The new ‘long telegram’:Why we must re-found European integration

By James Rogers and Luis Simón

Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the European Union, its Mem-ber States and the European people stand at a cross-roads.1 As a new generation has started to come to power and new geopolitical forces have begun to reshape the world around us, the political vision that once guided European integration has lost its way. As two young Europeans – one from the United Kingdom, the other from Spain – both proud of our respective national heritage, we offer this new ‘long telegram’ as a thought piece for the future of European integration. We identify and describe the current mal-aise in the European Union; offer a way out of the predicament through the transfer of political sovereignty and construction of a common identity at the European level; and conclude with a series of policy recommendations, which we offer as a means to em-power and revitalise Europeans in the twenty-first century.

Group on Grand Strategy | Long Telegram No. 1 | Summer 2011 1

Group on Grand Strategy

Long Telegram No. 1 Summer 2011

Picture credit: © European Union, 2011

The main features of the European malaise

At the end of his memoirs, Jean Monnet claimed: ‘The Community itself is only a stage to the more organised world of tomorrow.’2 For many pro-Europeans, this was the ul-timate motivating myth: it was hoped that European integration would be part of a wider schema, which would lead to interdependent layers of global governance, where the European Union would end up playing an important part. For most of the post-war period, this vision was sustained by a common enemy – the past, in the form of geno-cide, conflict, human rights abuses, themselves orchestrated by certain European autoc-racies. The European Union was therefore never intended to become anything other than a ‘post-sovereign’ community of Member States, a kind of half-way house between an international organisation and a sovereign state. Its main purpose was to use ‘civil-ian power’ to ‘domesticate’ the relations between its own Member States, preventing them from even contemplating the use of force against one another to settle disputes.3

To be fair, the dream of European and world peace was also infused with a strategic purpose: integration was crucial for promoting French-German reconciliation after the bitter memories of the Second World War, as well as wider political stability on the European continent; it was key to both economic growth and industrial integration, which subsequently led to the Wirtschaftswunder (‘economic miracle’) of the 1950s and 1960s; and it was critical in generating the means to enable West Europeans to aid the United States in containing the threat posed by Soviet Russia during the Cold War.

After the Cold War during the 1990s, and with intra-European stability taken increas-ingly for granted, the grand strategy of ‘civilian power’ developed a distinctively external flavour. What came to be known as ‘normative power’ took over to internationalise what ‘civilian power’ had achieved within the domestic European space.4 In this sense, it was thought that European integration could provide a popular template for other re-gions to emulate, eventually leading to an effective global multilateral system pinned around the United Nations. As a new grand strategy, ‘normative power’ also brought many benefits, allowing Europeans to portray themselves as a unique new form of actor – different from the United States – in vital regions such as Russia and the Middle East, but also vis-à-vis Latin America and East Asia – with many political and commercial benefits.

Most importantly though, and often neglected, both ‘civilian power’ and ‘normative power’ were instrumental in promoting a common – albeit loose and elite-centred – European identity, after centuries of disagreement. However, they did so at a very high price: firstly, ‘normative power’ has been gradually deprived of its instrumental value

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and turned into an end in itself – into a puerile form of unrestrained pacifism; secondly, both ‘civilian power’ and ‘normative power’ have only been viable in a relatively benign international environment underpinned by a friendly dominant power – the United States. So while Europeans have sought to differentiate themselves from the United States, they have simultaneously and paradoxically built their identity around a strategy that has made them progressively more dependent on American power. This was toler-able so long as Washington was committed to defending European interests regionally and liberal values globally, which was indeed the case until well into the 2000s. But to-day, the old marriage of ‘civilian power’ or ‘normative power’ and free-riding on the United States has led Europeans increasingly into a dangerous trap. Why so? There are three main reasons: geopolitical, generational and ideological.

