LONDON: A number of us from the pro-European wing of the trade unions and the Labour party got together this week for group therapy. Hilariously we had originally planned the meeting to decide how we would sell a yes vote in a British referendum that now lies buried beneath a mountain of French nons and Dutch nees. In the event our clandestine gathering in an attic room up a back staircase took on the character of an embattled resistance plotting how to fight back.

At least we are spared another wasted year trying to excite the interest of the British public about the finer points of the 448 clauses of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s draft constitution. I always did have my doubts about how long I could keep passers-by in my local shopping mall in conversation on whether it was time for the council of ministers to move on from a six-month rotating presidency.

There are many useful steps for the better in the new treaty and I have a lot of continental friends who have spent the best part of two years trying to perfect its text, but the harsh truth is that the whole exercise has been an extravagant diversion of energy, imagination and time that would have been far better put into addressing the legitimacy of the European project among the public. We have all behaved in a way that almost lives up to the caricature of Europe as an institution that exists for the perpetual extrusion of ever-longer treaties that meet the preoccupations of the political elites rather than the priorities of its peoples.

It would be a strategic blunder if Tony Blair was to let the British presidency waste the second half of this year in scrabbling around in the rubble of the recent referendums to find what can be salvaged from the collapse of the constitution. The priority must be to move the debate about Europe away from process and on to outcome. This is all the more essential as process is about how top politicians arrive at communiques in exclusive summits, while outcome is about how it all benefits the lives of the public.

There is an unhealthy tendency these days to regard a concern with the practical benefits to real people of European integration as some kind of sellout on the grand vision. This is not a perspective to which Jean Monnet and the founding fathers would have given house room. There could have been nothing more intensely pragmatic than where they started with the creation of a common market in iron and steel. If Monnet were to return now I suspect his first response would be delight that the seed which he planted has produced the largest, richest single market anywhere in the world, bigger even than the GDP of the US. His second reaction would be incomprehension that the current generation of politicians do not talk more about what this means to their public in terms of increased trade and jobs, and of greater competition that has halved the price of airline flights and telephone calls around the continent.

It is commonplace to talk about a democratic deficit in Europe, but in truth the immediate problem in the present crisis is a leadership deficit. The referendum debacles catch Europe at what is possibly the first time in its history when all the leaders of the big four nations are serving out their time, waiting to be replaced. What Europe needs are credible figures with a political future who can convince the public that the European Union is a necessary, effective response to the pressures of a globalized economy.

That must not be confused with turning Europe into the conduit by which those pressures are brought home most painfully to its people. There are too many people who believe they demonstrate they are modern by lecturing the workers on the need to work longer for less security and for poorer pensions. All too often they themselves turn out to enjoy well-paid jobs with good pensions and lifelong job security. It is for other people to make the painful adjustment to globalization that they preach.

If the European Union allows itself to be labelled as part of the forces of globalization it is doomed to fail in any project to rebuild public support. There are warning signs from the recent referendum campaigns, particularly from the hostility of the young, that too many people already equate the European Union with the pressures that are eroding their job security and quality of life. The challenge is to persuade them that the European Union is an intelligent way of meeting those pressures by forging a continental economy on the same scale as the US or China. Those who are most worried about globalization are the very people who should be most supportive of the European Union.

If Tony Blair wants to use the British presidency to kick-start such a project to restore the credibility of Europe among its peoples, there are two changes of direction that would help. The first is to stop talking about economic reform as if it were a threat. The French and German public may go along with our economic agenda if we present it as the road to full employment and prosperity, but not if we constantly lecture them on the necessity of giving up their job security and letting deregulation open the window to the chill winds of laissez-faire competition. A touch of humility before embarking on these lectures would also not come amiss. Both France and Germany after all have much higher productivity and greater investment than ourselves and, despite our superior conviction that we know how to handle the global economy, they have big trade surpluses with it while we have a whopping deficit.

The second is to stop standing in the way of the popular measures that do come out of Europe. Why should Downing Street make it an issue of principle that British workers be denied the European limit of 48 hours on the average working week, when they know it would be popular with the great majority of those who are forced to work excessive hours? Should it not be part of any progressive package of economic reform to remove one of the reasons why British business does not face up to poor productivity per hour?

In return the left should resist the Newtonian dynamic of being anti-Europe because Tony Blair is pro-Europe. There is no point in complaining about George Bush if we do not create in a united Europe the one alternative powerful enough to offer another world vision. Anyone who doubts that should pause to consider the balance of forces at the forthcoming G8 summit, where any progress on Africa or climate change will only happen if European leaders put up a more united front than their peoples have over the past week. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service