Spaceship Britain

As the British debate on the euro winds up yet again, we should watch out for an illusion curiously shared by combatants on both sides. When a British Eurosceptic and a British Europhile meet they will generally, before squaring up for another round of homely mud-wrestling, agree on one thing. And they will both be dead wrong.

That one thing - the most important thing, as Eurodum and Eurodee will cheerfully agree - is that continental Europeans are dynamically engaged on a single, great project to build a united Europe, in which the sovereign rights of nation states will inevitably continue to be diminished. Your classic British Eurosceptic decries this as an inexorable march to a federal superstate, which plucky little Britain must resist in the Churchillian spirit of 1940. Your regular Europhile sees the EU as a Eurostar train hurtling towards a gleaming Brussels station. Only by joining the euro can we still jump aboard before it is too late. The truth is very different. If you follow the continental debate about Europe more closely, you find an extraordinary diversity of views about the future of the EU and some remarkably "British" thoughts being expressed in quite surprising places. This is obscured from most people in Britain by two veils. One is the thick muslin of our own media coverage of Europe. The other is the fact that these continental views all come wrapped in a great big flag proclaiming "united Europe".

That is not just window-dressing. "It's all rhetoric, they don't mean it really" is the oldest British illusion about European integration. No, when the Spanish prime minister, José Maria Aznar, last month launched the current Spanish presidency of the EU in front of a banner proclaiming "More Europe" he meant more Europe. But the question is: of what exactly does he want more? And what less? In a conversation in Madrid a few months ago, Aznar made it clear to me that he wants less interference by Brussels bureaucrats and more economic deregulation, less pie-in-the-sky talk of European constitutional architecture and more practical problem-solving. Above all, he believes that Europe must be built on the diversity of its nation states, with intergovernmental cooperation being at least as good as, if not better than, supra-nationalism. What we really need to ask is: what works?

Then there's Italy's mercurial two-in-one prime minister and foreign minister, Silvio Berlusconi, whom Tony Blair visited but - with well-advised caution - did not wholly embrace in Rome last week. Berlusconi, like Aznar and Blair, is pro-American, in favour of deregulation and economic liberalisation, and not keen on surrendering many more powers of the nation state to Brussels.

"Ah," exclaim Eurodum and Eurodee in rare unison, "but that's only Italy and Spain. What's really driving the project forward is the Franco-German axis."

Well, that was true for more than 40 years, until Germany was united. Not now. In a recent conversation here in Berlin, a senior German official privately compared the Franco-German relationship to a failed marriage. As with many failed marriages, especially in an older generation, all the outward appearances are kept up. In practice, he said, Berlin and London work more closely together than Berlin and Paris. Moreover, as President Chirac and Prime Minister Jospin compete to be elected France's next president, France has not one European policy but two - which means none.

"OK," mutter Eurodum and Eurodee, "but there's still Germany driving the federalist project." There's more substance in that claim. But in Germany, federalism means decentralisation, not centralisation in a Brussels superstate.

When Chancellor Schröder's Social Democrats published their plans for Europe last summer, Michael Gove wrote in the Spectator that the plans of Schröder and Jospin "may differ in detail but they are united in accepting that power must be transferred from nation states to transnational institutions". Then, calling for a different Conservative approach to Europe, Gove argued that "the case for less transnational legislation, for greater intergovernmental cooperation, for the repatriation of policies such as agriculture to national governments, needs to be made in Europe's interest." But if you read the original of what in Britain is known as the "Schröder Plan" you find that it proposes, among other things, the repatriation of responsibility for agricultural policy to national governments. Three explanations seem possible: (a) Gove had not read the document he was writing about (it is, after all, quite long and in a foreign language), (b) he was deliberately misleading his readers, (c) he is an idiot. Since he is clearly not an idiot, we must choose between (a) and (b). My guess is (a).

E ven more striking is what the German Christian Democrats are saying, as they shape up to challenge Gerhard Schröder in this September's elections. Late last year they produced one of the most substantial proposals for a European constitution that I have seen. This certainly envisages more integration, especially in foreign and defence policy. Yet it also insists that nation states remain the essential building blocks of Europe; that the EU should do only those tasks that cannot be done better at the national level; and that whole areas of life, including social security, labour markets, immigration, culture, education and everything to do with "civil society" should remain the responsibility of member states.

Dr Wolfgang Schäuble, co-author of the proposal and the best chancellor Germany never had, was talking in Oxford last week. He was asked if he subscribed more to the vision, reiterated in European treaties since the Treaty of Rome, of an "ever closer union" of the peoples of Europe, or rather to the idea of specifying a constitutional end-state in which, for the foreseeable future, responsibilities would be clearly divided between the European and the national level. "Rather the second," he answered crisply. So much for the inexorable German march to a superstate.

None of this is to suggest that our continental partners don't want more integration in many fields. They do. But there is no single continental army marching as to war, no single Eurostar train we have to catch or miss. There is a shared, broad goal, but no agreement on how to reach it. When the foreign secretary stands up in the Hague today to lay out some interesting British ideas for the reform of European institutions, he will be one voice among many. On, say, the European parliament, he may find support in Germany, on the council of ministers, in France and Spain, and so on. Europe is not a train or army; it is a crowded, noisy room. It is not Us arguing with Them, but Us and Us, and Them and Them.

One thing, however, is certain: that is not the impression you will get from tomorrow's British news reports - if you get any impression at all. When the German government was still in Bonn, people referred to its incestuous closed circuit of politicians and journalists, far removed from the realities of everyday life, as Spaceship Bonn. So far as the reality of the European debate is concerned, we live in Spaceship Britain. And it makes Martians of us all.