What’s the Greek for catastrophe?

EYPO, I think.

You mention 4 European countries which, as EU members or associates, have gained from the trading strength of the EU – but for how much longer, if the EU loses momentum, I wonder? You mention Canada, which is very closely linked to the US e.g via NAFTA. You mention Singapore which has a lower wage economy, if not as low as some others.

You did have the decency not to mention tax havens like Lichtenstein, finance “kings” like Switzerland or the Emirates, or front-line states like Israel who fight surrogate wars for US hegemony. All these can get away with some sort of splendid isolation in political terms, but only because of the overriding strength of their global alliances in financial or military terms.

The real loner countries are the likes of Japan and Iceland, and they are losers. Let’s make sure we don’t join them.

Yes, this sort of thinking is what we liberals tend to leave to the Right. More fools us. If we can’t be bothered to sort out how we will make a living in this world, we’ll never get the chance to build the liberal society.

Yes, those which pay third-world wages but have begun to offer first-world capabilities have done pretty well. Good for them, but we can’t match what they are doing, unless we want to start with a massive reduction in our standard of living!

Otherwise, well, people used to cite Japan as a nation which was doing great things in terms of economy and technology without being big. The technology still works, the economy has languished. Being on your own can make you do some desperate things with your economy, look at Iceland!

I’m not emotionally attracted to the grandeur of the big superpower idea. I would be much happier living in this romantic idyll of a small liberal nation-state with a vibrant democracy, thrving culture, no wars or terrorists, money growing on all the trees. But fantasy is no basis for political action!

That said, HarryD, you’re right about “the only way we can tackle issues such as etc.”
Why building an EMF if the IMF can do it, if other eurozone members accept. We’re back to square one, or one point something..

As a geberal point, it’s all very well saying we should allow people tio have control over their lives, and the EU is seen as foreign, therefore we should oppose it. Actually, surely that is a reason for defending it? for showing that the only way we can tackle issues such as fishing, internation crime, immigration, climate change, mobile raoming charges or whatever people feel is important, that in any way imcorporates other countries around us (which is most issues); the only way to help grow the economy and allow firms access to the best talent, and people to be able to work in other countries, and access to markets for our firms; to ensure peace and stability in europe; and to project european (and thereby British) intrerests in the world, such that we are taken seriously and not some dusty irrelvant old colonial power – we need the right sort of EU.

Malcolm – your choices gloss over the fact that europe *was* the region putting forward the most radical proposals at Copenhagen. I don’t know if you meant it, but saying that acknoledging this is cultural supremacy, seems bizarre. The Americans, the Chinese, will have no scruples. Indeed all I got here in China at around Copenhagen was how brilliantly the Chinese handled it, the most responsible country there. David Allen is sadly right that the rest of the world may well steamroller Europe (and thereby Britain – the idea that we would be stronger alone is absurd)

In my rant against despair I should have been a little more careful. Despair and hence inaction over the environment is to betray our future. Despair over Europe cannot automatically be taken to have equally dire consequences (the point does need to be argued!) and I’m sorry if I gave that impression.

As to Europe getting ignored and marginalised in world affairs (Copenhagen being only one example): No I don’t believe we are culturally superior, yes I do believe it is very often a dog eats dog world. An untidy plurality of voices working slowly towards possibly getting things right is a lovely liberal idea, but if meanwhile the rest of the world is going to steamroller its way over you, perhaps you have to wise up and compete.

Let’s face it, the Bush/Blair strategy for the future is that the world is going to run out of resources and the West is going to make sure it is everyone else who starves first. Obama/Brown may have softened the rhetoric but they haven’t really changed the policy. If we as liberals are going to oppose neocolonialism, we need to find practical ways to do so. A strong Europe has some chance of success in that regard, a weak Europe will just get pushed aside.

As for your other points:
There’s a world of difference between “only empathising with people who speak your own language” and my actual claim, which was about having a shared political culture – in which a common language certainly is a significant factor (look at Belgium’s tribulations, for pity’s sake!) but not the only one. The point is that within an established ‘demos’ such as exists here, we can argue about the way forward and switch our vote between parties that are more or less trying to represent the nation, on the basis of different philosophies and policies, and different ideas about what is in our common interest; attempt that on a larger scale, without a political commonality, and you either get the domination of the biggest/most powerful group, or rule by a detached elite with plenty in common with one another but little with any of the people they’re supposed to represent. Better at that point – though undoubtedly slower and more difficult for decision-making – to proceed by agreement between each polity acting as a single unit.

