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Europe as Super Power
by Paddy Ashdown

What we are, albeit painfully, creating in Europe is the world’s first working experimental test bed for a supra-national structure. And that, though I am sure this was not one of the motivations of the founders of the European Union, we have, nevertheless come up with an accidental but intelligent response to the challenge of globalised power – if only we would realise it.

The purpose of Europe is to deliver things to our citizens that the nation states cannot deliver on their own. No more and no less.

And in making the case for pooling a power in Brussels, we have to make the case that this is necessary because it will benefit our citizens in some way that their own Government is not able to.

We come back to the dreaded “f” word again. No-one dares say it, but we are building, if not a federal structure, then a structure with clear federal qualities. It is time to acknowledge the fact.

But at the heart of a federal structure, even a loose one, lie two key questions.

What are the limits of the power of the power of the centre? And what are the inalienable powers which will always be left with the members?

The Treaty of Rome talks of “ever closer union”.

My fellow pro-Europeans tell me that doesn’t mean what it sounds to ordinary people. It isn’t meant to be institutional; it’s meant to be, well, sort of spiritual.

Try explaining that to a sceptical voter in Liverpool; or Jeremy Paxman in a five minute Newsnight slot!!

Ah, you will say, but we have an answer.

Subsidiarity!

That great panjandrum word – which is so important and so widely used – but whose actual meaning in any given set of circumstances, no-one has any clarity about. Chiefly because it means – like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty – whatever we want it to mean.

For as long as we hide the central question of Europe behind a word which means either nothing, or everything, we should not be surprised if people fear a conspiracy against their interests, and nations worry about the erosion of their identity.

We just have to grasp this nettle – and we have to do it now.

The second reason why Europe cannot any longer hide behind the petty in order to avoid the big issues might be called the “Cosi Fan Tutte” question.

You will remember the plot. It depends on the Turks invading.

And it refers to the oldest European question of all, which goes back to the time of the crusades and earlier. Where does Europe (or as we used to know it Christendom) end and where does non-Europe and the "infidels" begin.

The EU seems to believe that we can create an economic giant, while still having the luxury of remaining a political pygmy – that we can once again leave it to someone else – the UN or the US – to come in and bail us out in our own backyard.

This is a free ride which Europe can no longer afford to take.

Here is a fact that almost every European politician seems reluctant to admit to – but it is a fact nevertheless.

That what we are creating in Europe is a super power. Not necessarily, please note, a super state – but a super power. There is a profound difference between the two.

How can it be otherwise?

By creating, in the Euro, the second most powerful currency in the world –one which can in due time challenge even the dollar for the top position – we are also creating a power which we cannot avoid, and whose responsibilities we cannot hide from.

As we in Euroland develop our own interest and areas of concerns, we will find ourselves increasingly in tension – or even contention –with the other super power, our Atlantic partners.

The Banana trade war and its probable future bigger brother, GM trade war, is only the beginning.

The reluctance to send US troops into Mitrovice in Kosovo is another example.

Why should US citizens risk their young men and their tax payers money bailing Europe out yet again in our own backyard, when we have a greater combined GDP and more men under arms than they do?

The last thousand years have been the European millennium. Along with the art and music and culture and language, there have been two other products of that period. War and political thought.

Unless we recognise that, though we may not wish to become a super state, we cannot avoid being a super power.

The last two centuries have seen a great flowering of European political thought and ideas. But the greatest, indeed the only political thought to have come out of Europe in the last 50 years, has been the notion of European integration.

This idea, too, is one that will be seen as ahead of its time. It is one that will be necessary if we in Europe are not to be engulfed again by the consequences of conflict on our continent, or around its borders.

It is one, too, which will be copied by others, not least because it is an appropriate response to the challenge of globalisation.

It is such a tragedy that, at a time when this idea is so important, we are so significantly failing to sell it to our people – and seem even to have lost the confidence to believe in it ourselves

Editor : This is a reduced version of a speech Lord Ashdown made at Chatham House on 23 March 2000 and subsequently offered to One World

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