1. The return of geopolitics

Many Europeans seem to have forgotten that the institutionalised system they helped to construct with the United States since the middle of the twentieth century rests ulti-mately on two things: political will and military power. Robert Cooper makes this very clear:

Institutions are a frozen form of power… They are a “civilised” form of power, but probably behind them, very far behind, invisibly – to the point you forget it – there is a form of hard power, but the institutions are a polite way to exercise it.5

This ‘civilised’ form of power always masks the original political forces that constructed it, often through violent force. It represents a kind of agreement between the strong and the weak: the weak agree to live under the rules and values set by the strong if the strong provide a degree of protection for the weak. If carefully propagated, this agree-ment can expand into a ‘grand bargain’ at the global level, whereby it is institutionalised through various international forums to create expectations of peaceful change; in other words, it becomes a form of hegemony.6

In today’s setting, the global and European systems are still largely underpinned by the United States, and to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom and France. These three pow-ers have shown that they have the political will and military power necessary to provide leadership and security for a wider area, including, initially, all of Western Europe, and then, after the Cold War, most of Eastern Europe as well. However, in recent years – particularly after the 2008 financial crisis – the international environment has become less benign and more unpredictable. New and very large powers like China, India and Brazil have started to assert themselves; they have been joined by a cacophony of

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smaller but nevertheless influential countries, such as Russia, Iran and Turkey. Without prejudging their heterogeneity and differences – this is certainly not about ‘the West’ versus ‘the rest’ – the rise of these new powers has already started to pose a challenge to the established system. It has altered the composition of the international order, reduc-ing American and European ascendancy, and creating a new multipolarity.7

Many Europeans hope that the new powers can be turned into ‘responsible stakehold-ers’ and enmeshed into the current global institutional architecture. This is of course understandable: those institutions are animated by American and European values and serve to preserve and promote them. However, this multilateral system cannot run it-self; Western strength and leadership are fundamental for its existence and ability to function. After all, it was during the period of American and European hegemony be-tween 1990 and the mid-2000s that a rules-based international system reached its peak – both on the European peninsula and beyond. Globally, the United Nations was strengthened; worldwide commercial activity boomed through rising interdependence; the internet was formed, ushering in instantaneous global communication; and – for all its failings, and there were several – the international community confronted together a number of diffuse threats to the general peace. Meanwhile, while undergirded by a greater level of determination on the part of Europeans, Germany’s peaceful reunifica-tion went smoothly; monetary union led to the Euro; the pacification and progressive stabilisation of the Western Balkans took place (although after much bloodshed and dithering); and, crucially, large swathes of Central, Eastern and South-eastern Europe were enveloped into the Atlantic Alliance and the European Union.

Yet as new powers emerge, European and American influence has come under threat, while the dream of ‘effective multilateralism’ has waned too. Recent examples, where Europeans sought multilateral solutions, have turned out to be woeful failures: the at-tempt to stop the ethnic war in Sudan; the desire to combat climate change at Copenha-gen; the move to end the Russian occupation of Georgia; and the struggle to get Iran to give up its nuclear weapons programme. Each time, the new powers have blocked mul-tilateral progress (sometimes in cahoots with older powers), either alone or in ad-hoc groups. We should get used to this: without greater European political determination and leadership, the future will probably look more like Europe’s own past, a world where sheer power will become more important and where the established rules will get broken if or when they get in the way of the new powers’ national interests.

Critically for Europeans, the rise of a multipolar order will inevitably reduce further the power of the United States, leading the Americans to focus their assets more sharply in regions of strategic importance to their own interests. Indeed, Europeans will start tak-

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ing a seat further and further back in Washington’s geostrategic bus, particularly as Americans fork out ever-increasing bags of cash on a grossly inefficient privately-funded health care system, and while the United States’ role in East and South-east Asia continues to grow.8 In this sense, the wars in the former Yugoslavia offered a glimpse of what is to come, and indeed led to a shift in Europeans’ own approach, with the devel-opment of what is now the Common Security and Defence Policy. In more recent years, as the Pacific Rim takes up more of its time, the United States has stepped back in re-gions or areas of primarily European concern, especially in relation to Ukraine and Georgia; then Iran, and now Libya. Washington is ready to help sometimes, but only up to a point: it is no longer able to take Europeans all the way.9

2. The rise of a new generation

At one and the same time, as a new generation of Europeans is coming of age – and, perhaps more importantly, coming to power – the old elite-driven European project represented by ‘civilian power’ and ‘normative power’ has hit the rocks. The old post-war motivating myths, to prevent war breaking out within the European continent and/or to generate interlocking layers of global governance, is no longer strong enough to sustain a common European mission. It motivated the generations who experienced the horrors of the Second World War and those who suffered privations during its immedi-ate aftermath – the so-called ‘baby-boomers’, born from roughly 1945-1965. Both of these generations were attracted by the prospect of a more deeply integrated Europe; they saw for themselves the times of plenty that seemed to follow the Treaties of Paris and Rome.

