Labour must understand the way Europe is heading

—I have serious reservations about the ‘One Nation’ tag that Labour has filched from the Conservatives and nailed to its masthead. It is too inward-looking and parochial. We are living through one of the most extraordinary periods of history – bar none – in which the internet and other communications technologies have destroyed distance, and where that process is advancing day by day. The consequences are far from wholly benign, as we can see from the advance of climate change, and from the financial crisis, whose origins and nature are plainly global. The crisis is self-evidently not just cyclical but symptomatic of much broader transformations. Even the most local of reforms will depend in some part on whether these changes can be brought under control on a transnational level.

I am a pro-European because the European Union is both pioneering a way of relating to this new world, and because it has far, far more chance of influencing its trajectory of evolution than any of its component nations could do acting alone. Many people worry about losing national sovereignty to the EU, but there is no point lamenting something that has largely disappeared anyway. Membership of the EU confers what I call ‘sovereignty plus’. Each member state has more sovereignty – real influence – in the world as a member of the union than it would do otherwise. This applies even when states appear to act in isolation, since everyone knows they have very substantial back-up.

The EU has been shaken to its core by the convergence of the changes mentioned above and the incomplete nature of the single currency. For the union to prosper, the euro must be stabilised and wider structural reforms undertaken. If the euro were to disintegrate the EU would not only be in chaos but its influence in the wider world would all but disappear. For better or worse, the coming of the euro has made the states in the eurozone tightly interdependent. That interdependence simply has to be complemented by greater economic and political integration in the union as a whole, tortuous though the process of bringing it about may be. In essence, there must be a solid form of banking union, fiscal integration and, within a reasonable period of time, greater democracy – for example, the direct election of the president of the commission. There must also be a far more adventurous approach than at present to healing the political and economic divisions that have opened up between north and south.

David Cameron’s position on Europe seems to me hopeless, since he wants to move Britain in the opposite direction from that which the rest of the EU has to take. Given the exigency of further European integration, there is very little chance that substantial powers would be handed back to a single country. Meanwhile, I am not really sure what Labour’s perspective is. The party’s main concern at the moment seems to be how to respond to Cameron’s commitment to hold an in-out referendum by 2017. My view on that is straightforward: in the interests of the country, Labour must refrain from endorsing a referendum within a given time period. If there is to be a referendum, it is essential that it be held when we know what the shape of the new Europe will be. A revitalised union could and should play a vital part in Britain’s future. I would like to see Labour ground its view of Europe – and indeed its whole philosophy – in an assessment of, and response to, the extraordinary changes mentioned earlier. There is little chance of doing so within the context of a ‘blue Labour’ or One Nation approach, which have more than a hint of nostalgia for a world that has disappeared, never to return.

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Anthony Giddens is a former director of the London School of Economics and author of  Turbulent and Mighty Continent: What Future for Europe?