As the six month French presidency comes to a close, I have been asked for my reflections on the performance of President Sarkozy. Not only has he had to lead France for the past half-year, he has also had to think about European issues from a European perspective as well as from a national one.

And what issues. There has been the war in Georgia, the need to find a way forward after the Irish referendum rejected the Lisbon treaty, and the financial crash on Wall Street, which came to a head with the bankruptcy of the US investment banking industry and the ensuing crisis of confidence around the world.

Most presidencies would have busy enough with just one such issue, never mind three.

Reporting to the European Parliament at a session in Strasbourg (read the speech here), he remarked that “I tried to change Europe, but Europe changed me”. And he went further to recommend that this is an experience that every government leader should have.

This sounds fine, except it can never work. With 27 member states and a six month period of office, the presidency will come round to each country every 13½ years. The average head of government is in office for about half that time, which means that most of them will never chair the European Council. There are two lessons from this.

First, another method is needed to provide heads of government with a European viewpoint. They spend most of their time working within national politics, with only occasional excursions for European issues. They have to work with their opposite numbers from other member states, but do not do so enough. More needs to be done to bring them together, both while they are heads of their respective governments and also at earlier stages during their careers. The reality of the European Union should become clearer to politicians at all levels.

And the second lesson regards providing leadership for the European Union from an all-European perspective. If a rotating six month presidency cannot do this, what can?

The answer is that there is an institution within the EU set up for just this purpose, namely the European Commission. It is composed of experienced and successful politicians, supported by an adequate and well-trained staff, and already possesses the right to propose legislation and the command of the EU budget. Its democratic mandate is rather indirect at present, but that could readily be strengthened. (In 26 out of the 27 member states, do not forget, the president of the European Council, whether Nicolas Sarkozy or anyone else, has no democratic mandate at all.) To strengthen that mandate is a matter for the European political parties, when they decide how to contest the European parliamentary elections in June next year. With candidates for president, or without? Perhaps President Sarkozy can work his magic here, too.

There are lots of reasons for doubting whether holding a second Irish referendum on the Lisbon treaty is a good idea, or whether it can be won, but it cannot be correct to say that to do so would be undemocratic.

The EU treaties require the unanimous assent of each member state, which each gives according to its own constitutional requirements. In Ireland, this means a referendum. When, and how many, is a matter for the Irish.

It would be quite wrong if the other member states forced the Irish to have another vote, if the Irish government preferred to abandon ratification (and this might still happen). But it is also wrong for the other countries to refuse to allow the Irish another vote, if that is what they want.

We hear a lot from British eurosceptics who insist that Britain should be allowed to make its own decisions regarding the EU but who refuse to accord to Ireland the same privilege.

Why should there be another referendum? The basic treaty will be identical, but a number of aspects might be clarified or, in the implementation, even changed. For example, it is likely that the number of European commissioners will stay at one per member state, and not be reduced as per the original idea.

What this means is that the Irish government has got changes made to the proposal that it thinks will be more attractive to the Irish voters but which are still acceptable to the rest of the EU. That way, the Irish get more of what they want, and less of what they don’t want. Isn’t that a good result for Ireland? Isn’t that what democracy is about?

The immediate answer is not right now. Joining the euro requires fixing an exchange rate between the pound and the euro forever, and with sterling falling every day, no-one can be sure what the right rate would be. The Maastricht treaty itself requires two years of membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism as a means of establishing a viable long-term rate, and it would be an enormous error to fail to do this properly.

It is necessary to point this out in view of the near-hysteria among some anti-Europeans that the government might try and sneak euro membership past them under cover of the current crisis. If there is anything we can rely on Gordon Brown for, it is his lack of desire to join the euro.

There are also the Maastricht convergence criteria regarding public debt and the public deficit. Debt is supposed to be no higher that 60 per cent of GDP – the UK’s is currently much lower than that but will get close as the recession unfolds – and the deficit is to be less than 3 per cent of GDP. That figure will be exceeded comfortably in the depths of the recession, which amounts to a further brake on membership talk. Government projections suggest that the deficit will not fall below the Maastricht level before 2013 at the earliest, so that’s another reason for thinking in terms of several years.

But if that is when the process might be completed, when might it start? Does that also have to be put on hold until the recession is over?

The government’s view is that it is in favour of membership of the euro, if the economic conditions are met. The famous five tests are intended to bring some kind of objectivity to this judgement, but in truth they attempt to justify the decision to stay out, not the decision to join. For the economic conditions are never going to be met without a conscious effort to meet them.

The recovery plan should be drawn up with euro membership in mind. All kinds of aspects of the British economy need to be rethought – the excessive obsession with rising house prices (step forward, the Daily Mail), or the disproportionate influence wielded by the City of London (the only industrial sector to get its own test in the famous five) – so let’s do so with the intention of joining the euro. This isn’t a commitment to joining, so if other things go wrong, then Britain still has its options open, but it is a necessary and essential stage in that journey.

Lastly, there is the question of a referendum. To join the euro would be a major step of constitutional significance and it is the policy of the parties that support euro membership that there should be a referendum first. To win that referendum will require a very different public attitude towards Europe than the government has shown in recent times. Gordon Brown’s usual approach has been to denounce the other European countries for not following closely enough the British economic model, which was hardly the way to win public support for a pro-European economic policy. (As an aside, after all the criticism he has voiced at them, he can hardly be surprised when the German finance minister finally answers back.)

To join the euro amounts to more than simply reprinting the banknotes. It is more than just a policy: it is a strategy, encompassing the government’s approach to economics, its approach to European politics, and its approach to its own voters. It is a step comparable to joining the EEC in the first place, and no-one should imagine that it will be done more easily. But equally no-one should forget that it is just as important.

