The war in the Balkans could provide an opportunity for an overall settlement of the whole region. The British Prime Minister has set out his vision of what that might mean, but there is a huge gap between aspiration and reality. Baroness Williams speaks in the Lords for the Liberal Democrats on foreign and European affairs. THE speech Tony Blair made on 22 April in Chicago, shortly before taking part in the Washington summit to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Nato, was breathtaking in its scope, setting out a global agenda for the West and more specifically for Europe in terms so ambitious that it seemed reminiscent of statesmen?s speeches of the early post-war years.

Taking as his starting point Kosovo, and arguing that this was indeed a just war, the Prime Minister outlined his scenario once the war is won: a Marshall Plan to reconstruct the Balkans and a new security framework for the region; and an energetic effort to bring those responsible to justice before the international war crimes tribunal.

The scenario went wider than the Balkans themselves. One pillar of a new security framework has to be a stable and prosperous Russia. Beyond the current rescue operation by the International Monetary Fund, Tony Blair envisaged a constructive partnership between the Group of seven top industrial countries and Russia, based on what would have to be a major G7 commitment to support the economic, legal and democratic reforms which a modern Russia will need. The financial consequences for the European Union of such commitments would, of course, be immense.

But all that was a preliminary to the British Prime Minister?s theme of globalisation, alongside modernisation ? the leitmotif of his administration. The influence of Professor Anthony Giddens, this year?s Reith lecturer, was evident. Mr Blair is one of those rather rare people whose thinking is linked directly to action. He believes that the whole global architecture, so carefully constructed in the aftermath of the Second World War, now needs refurbishment and even radical reform.

Let us start with global finance. The Asian and Russian crises of last year and the year before showed how rickety the banking systems of these countries are ? poorly regulated, dominated by a few powerful and unaccountable figures close to the political leadership, often corrupt. The Prime Minister called for far-reaching overhaul and reform. Already his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, has been pressing hard for transparency in global financial dealings, and for much greater accountability by the commercial banks.

The greatest losers from the current financial system are the developing countries, above all those that are heavily burdened with international debt. It is plain that the much-touted HIPC, the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative, is far too stringent and far too slow to respond to their desperate needs. Non-governmental organisations and Churches have understood this far better than the governments of the developed countries, and now their message is being heard. A serious examination of the issue was demanded by Tony Blair in Chicago.

He addressed, too, the weaknesses of the long-established pillars of the current world order ? the United Nations and in particular the UN Security Council. The United Nations Charter provides for an international military response in one situation only, that of a cross-border attack by one state on another. Even in 1945 that was odd, given the recent memory of the Holocaust. But the architects of the United Nations may have believed that to have been some uniquely dreadful event, limited to a particular country at a particular time. The UN Charter makes no provision at all for a situation its founders simply did not envisage, a state attacking its own citizens. Yet the massacres and genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and the successor states of Yugoslavia tell us that international law and international peace cannot be built on a United Nations that sedulously turns its back on what governments do to their own people.

Nato, too, came within the Prime Minister?s agenda for reform. Designed to fight a major war against the Soviet Union, Nato is inflexible in its responses and bureaucratic in its structure. Its sheer power makes it probable that it will in the end emerge victorious in Kosovo. But there are large questions about its suitability for this kind of war. It is a blunt sledgehammer trying to crack a small but very hard nut, and not doing it very effectively.

Finally, Tony Blair mentioned two areas where the strains between the United States and the European Union are most acute ? international trade and global warming. On both he wanted fresh initiatives: a new millennium trade round to reduce the remaining obstacles to free trade among developed countries, a new determination for all nations to co-operate to stop global warming. These huge projects could take a generation or more to accomplish. The Prime Minister asked the key question: Are we prepared for the long term? We talk too much, he said, of exit strategies. Our agendas are in part shaped not by the world?s needs but by CNN?s choice of what to cover. Our responses are not thought through, but are urgent and ad hoc. It is time for a new assessment of our aims, and time to construct a new political framework guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self-interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish.