Yet this old vision no longer bites at the hearts of young Europeans; for the generations born since 1980, the European settlement is taken for granted, as well as the institu-tions that they assume now stand permanently over it. Their experience of war and con-flict has been limited to television and computer games, while poverty is something they equate with distant lands overseas or times long since past. This has opened up an ideo-logical void at the heart of the European enterprise: indeed, and paradoxically, in some ways, the grand strategy of ‘civilian power’ has been killed off by its own success. This is evident in the fact that European integration is no longer invested with a powerful mo-tivating vision – a ‘deep meaning’ – to drive and then keep the community together. It is therefore no surprise that European integration has itself stalled, crushed under the weight of its own contradictions.

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3. Ideological dead-ends in strategy

The European project’s connexion with internationalism has also amplified the divide among European foreign policy experts and military strategists, between those who emphasise the importance of nationalism, acknowledge the realities of power, and have their country as their strategic referent, and for those for whom world governance is the promised land – and the European Union their flagship to reach it. Indeed, manifesting itself differently across the European Union’s Member States, this has been a long-running theme.

And yet, both logics are deeply flawed: the coalition of nationalists and realists has failed to grasp that the old European nation-states are no longer big enough to make their voices heard in a rapidly changing world, and that the best way to protect the val-ues that those national communities hold dear is through a greater and more potent grouping. Likewise, the group of liberal internationalists has failed to understand that European integration – including their idealism – is undergirded by the same national political will and military power that they seem so eager to transcend. But there is also merit in both groups’ stances: nationalism is still needed, albeit in a liberal as opposed to an ethnic form, while European institutions are important, particularly for small states that lack the mass required in a world of emerging super-states.

How to re-found European integration

The coming together of these geopolitical, generational and ideological dislocations has meant that the European Union and its Member States are increasingly detached from one another and, consequentially, from the interests and values of Europeans them-selves. So how do we overcome this malaise? We believe the answer can be found in the development of a new grand strategy to re-found and revitalise European integration. This should bind all Europeans together with a powerful new motivating myth, a great vision to protect and improve the lives of Europeans in the twenty-first century; it should also authorise and energise the institutions of government in Brussels to provide leadership at the European level; and it should provide the instruments and modalities of power necessary to enable those institutions to assert European interests and values in an increasingly non-European world. A new grand strategy can result from the rec-onciliation of European liberal internationalists and nationalists at the European level. This should take the form of a common European identity, which is something the European Union has so far approached from a very modest perspective and primarily

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among elites. A common European identity should be articulated, modelled on a liberal model of nationalism at the European level.10

A common political union – a state – is not enough; a common identity is also crucial, and for two reasons. Firstly, it encourages a people to work together for a common pur-pose – the betterment of their fellow citizens – even motivating them to surrender their lives during times of acute emergency in an extreme act of altruism. John F. Kennedy captured this point well in his inaugural address as President of the United States: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.’11 Further, a stronger European identity would also provide the ideological antidote to stop non-European foreign powers, whose governments might seek to divide and rule Europe-ans, from attempting to cut deals with particular Member States.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly of all, a common identity is entwined with – perhaps even the pre-requisite for – constitutional democracy and the development and expansion of the modern welfare state. Democracy, after all, requires a demos, and a demos can only be produced through a national consciousness. Without a demos, con-stitutional democracy is bunk. Likewise, the welfare state, which – by its very nature – requires a feeling of mutual social obligation on the part of all citizens, depends on a common identity. Representing the ultimate compromise between conservatives and progressives within a democratic political order – acceptance of a market economy, along with interlocking systems to provide universal health care and social security – the welfare system is only possible if it is deeply embedded in a national community. This is because a common identity encourages everybody inside social community to view one another as equals and thus share in the cost of everyone else’s wellbeing.12

For the European Union, the formation of a European ‘us’ – a ‘we’ – will be an essential component in the construction of a European demos, as well as a wider democratic European political space. The ingredients for the ‘we’ are all there: they take the form of the shared lessons of the past – the countless European wars – as well as the values born in Ancient Athens, taken forward by Republican Rome, re-founded and perfected during the great age of European modernisation – from the Renaissance to the Enlight-enment, and on to the Industrial Revolution; established in reality through much of Western Europe after the Second World War; and expanded over all of Europe after the Cold War. Today, Europeans have more in common than ever before, turning – as we do – around the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, well-regulated markets and, crucially, a system of social justice aimed at reinforcing the equality of opportunity and protecting the vulnerable and less-fortunate from wrong. These values are now shared values; they are European values, and they should define who we are: a political com-

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munity of European citizens, united by a common vision, integrated through a common purpose; believing in a common destiny, and a better future.

