A packed lecture theatre in St James’s Square, London, was the setting for this year’s Isaiah Berlin Lecture, hosted by Chatham House and introduced by Liberal International President, Dr Juli Minoves. Tickets had been swallowed up within three hours of becoming available in anticipation of a typically robust contribution from the recently appointed negotiator for the European Parliament, and Guy Verhofstadt didn’t disappoint.

Against a backdrop of unprecedented threats to the stability of the European Union, he set out his vision for the future of the political order in Europe.

He believes that Europe is under a triple threat of radicalised political Islam through terrorism, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia through cyber attacks and the financing of extremist parties, and from Donald Trump’s America, given his expressed desire for a fragmentation of the European Union. The European Union has fewer friends than at any time in recent history.

And how do we avoid the disintegration of the European Union? He acknowledges that it has problems, multiple crises of migration, terrorism, geopolitical weakness, the economies of Southern Europe. It acts too little, too late.

He gave the example of the response to the 2008 financial crisis. The Americans cleaned up their banking sector and took all the necessary steps to secure the economy in just nine months. Europe is still talking about it. The American taxpayer has already been recompensed for the cost of the rescue.

Europe has a half-complete banking union and inadequate political institutions. Perhaps, he mused, the European Union doesn’t really exist, but is simply a loose confederation of twenty-eight European states. As he explained, if you have weak institutions, you will not have good policies and resulting poor economic performance (a point that is true both in politics and in political parties). And, with the unanimity rule at European Council level, you cannot have effective decision making.

In cantering through a brief history of the European institutions, he pointed out that the Treaty of Rome had simply created a customs union, due to French diffidence about the project. As a result, the institutions have been playing catch-up with the politics ever since.

Europe does things the wrong way round, passing Schengen and then thinking about a Coastguard and Border Agency, creating a common currency without a treasury. The institutions matter.

I was particularly intrigued to hear that Europe spends the equivalent 42% of the American defence budget but has only 12% of the capacity because each country duplicates the efforts of its neighbours. Co-operation is localised, not Europe-wide, and he was clear that we need to address this, through a European Defence Union which would complement, not compete with, NATO.

He did have a potentially positive sense that people believe that Europe should do all sorts of things, but not the way that they are done now. More than 70% of European citizens believe, in twelve of thirteen fields polled, that Europe should do more. We need to find a way of delivering these things by having a better Europe, a Europe that can defend itself and its values.

In a final rallying call, he said that we cannot retreat to nationalism and national identity. Nationalism was a European invention, but proved to be a disaster when it became a conduit for the politics of ethnicity. Too many people died for nationalism for it to be the answer. It was, he concluded, the most stupid thing you can do, and you play with fire if you return to it.

All in all, it was a lecture that would be unfamiliar to those whose only image of Guy Verhofstadt is that of the fanatical federalist so alarming to our somewhat rabid press corps. He believes that, for Europe to work, it needs to change and change radically. He isn’t alone…

* Mark Valladares is a member of the Party’s International Relations Committee.