The speech was greeted rapturously in the United States. Tony Blair seemed to be all that Bill Clinton once promised to be, energetic, modern, brilliant, responsive, charming ? and all that he wasn?t, a man of self-discipline and personal principle. Furthermore, his country had proved itself again and again the most loyal of allies, the one that could be counted on. No wonder the special relationship glowed with renewed warmth.

Yet the week of Tony Blair?s speech was also the week in which the US House of Representatives voted against a resolution authorising air strikes against Yugoslavia, and also voted not to fund the deployment of American ground troops without specific congressional approval. While Congress cannot prevent military action authorised by the President, it can cut off the funds that sustain it.

The realisation of Tony Blair?s global vision depends not only on a United States which is currently suspicious and introverted. It depends also on a European Union which hesitates between timidity and parochialism. At Amsterdam in 1997 the European Council of heads of state and government failed to grapple with the institutional changes essential to EU enlargement. A few weeks ago, the Council of Ministers backed away from any major reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, though this too is essential if resources are to be found to make enlargement possible.

Why does enlargement matter so much? Because it offers the prospect of a secure future to countries now threatened with destabilisation as a by-product of the conflict in Kosovo. That is why even the poorest Balkan countries, like Macedonia and Albania, are being proffered the carrot of some day joining the European Union.

THE killing fields of Kosovo may be the place where Europe accepts its destiny; where it finally faces up to its responsibilities as a potential major power. The European Union is, after all, the biggest trading bloc in the world, with a gross national product broadly equivalent to that of the United States, and with a bigger population. The luxury of living under the protective shield of the United States, while criticising and complaining about American global policy, may not be open much longer. So the EU has to address its own weaknesses: the lack of an integrated defence policy, the divisions over foreign policy, its failure so far to appoint someone who can speak for the whole Union on such matters.

The feebleness of the European Union in the area of foreign policy and defence is directly related to the history of Britain?s relations with it ? a reluctance ever to make a wholehearted commitment, combined with a determination to be associated in any way that is likely to benefit Britain?s national interests. Blair put it starkly in his Chicago speech: For far too long British ambivalence to Europe has made us irrelevant in Europe and consequently of less importance to the United States.

Yet in one respect, even the Blair Government, which has changed the whole style of Britain?s approach to the Union, has continued that tradition of ambivalence, in its notable reluctance to make any specific commitment on the single currency, beyond a referendum at some unspecified date. The euro, after all, has been the first business on the European agenda since the Maastricht Treaty was ratified. Once again, Britain has excluded itself from the inner circle of decision-makers, the so called Euro-ll committee.

Tony Blair and his colleagues inherit decades of British detachment, British scepticism and British superciliousness towards the European Union and its predecessor, the European Economic Community. The authoritative history of the postwar relations of Britain and continental Europe is contained in Hugo Young?s book This Blessed Plot1, a minutely researched and damaging account of a political class that failed to understand how far the world had changed.

Its author relates how, from the very beginning, Britain looked down on the continentals. It was assumed that they would never be able to agree on anything. Even if they agreed, their schemes would not work. And if they worked, they would be disastrous. Britain missed every opportunity, with the surprising exception of the Single European Act of 1986, which greatly extended majority voting. That Act was passed during Mrs Thatcher?s second term as Prime Minister, and it was looked upon benignly at the time, presumably because it was all about the achievement of the single market. Yet the logic of the single market led on to the single currency and that, in turn, raised in an acute form the dreaded issue of sovereignty.