However, and critically, there has been an endemic failure – even a fear – among Euro-pean elites to articulate our values together under a genuinely European rubric. This has been a profound mistake: it has led to the delinking of those principles from the European enterprise, even when they and it are increasingly threatened. Therefore, the time has come to consolidate the European Union by binding it into and alongside our shared values so that both can feed off one another. In short, the European Union must become a super-state and a super-nation, which should enable it – in turn – to become a superpower; it should then be able to better protect and promote European interests and values in an ever more volatile and unpredictable world.

Of course some competences will remain with the Member States, and Europeans will still be able to identify with their existing national communities. But the old national communities – Germany, France, Spain, Poland and Britain, and so on – have all be-come increasingly powerless and vulnerable in a rapidly changing world. The sovereign debt crisis and the uncertainty surrounding the Euro’s future should be eye-openers: they showed Europeans that their own Member States could sometimes even fail to look after their own domestic affairs. Further, those same Member States no longer seem to have the military means or, in many cases, the political will to get involved, even if their vital interests are at stake overseas, unless encouraged and/or assisted by the United States. This has been demonstrated by numerous international crises over the past fifteen years, such as the Bosnian war, the Kosovo war, the conflicts in Sudan and Somalia, the Russian invasion of Georgia and even the current crisis in Libya.

We should be under no illusions here; even our shared liberal values are not immune from corrupting foreign influences, particularly in a world where large and potentially predatory autocracies will acquire more and more influence and power. We argue that, increasingly, it will only be through an effective grand strategy and sheer power that we will be able to protect European values – the principles symbolising who we are – from the outside world. As Timothy Garton Ash has pointed out:

Where the main achievements of Europe in the past fifty years have been inside Europe, the challenges of the next fifty will be mainly external…For its first half-century, the European project was mainly about what we did to ourselves. For the next half-century, it will mainly be about Europe in a non-European world.13

If European integration is to survive the mounting geopolitical pressures of this cen-tury, the reasons given for its justification will have to change. For not only is the out-

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side world unlikely to become what so many Europeans hope, but other powers within that world may start to work harder and harder against the European Union’s vital in-terests.

We must now ask ourselves whether, in forty, thirty, or perhaps, as few as twenty years from now, we are prepared to accept diktats from other countries. If the answer to that question is ‘no’, we must ask ourselves what we can do to give us the means to resist. In this sense, Europeans currently face two futures: a future of power or a future of ruin. There is no alternative: we can either remain the rulers, or become the ruled. We Euro-peans are facing a kind of ‘Civil War’ moment, as the Americans once did: we are at a juncture where we can either throw in the towel or take a qualitative leap towards fur-ther unification. A failure to integrate may lead to disintegration on all fronts and an unravelling of the certainties and luxuries of the past sixty years – with potentially dev-astating consequences for both Europeans and the wider world alike. Here, our argu-ment is not based on scare-mongering, nor on some idealist fantasy, of the kind that has driven away a good number of strategic thinkers, who remain wedded to the national projects in their own Member States. Rather, it is a pragmatic call based on an under-standing of the realities of the importance of identity, power and geopolitical change.

It has been said that the construction of France, for example, involved a political project to ‘turn peasants into French-men’.14 A number of institutions and identities were ar-ticulated together to form a national-state, with a common identity and a common bor-der. In fact, the two components – fostering a universalism within a particularity, i.e. a liberal nation within a state boundary – of a national project are entwined. The Euro-pean Union’s intellectual, political and economic opinion formers must now come out of hiding and provide leadership. We must articulate a liberal pan-European identity, which will motivate a new generation of Europeans to partake in an exciting new pro-ject of European revival and rejuvenation; which will allow for the final unification of our continent; and which will build up the European Union’s global power, enabling Europeans to maintain a favourable world order.

