ANGLOSPHERIC, NOT EU-NICK:

A New Deal for Europe (Michael Howard to the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Berlin, February 12, 2004, The Guardian)

Britain and Germany are two great nations with their own histories and their own perspectives.

Germany has wanted to achieve closer and in some cases irreversible integration thanks to her specific experiences in two world wars. Konrad Adenauer, whom we honour in this foundation, understood that the European process could be of great service to Germany. As a result, he made this country strong in Europe, valued as a trading partner and trusted as an ally. I understand why his European policy, which helped to establish Germany's place in the community of nations, is admired in Germany today.

We in Britain came through the war with our national institutions strong. When we seek to preserve those institutions, we are defending a constitutional settlement that has survived great stresses and strains and which continues to work well and be understood by people in Britain.

Britain has always been a global trading nation. We have historic connections with our Commonwealth partners and with the United States. Look, for example, at where our international telephone calls go at Christmas and New Year: to North America, to the Caribbean, to the Indian subcontinent, to Australia and New Zealand.

This is not just a sentimental point. It is also a hard commercial truth. More of our trade is with non-EU members than is the case for any other member state. We have more overseas investments in non-European markets than any other member state. We are unique in the EU in having a global financial centre.

But Britain and Germany are not the only countries that approach European integration from a perspective shaped by their history. Every European country does. I do not always agree with your Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer. Nor, I suspect, do you. But he was recently quoted in one of our newspapers as saying: 'All the countries ... have different traditions, different political disputes at home, complicated parliaments, complicated majorities ... Language and history matter in Europe and we have to understand these different histories and difficulties'. He makes an important point.

The Eastern European accession countries have thrown off the yoke of Soviet domination. They, along with other new member states, have rediscovered their own national identities and the freedom to determine their own destiny. As a result they may well be wary of giving up too much of that hard-won independence.

Different histories, different institutions and different traditions.

To undermine these institutions and ways of life, whether they have developed uninterrupted over hundreds of years or only recently re-emerged, and which are seen as legitimate by their people, would be an act of folly. Most people in the nations of Europe do not feel the same affinity or identity with EU bodies that they do with their own national institutions. People who identify themselves as Europeans rather than as citizens of their own country still remain a very small minority in every member state of the European Union.

Most people simply do not feel European in the same sense that they might feel American or German - or British.

There is no European public opinion; no European national identity. In the absence of a European demos, we are left with unadorned kratos: the power of a system that commands respect through force of law, not public affection.

It is in in fact the perfect expression of modern Europe, an attempt to unify around a void.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 28, 2004 10:26 AM