Hugo Young points out that the pro-marketeers never frontally addressed the issue of sovereignty and the necessary constraints placed upon it by membership of the European Community. The Eurosceptics and their allies in the tabloid press have made this their sacred cause. Yet in a globalising world sovereignty is qualified in many ways: by membership of Nato and the acceptance of United States command over British troops; by membership of the World Trade Organisation, which determines where Britain can buy bananas; by an International Monetary Fund which in 1976 decreed what cuts in public expenditure were required to stabilise the British economy; by powerful multinational companies which decided to grow genetically modified food before consumers or their governments were consulted. The failure to discuss sovereignty left Britain with a comfortable myth that might also inhibit discussion of how to deal with a globalising world. For establishing a new system of law, based on the recognition of individual human rights and individual human responsibilities, will depend upon accepting the jurisdiction of supranational organisations, sometimes in conflict with the decisions of sovereign states.

Last year Britain, after nearly 50 years of resistance, finally incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law. British courts will now have to have regard to the convention and the verdicts reached by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in reaching their own verdicts. Since 1972 they have been similarly bound by the European Court of Justice on Community matters, but the scope of this latter court has been extended very considerably since then, embracing wide areas of human rights in the field of gender discrimination and discrimination on grounds of nationality. Now, with the verdict of the House of Lords on the immunity of General Pinochet, the rule of law in at least one field, that of crimes against humanity, has become global. The United Kingdom has much to contribute in these areas, but has been inhibited time and again by its resolute attachment to the past.

That attachment to the past has never been challenged at the popular level, save in the 1975 referendum on whether or not Britain should stay in the European Economic Community. Hugo Young is rightly excoriating on the way the political and official ?lite kept the whole European issue to themselves. He does not sufficiently recognise, however, that the entire parliamentary system in Britain has been built on party discipline and adversarial argument between parties. If, as with the European issue, the adversarial argument cuts across party and not between parties, it threatens to wreck party unity, and political leaders will therefore do all they can to keep the debate within closed doors.

Precisely because the parties themselves were divided on Europe, no election victory by either party would have provided a clear-cut verdict on the public?s view of the Common Market. That was the argument for the 1975 referendum. Nor would anything other than a referendum provide an opportunity for full-scale public debate. Hugo Young points out that in March 1972, Roy Jenkins, Harold Lever and George Thomson resigned from the Shadow Cabinet in protest against the decision to support a referendum. I was also a member of that Shadow Cabinet, and an equally committed European. But I did not resign, because I believed a referendum would force the issue out into the public arena, and might begin the necessary process of informing and educating the British public in what was at stake.

The opportunity came, and the Government agreed to send every household in Britain a statement of the case for and the case against membership, written by the respective campaign leaders, together with a brief statement of the Government?s own case, essentially to stay in if the conditions were right. The then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, in an unprecedented attempt to save his party, even allowed individual cabinet ministers to take up publicly opposed positions on the issue. There was indeed a great debate, attracting thousands of people to meetings up and down Britain.

But soon the politicians returned to their own Westminster world. In the Thatcher years, a national curriculum was introduced for all state schools. There was no recognition in it of Britain?s membership of the community, no emphasis on European history, no requirement for the study of European languages, no teaching of European institutions. I remember in the 1980s working on a European module to be included in the curriculum of every European member state. The idea attracted the European Commission, but was adamantly opposed by the then British Government, which regarded education as an entirely national concern. In his masterly book, Hugo Young does not refer to education, but it too was further evidence of the reluctance of Britain to commit herself to what she had joined.

Fifty years after the British Government scorned the invitations to take part in the discussions on a European Coal and Steel Community, has the long debate been resolved? Not entirely: it still rends the Conservative Party, as once it split the Labour Party. It will not run its course at least until the question of joining the single currency has been resolved.

But the world cannot wait much longer for a Europe that accepts its responsibilities for its own security, for peace and the rule of law, for supporting and encouraging the troubled countries along its periphery. Tony Blair has outlined the challenge and the response. He has, however, remained ambivalent thus far about Britain?s commitment to the euro, this central element of European integration. A key test of his leadership will be whether in his time Britain finally and fully joins Europe.

1.This Blessed Plot:Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair (Macmillan).

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