We offer ten points, which we think will contribute to the building of this common European identity and lay the basis for the European Union’s global power. We are aware that many efforts have already been made in the direction of some of our propos-als, while others will seem far-fetched, if not impossible. Our approach will not be an easy pill to swallow; aside from the fact that so many (often petty) differences remain between the Member States, it will grate at the most delicate and sacrosanct edges of politics, in places where most Europeans do not want to go. Many will ask questions about procedure; about the role of the Council; about the Commission. But all grand

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plans must start somewhere, and we think the current situation demands radical meas-ures. We are not calling for our recommendations to be implemented tomorrow; in-stead we have sought to offer something for politicians, practitioners, opinion formers and other interested parties to think about today. As Monnet once said: ‘To solve a problem, enlarge the context.’15 We think the time has come to forge a wider European national community, a place where confidence and change can overcome stagnation and disillusion and where politics will become dynamic again. After all: L’union fait la force.

» Ten points for Europeans

1. Expand and deepen the European Union’s communications infrastructure

The ability to send goods and services and to move people over territory is the founda-tion of both a strong economy and the construction of a common identity. An integrated European communications policy should therefore have two main components: firstly, energy transmission and distribution; and secondly, strategic transportation. A com-mon energy policy: emphasise green power; fund new technologies; and establish mari-time gas shipments, better strategic gas transmission pipelines – like Nabucco – and an electricity super-grid to reduce dependency on foreign suppliers. A common transport policy: ensure the completion of the Galileo satellite constellation and emphasise stra-tegic motorways and high-speed rail, which should form the foundations of an expan-sive and comprehensive European transportation system. The capital city of every Member State should be linked together through a series of European high-speed rail-way lines, based on a radial hub-and-spokes system centred on the cities of Brussels, London, Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

2. Inject new energy into European politics

A president of the European Council, elected directly in a five-yearly pan-European bal-lot, would inject new political energy into European politics. Taking into account the will of the Member States and the results of European Parliamentary elections, the President of the European Council would then appoint the President of the European Commission and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, as well as a political cabinet of his or her own to offer advice and strategic direction. At one and the same time, the European Parliament should be moved permanently from Strasbourg to Brussels, which should become a city truly befitting a superpower. The Rue de la Loi should become a grand mall; a vast new Monument should be erected to

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celebrate European integration; and a distinct and permanent residence should be pro-vided for the President of the European Council.

3. Actively promote a common European identity

A European Union Department of Education should be established, to be headed by a Secretary of State to co-ordinate school and university curriculums and standardise ti-tles and degrees across the European Union. The history of European integration and the English language should be taught to all Europeans at primary and secondary level. A public European television channel should be founded to broadcast across the conti-nent in English, French and German, to reach the largest possible audience.

4. Build a stronger and more centralised diplomatic service

The External Action Service must continue to emerge as the centre of the European dip-lomatic community, eventually taking over the Member States’ embassies in foreign countries. It should produce a European strategy for external action every five years to increase its diplomatic reach within new strategic partners and in new groupings like the G20. Currently, the European External Action Service is fed by personnel from three sources: officials from the Council’s General Secretariat, the Commission and from the Member States. This should be replaced by only one avenue: a pan-European selection process, supported by a single Diplomatic School in Brussels. Equally, the European Union should acquire its own permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council, taking over from both France and the United Kingdom. However, both Mem-ber States should be given extra control – including veto power – over the common European seat for a transitionary period lasting not longer than five years, at which point it would come under the complete jurisdiction of the European Council. The stance taken by Brussels on issues in the Security Council would then depend on quali-fied majority voting under current rules (fifty-five percent of Member States comprising sixty-five percent of the European Union’s population).

5. Construct a common military strategy

The European Union’s military policy must move beyond ‘crisis management’ to cover every function of strategic power, including territorial defence, preventative defence, deterrence and ‘forward presence’. The relative importance of each of these functions should be discussed in a European-level strategic military review, to be undertaken every five years under the direction of the President of the European Council and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. The common military pol-icy must be underpinned by the European Defence Agency and provisioned with a large

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single budget, a Permanent Joint Headquarters, a European Military College in Brus-sels and – crucially – a single European military procurement market. More mergers also need to be encouraged within the armaments corporations of the European military-industrial base (particularly in the land and naval sectors, but also in air-space systems and electronics) to make them more efficient and competitive.

