

The first is whether or not to hold a referendum on Europe at all: the second is, if so, what the question should be. The Speaker has already ruled on the answer to the second question – the Lisbon treaty and not EU membership – so only the first one is to be decided on Wednesday. This is a pity, because the second question is actually more significant.

On the first point, the British constitutional doctrine is that European treaties are ratified in parliament and not by referendum. Neither the Single European Act nor any of its successors was put to a referendum, under either Conservative or Labour government.

Now, one might argue that the British constitutional doctrine that was changed by the announcement by Tony Blair in April 2004 of a referendum on the constitutional treaty. Many other constitutional changes introduced by Labour since 1997, such as devolution to Scotland, Wales and the north east of England, and the creation of elected mayors, have been put to referendums, so in that tradition a referendum on a European treaty might fit in. But other recent constitutional changes, such as the changes to the House of Lords, have been decided by parliament alone, so we have not definitively moved to the Irish position where all constitutional changes have to be approved by referendums.

The position is complicated by the evident fact that the decision to hold a referendum on the constitutional treaty was not taken on constitutional grounds anyway. It enabled Labour to remove one of the possible negative factors it faced in the European elections of June 2004: the decision was a political one, not a constitutional one. Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time, has said since that the reason was “because of the extent of the clamour”.

The Conservatives argue that the obligation to hold a referendum is political: the 2005 general election manifestos of the three main parties contained commitments to a referendum on the constitutional treaty and the Lisbon treaty is sufficiently close in content to the constitutional treaty for those manifesto commitments still to apply. Labour and the Liberal Democrats dispute this, arguing that the differences between the two treaties are more important than the similarities. This is a political question, which by its nature is never going to have a definitive answer.

But, even though there are some interesting things to say about referendums in general, the second question – about the Lisbon treaty in particular – is more important.

There are two options on the table, a referendum on the Lisbon treaty alone and a referendum on EU membership as a whole, but the two are not so different, for reasons I shall explain.

First, let us imagine that the referendum on the Lisbon treaty rejects it – this is the only case where the subsequent outcome is unclear. What happens next? A treaty can only come into force if it is approved by all member states, which implies that the Lisbon treaty would be stopped in its tracks. However, after each previous referendum rejection, further negotiations have followed to fix whatever problem the No voters had identified. (The Lisbon treaty is intended to be the fix to the problems the French and Dutch saw in the constitutional treaty.) This time, new discussions would be opened to deal with the problems the British saw in the treaty. How could the difficulty be overcome?

This is where we have to look at what the grounds for opposition to the Lisbon treaty actually are. What we find when we look at what the opponents to the treaty have said is that their opposition goes far beyond the wording of the treaty itself.

They object variously to such things as the development of European cooperation on foreign policy and defence, the primacy of European law, the regulation of the single market, and the growing powers of the European Parliament. But these are not features of the Lisbon treaty, they are characteristics of the European Union as a whole.

European foreign policy cooperated started as far back as 1970, the primacy of European law was implicit in the Treaty of Rome of 1957 and made explicit by a European Court ruling in 1964, the single market was launched by the Single European Act in 1986, and the European Parliament became directly elected in 1979. It would take much more than simply unpicking the Lisbon treaty to deal with these concerns.

Furthermore, these points are not mere characteristics of the European Union but absolutely fundamental to it. The reason why it works is because European law has primacy over national law; the reason why it is democratic is because the European Parliament is becoming more powerful. To remove these features would be to change the EU in the most far-reaching way imaginable. The other 26 member states have joined it precisely because it has these characteristics: they will surely not give up on them happily now.

In that light, what outcome can possibly follow a British No vote to the Lisbon treaty? It is inconceivable that these objections could find satisfactory resolution within anything resembling membership of the EU as it is today. Unless the other 26 member states are willing to rip up 50 years of history (with which, remember, they are actually rather satisfied), a British No to the Lisbon treaty will surely lead to Britain’s departure from the European Union.

Now, if that is really the issue at stake in a referendum, the question on the ballot paper ought to say so. Proponents of a referendum on the Lisbon treaty ought to face up to the consequences of what they are proposing: for some of them, perhaps, that is what they really mean.