What about Copenhagen? Well, it’s all very well to suggest we’d have got a ‘better’ outcome there if only Europe had been united; but even if it’s true that a united EU could have overcome US and Chinese reluctance, the idea that that’s desirable in general is presumably based on either (1) Europe is generally going to be right about the best way forward for everyone (anyone for cultural superiority?) or (2) It’s a dog-eat-dog world, we’d better look out for ourselves against those swine out there, and we can do that better if we’re part of a big gang (which doesn’t sound like the Europhiles I know and love – though given your closing “colonies of India” remark, perhaps it’s what you meant). If what’s important is doing what’s right then a plurality of voices is a good thing, though terribly untidy.

Why not give up on Copenhagen, since it’s a mess? If nobody else is going to bother giving our grandchildren a decent chance of dying in their beds, why should we?

Why not give up on Europe, since it’s such a mess, and it’s so much easier to empathise with only the people who speak your own language? Well, look at Copenhagen. Europe got ignored, big time, because we are small fractious individual nations who cannot hang together. Very well, let us hang separately. Perhaps in another century, we shall all be colonies of India?

The answer to this is apparently (and Anthony is by no means unusual in saying this):

“My feeling is that as history goes on more people will feel more European.”

Perhaps they will, perhaps they won’t. Why should people who don’t currently feel more European than, for example, British, French, Polish or Ruritanian, be shoehorned into an unwanted and remote political union just because you or I might believe that they ought to “feel European” and that perhaps there children or grandchildren will eventually (give up and) feel it?

To be clear: I’m not a nationalist. I’m utterly uninterested in mystical notions of nationhood, and deeply suspicious of anyone who makes a lot of noise about preserving or ‘protecting’ cultures or bangs on about ‘identity’ or ‘values’ as if these were magically transmitted through the bloodline and define the nature of the people born within one more-or-less-arbitrary set of borders rather than another. It’s all tosh. What I am bothered about is that people, and communities (the real ones that we actually live in) should have, and feel that they have, the maximum possible control over their own lives and their public spaces. This is just about tenable in a nation-state, where (thanks to quite arbitrary historical outcomes) most people understand themselves to be talking the same language (literally or metaphorically) about the same issues, and accept that there are common bonds and obligations between them all. We’re a long long way from any such sense of ourselves as a European entity, which is why the EU is perceived as an alien organisation without democratic legitimacy, whose attempts to push the population in directions they don’t generally want to go are therefore resented and resisted.

I do dislike threads like this. I start out feeling broadly, though sceptically, pro-European and by the end I’ve almost convinced myself we should be campaigning to pull out altogether. So it goes.

Mike wrote:

“The US were a State from the outset, had a single currency right from the start and American citizens (bar some Southerners and a few others) define themselves as American. Germans, French, Swedes et al. will always remain what they are. The very notion of a political union is a chimera.”

For some years after independence the 13 colonies / new states existed under the Articles of Confederation which were arguably looser ties than EU state have today, had existed for almost 2 centuries before that as distinct social and political entities. The eventual ratification of the US Constituion was highly controversial. In some states like New York, ratification was doubtful. The “Federalist Papers” are pamphlets written for swing voters in NY to persuade them to join the US.

There also plenty of other states that had long term poltical and economic existance prior to joining the US- Texas, Louisiana, and Hawaii which only joined about 50 years ago.

So I’m not sure that “US were not a state from the outset”.

Creating the US dollar was also controversial and when it started it had a fixed exchange rate with the pound. Spanish currency was also legal tender in the US until 1857 and several of the states issued currency (there was a New York Pound, a New Jersey Pound) from independence in 1776 until 1792.

Regarding “American citizens (bar some Southerners and a few others) define themselves as American”

I know New Yorkers who identify themselves as such.

Isn’t the point that identity is not one or the other but several-fold- I’m Kentish, English, British and European, not to mention a professional identity, an identity as a liberal, and others.

“Germans, French, Swedes et al. will always remain what they are”

Will they? Germany didn’t exist until 1870. Norway was once part of Sweden. France did not always have a single national identity, nor did Spain or the Swiss. Italy did not exist until 1871. Yugoslavia and Czechoslavakia at one time looked like permanent nations. Belguim did not exist until the late 1800s and might not exist by the end of this century.

The idea of “Britain” as a single entity at one time seemed ridiculous as Linda Colley explores in her classic “The Forging of the Nation”. It was basically an invented identity.

My feeling is that as history goes on more people will feel more European.