European Union (Amendment) Bill

I am happy to follow the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, because I agree with many of his sentiments and those expressed earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson. Above all, I agree with his puzzlement about the arguments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford. I cannot work out whether I was more depressed or frightened by hearing the arguments put forward by those on the anti-European side opposed to closer European integration on foreign affairs and defence. I think I was more frightened overall because the arguments bear no relation to the changing world in which we are living or, above all, to the new threats that the nations of the European continent and the European Union are now facing. My puzzlement and bewilderment is about the strange positions taken by old friends. I have always had a very high regard for the voice of the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, on matters related to foreign affairs. I have always respected him, so it comes as something of shock to hear him mouthing the same arguments—indeed, sometimes even the same words—as Mr William Cash down the corridor in the other place. However, I agree with him about one thing. At the end of his speech he said—I think I quote him precisely—that we need, "““foreign policy instruments that suit the world to come and not the world of yesterday””." That is where I find his arguments so extraordinarily deficient because the arguments that I hear advanced are arguments that come out of a vacuum and are completely unrelated to the reality of the new threats that we now face. They bear the same sense of importance as Nero would have recognised regarding his fiddle case as the flames leapt higher outside or the same sense and understanding of the strategic threat that we face as informed those who designed the defences of Singapore and put the guns resolutely facing out to sea while the enemy came from behind. I wonder whether people have been to Washington recently. Do you often hear the word ““NATO”” there? Do you often hear the word ““Europe”” there? No, you do not. Washington’s obsession these days is one thing: homeland defence. If you are relevant to homeland defence, you are relevant, and Europe is not. Indeed, the European Union is regarded as a collection of countries that failed to come to the aid of their primary ally in its hour of pain in Iraq and failed to come up to the plate when it meant fighting our common enemy in Afghanistan. Europe will occupy a much less important position in the pantheon of American interests in the future than it does today. I suspect that the new American Administration, whichever side they come from, will re-establish positions with Europe and improve relations. I welcome that. But the reality is that the United States is looking elsewhere in the world and the European Union and the Atlantic relationship, which will always be there, will be far less important than they were. Let us take a look at one fact. How many US soldiers are there today on the mainland of the European Union? How many US tanks are there? There are almost none. There are now 30,000 US servicemen in the European Union today, but almost all of them are manning the airbases that America finds it convenient to use to prosecute its war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I do not complain about that; it is a fact of life; but the reality is that the American security guarantee under which we have sheltered for so long and under which many European Union nations have abandoned the need for a strong defence, which I greatly regret, is not going to be there in the future in the way that it was in the past. If we in the European Union do not understand that the consequence of that is that we should deepen the integration of our foreign policy and defence institutions rather than weaken them, we are fools. We do not understand that realignment. I am a passionate European—noble Lords will hardly be surprised by that—but I am also a passionate Atlantacist. I do not see a contradiction between the two. One of the ways we will refurbish and renew the Atlantic relationship is to strengthen the integration of the European Union, not diminish it, to make ourselves more effective, not less effective. We are not dealing with just a retrenching United States; everybody knows that we are also dealing with a more assertive Russia under a muscular new president who has found new leverage in the form of energy. If there is a clear example of how we fail if we deal with Russia on an issue as a fractured series of nations, each negotiating a bilateral treaty, it is energy because our failure to speak with a single voice has given Putin more leverage than he would otherwise have and diminished our bargaining power. We are not without bargaining power in the energy debate. Russia needs our markets and our investment quite as much as we need its oil. There are only two existing pipelines—a third is being built to China—and both of them come to Europe. However, the fact that we completely fail to speak with a single voice has increased enormously both the political leverage of Putin on this issue and the pain that we suffer in consequence. As America is retrenching to our west and Russia is more assertive to our east, the right reaction from Europe is not to weaken the institutions of our foreign policy and defence but to strengthen that integration. We should look beyond Russia. We are not dealing with just an assertive Russia, but a rising China, a nation that is becoming more and more important. I happen to believe that China’s ascent will not be smooth. It will not be a relatively easy rise. It will have to come to terms with the need to democratise its society following the liberalisation of its economy. However, there is no doubt about where China is going to end up—as a nation immeasurably more powerful than any single European Union nation and probably more powerful than the European Union put together. If we do not understand that in the face of these new powers—China is only one; India is following—the right reaction from Europe is not to weaken the integration of our foreign policy and defence, but to deepen it, we are fools. Put your hand over the side of the little boat in which we sail, feel the way the tide is moving, feel how strong the economic tide is now moving from the nations gathered around the Atlantic shore board to those of the Pacific Rim. It is not impossible that we will wake up within the next 15 years and discover that we are not among the world’s first economies any longer, but among its second tier ones. Imagine what that will mean for the governance of our countries. In the face of that, do we seriously believe that we want to consign ourselves to the role of little corks bobbing along in the wake of somebody else’s ocean liner rather than integrating Europe to give us all a stronger voice, integrating and pooling our sovereignty on some of these key issues on which the decent lives of our citizens depend? If we do not understand that the right response to those circumstances is not to weaken the integration of our foreign policy, security and defence, then we are fools. We are looking at a whole new different shape to world affairs. We are not looking at a world dominated by a single super power—a mono-polar world—but at a multi-polar world. It will no longer be good enough to shelter behind the apron strings of our neighbouring super power and say that that is a foreign policy. The great British Foreign Minister, George Canning, used to talk about the European areopagus in the middle of the 19th century, the concert of powers in Europe—the five sides of powers in Europe. He said that Britain should always seek to counterbalance any coalition of others in order to preserve the equilibrium of the concert of Europe. In so doing, the peace of Europe was kept for 50 years and Britain was kept out of continental armed entanglements for more than a 100 years. That is much more like the world that we are going to look at and that we are going to be in. If we do not understand that, in these circumstances, Europe will have to be much more independent and more subtle to be able to play its role among this multi-sided, multi-polar structure of world affairs and therefore that we should not weaken the institutions of our defence and foreign affairs, then, we are fools. There is a great poem, ““A Shropshire Lad””, that is said to have echoed in Churchill’s mind in the 1930s, written by AE Housman at the end of the long hot summer of stability of the 19th century. One stanza talks about the changes coming—listen because we live on the cusp of just such a change. The lines run: "““On the idle hill of summer,""Sleepy with the flow of streams,""Far I hear the steady drummer""Drumming like a noise in dreams.""Far and near and low and louder""On the roads of earth go by,""Dear to friends and food for powder,""Soldiers marching, all to die””." You do not have to listen very hard to hear the distant drummer and the sounds of feet marching. We are living in an extremely turbulent world, one in which we will be facing possibly mass movements and migrations in the face of, for instance, global warming and starvation; a world in which conflict will, I fear, be more, and not less, common and in which the threats to our civilisation, future and security, will be deeper and stronger than any we have experienced since the end of the cold war and maybe even more so than that. If we do not understand that in the face of such threats, the right response for Europe is to deepen the integration of our foreign and defence institutions, then, we are fools. The problem with the Lisbon treaty is not that it is too strong but that, in this matter, it is too weak.