6. Create a single European Union Coast Guard

A common European coast guard should replace the mishmash of coast guards cur-rently operated by the Member States, thus freeing-up European navies from the hum-drum of maritime policing and allowing them to concentrate on distinctly strategic af-fairs. Critically, this common coast guard should have the means to operate on a world-wide scale, not only to offer a swift European humanitarian response to countries over-seas during or after natural disasters, but also to protect European maritime communi-cation lines from piracy and other forms of organised criminal activity, which puts the lives of European citizens in danger and threatens the durability of the European econ-omy.

7. Establish a European Central Intelligence Service

Although politically sensitive, the European Union needs its own large-scale central in-telligence gathering capability, with both internal and external security agencies. This institution should be co-ordinated by a European Intelligence Directorate, headed by a Director-General for Central Intelligence, and answerable to the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. European intelligence agents would be able to move from the Member State level to the European level, but not the other way around. There must not be quotas for Member States in the European Central Intelligence Serv-ice; instead, recruitment policy would be determined in Brussels by the Director-General.

8. Establish full fiscal co-ordination among the European Union’s Member States

This should include the founding of a direct source of revenue and the European level – beyond transfers from Member States – and the creation of a bond system. The United Kingdom should join Economic and Monetary Union and a secondary headquarters for the European Central Bank should be founded in London, which is already the de-facto financial capital of the European Union.

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9. Put in place a common immigration policy

With several Member States to the south and east of the European Union confronted daily with migrants from poorer surrounding foreign countries, Europeans need a common approach to immigration. This approach should also encourage migration within the European space, to account for demographic changes underway in some Member States and to maximise the potential of the regions and the citizenry alike.

10. Reinforce and reform the European welfare system

At a time when the welfare state – something which defines who we are as Europeans – is threatened by the negative forces of globalisation, the European Union offers the ag-gregated power necessary to sustain, bolster and reform the role it plays in European society. Upholding and reinforcing the welfare state is critical: it protects the vulnerable from poverty, ignorance and want and maintains a high degree of equality of opportu-nity, which prevents the emergence of suffocating social rigidities that blunt the growth and durability of the European economy. Accordingly, a ‘European Committee on Wel-fare Reform’ should be established to look into the integration of the various models operated by the Member States and – where possible or desirable – reform them by making them more effective.

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Notes

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1 We would like to thank Giovanni Grevi, Eva Gross, Jolyon Howorth, Daniel Keohane, Alexander Mattelaer, Bence Németh and Thomas Renard for their helpful comments on a previous draft of this ‘Long Telegram’.

2 Jean Monnet, Memoirs (London: Doubleday and Company, 1978).

3 François Duchêne, ‘Europe’s role in world peace’, in Richard Mayne (ed.) Europe Tomorrow: Sixteen Europeans Look Ahead (London: Fontana Press, 1972).

4 Ian Manners, ‘Normative Power Europe: A contradiction in terms?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 40, No. 2, 2002, pp. 235-258.

5 Robert Cooper, ‘What does power mean today?’, in French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs (ed.), Europe and Power (Paris: French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, 2008), p. 199.

6 G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint and the Rebuilding of Order After Ma-jor Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). See also: Jolyon Howorth, ‘The EU as a Global Ac-tor: Grand Strategy for a Global Grand Bargain’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 48, No. 3, 2010, pp. 455-474.

7 James Rogers, ‘From Suez to Shanghai: The European Union and Eurasian maritime security’, Occasional Paper 77, Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies, 2009.

8 Luis Simón and James Rogers, ‘The return of European geopolitics: All the roads lead through London’, The RUSI Journal, Vol. 155, No. 3, 2010, pp. 58-64.

9 The United States Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, has warned Europeans on several occasions over the past few years not to reduce their military power to the point where they become weak and powerless.

10 For more on the liberal version of nationalism, see: Ernest Renan, ‘What is a nation?’, in Alfred Zimmern, Modern Political Doctrines (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 186-205.

11 John F. Kennedy, Inaugural address as President of the United States of America, 20th January 1961.

12 The so-called ‘Beveridge Report’ is widely acknowledged to have created the concept of the modern and comprehensive welfare state with its declaration of war against the five forms of poverty: disease, ignorance, want, squalor and idleness. See: William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Service (London: His Maj-esty’s Stationary Office, 1942).

13 Timothy Garton Ash, ‘What do we want Europe to do for us?’, The Guardian, 5th April 2007.

14 Eugen Weber, From Peasants to Frenchmen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).

15 Cited in: Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), p. 138.

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