Tory Eurosceptic MP Daniel Kawczynski suggested, in the House of Commons yesterday, that Greece should not be allowed to veto the accession by Macedonia to the EU while the issue of the name “Macedonia” remains unresolved. (The Greeks famously object to the use of the name Macedonia, which they claim belongs only to the region of northern Greece governed from Thessaloniki.)

Does Daniel Kawczynski realise the mistake he has made? The reason why Greece can exercise this veto is because the major changes to the EU, such as amendments to the treaties and the admission of new members, are made by unanimity. Each one of 27 member states has to agree before anything substantial can be done.

Daniel Kawczynski might object that the Greeks are being unreasonable or inconsistent in their view, but that only reinforces the point. Unanimity requires that each member state agrees to a proposal, on its own terms. It is not for anyone else to judge why a single member state might choose to block a decision; all they can do is accept it.

To assert that Greece should not be permitted to block Macedonian membership of the EU is to chip away at the rights of the member states, including the rights of the UK, within the EU system. Is that what Daniel Kawczynski really wants?

Professor Stephen Haseler launched his new book yesterday, “Meltdown: How the Masters of the Universe Destroyed the West's Power and Prosperity”. (The term “Masters of the Universe” was used to describe financial executives on Wall Street during the 1980s.)

As you might imagine from the title, Stephen Haseler is fairly critical of the strategy followed by modern capitalism. Central to his argument is the decline in real wages in America over the past generation. Previous eras saw wages double every 35 years: in the last 35 years that has stopped happening. Living standards have been propelled upwards by women joining the labour market, so that a typical household has two incomes rather than one, by longer working hours and second jobs, and by borrowing. The proportion of American GDP taken up by wages fell and the proportion that was profits rose.

Not only was this the system adopted in America, but it was exported around the world. Economic globalisation enabled manufactured goods from around the world to be provided cheaply to American consumers amid the free flow of capital outside the constraints of national regulation. The US adopted a forward military strategy to protect and extend this notion of globalisation: the invasion of Iraq was intended to remake the Middle East in the American model.

Sooner or later, this system would trip up and fall over, and it has. The vast debts have to be paid back, and the American consumer has to retrench. The American middle classes are feeling the pain, in a manner to which they are not accustomed. How will they react?

An important signal will be the fate of the US car industry, which, like the banks, is facing insolvency. The recent presidential election was not only a victory for the Democrats but a victory for the north – Barack Obama represented Illinois – and that victory will be used to preserve America’s remaining industrial base, even at the cost of free trade.

The future will be not a unipolar world but a multipolar one, in which the Europeans can play a role if they choose, and in which the British can play a role if they choose the Europeans.

You can read more about Professor Haseler’s book (and order a copy) here: http://www.global-policy.com/index.php?id=123

A new publication denounces the European Union’s Brussels establishment (or perhaps that should read Establishment) for its contemptuous attitude towards the public. Bruno Waterfield and Chris Bickerton are critical of the way in which the EU institutions represent the member state governments and enable them to fix up deals behind closed doors, deals which extend beyond legislative and budgetary questions as far as issues of fundamental rights and even the constitution itself.

(You can read the arguments here.)

Anyone familiar with this blog will share many of the same concerns. But what should be done to rectify the problem?

The easy answer is to reject the Lisbon treaty, but that is only half an answer. All the complaints are about not the Lisbon treaty itself (which is not in force) but about the present status quo. To protest against the status quo by defending it against change is an incomplete response.

Over and over again, the complaint is that the EU follows secretive methods and procedures: the meetings are held in private; there are no proper public records; everything is agreed before anything becomes public. But that is how diplomacy works. The solution is to replace diplomacy with democracy: it’s quite a substantial conceptual leap, but once you have made it, the solutions become fairly straightforward. For example, there is a ready-made way for the Council of Ministers to deal with legislation in a proper manner, as is described here.

On the subject of referendums, the Manifesto Club is on still shakier ground. It is no good calling for “a pan-European political response” while saying that the voters voted No to the European constitution. There were four referendums in 2005, not two, and in aggregate more voters voted Yes than voted No (26 million to 22 million). The pan-European response was in favour, it was the national response that in some countries was against.

Slavoj Zizek is surely right, though, in observing that “The Irish voters were not presented with a symmetrical choice” – a Yes vote would lead to the ratification of the treaty, whose terms were written down in black and white and available for all to see, whereas a No vote would lead to who knows what. But isn’t that a further benefit of the transition from diplomacy to democracy? Democracy runs along observable lines, with rules and procedures and predictability. Diplomacy, by contrast, has no rules, and the procedures it attempts to follow in place of those rules are the very procedures that we were complaining about above.

It is not true, though, pace Zizek, that “the very terms of the referendum gave preference to a Yes.” If, as he says, the referendum “consisted of ratifying the inevitable”, we wouldn’t be having this discussion now. It is entirely open to any member state to stay out of the European Union if it wishes, as Norway has chosen to do.

Bruno Waterfield’s essay concludes with the ringing declaration that:

“Today there are two sides in Europe: those who believe that Yes is the only answer to the EU, and those who call for political structures and decision making to be part of the public domain.”

The people who object to the EU on principle might not recognise themselves in that description of the debate about the future of Europe, the federalists – the people who champion democracy over diplomacy at the European level – don’t accept that Waterfield’s two propositions are necessarily in conflict.

It is one thing for opponents of the current EU to demand something better: it is another thing for them to describe what it should be. The Manifesto Club’s pamphlet is silent on what the alternative might look like. The debate remains about the implementation of the terms of the Lisbon treaty, either by ratification in Ireland or, within the existing treaties, of those parts which are compatible. We still await more democracy in Europe: via Lisbon is the most likely route.