Great article very much enjoyed reading it and has given me much food for thought. I very much agree with what you say on the need to spread democracy and confront Russia and China. However, I do have some queries though. For one thing it seemed very unclear how you intended the EU to achieve these goals. You suggested a greater integration of the military but this seems to me to have serious problems. For one thing, as the other commentator has noted, I doubt whether the EU, were it considered a county, could be rated as one of your 80 odd democracies. Creating a centralised EU army is something I think no one would ever agree to simply because it is such a frightening scenario. What if a majority of the council of ministers wished us to go to war when we did not wish to? They are already ramming the Lisbon Treaty through Ireland what in theory could prevent us losing significant control over our ability to defend ourselves. Or, even worse, what if we were prevented from adequately defending ourselves as a nation? For better or worse, under your scheme we could never have gone to war in Iraq which would have significantly undermined parliamentary sovereignty. Also In such a case where our independence of foreign policy were challenged, I cannot but see that it would inevitably lead to a weakening in our standing in the world and relations with the USA.

Secondly it is actally very unlikely whether an integrated policy would help matters. The real problem with NATO and the western alliance is not poor co-ordination but the fact that European nations continually fail to provide the man power and the money for the sort of enterprises you are suggesting and getting them to do so should be the main way of solving the problems you mention. Look at the fact that it was Germany and Italy who prevented tougher sanctions on Iran recently or the continual failure of European nations to provide troops for Afghanistan or their lacklustre efforts to help Georgia in the face of Russian aggression. Though the MoD may be useless and our armed forces chronicly underfunded, European nations’ attitude to defence is consistently ambivalent to say the least. I know that these are the problems you wish to deal with but you do not seem to suggest any real solution.

Furthermore, there is I think a real ideological problem that the West must confront which I think is at the root of all these problems. We may not have found our place in the world but neither has Europe or the USA because what Robert Mugabe describes as neo-colonialism is in fact, if we were being honest, a colonialism of sorts. It is a dominance of ideology that you are (I think quite rightly) asking for. But we now live in a world where colonialism of any kind is thought to be evil, where anyone can defend the most hideous barbarity as “what gives you the right to say your culture is any better than ours”. Not that they are not sometimes right but the contradiction of essentially forcing others to be free will be used by those powers who wish to undermine the west, such as Russia and China, for their own ends to develop their own colonial power. The very idea of defending democracy has become abhorrent to most people as they associate it with the Vietnam war, the concept of nation, state institutions and laws etc (in fact the very opposite of what they view as democracy which is, let’s face it, basically just license). Democracy is facing a crisis as an ideology as great as in the 1930s and is it surprising when a tiny percentage of the population regularly votes in national (and even fewer in European)elections and institutions such as the houses of parliament can be questioned?

Anyway, ramble over (besides I am sure you will disagree with me in any case). Let me know what you think and I am sure we shall have a chat about it soon.

However, whilst its membership may have a reasonable democratic pedigree, that cannot be said about the European Institution itself. Most of the infrastructure of the European state has been established with little or no democratic mandate. The refusal to hold referendums to endorse key changes to the structure of the EU, the re asking of the question when a vote goes the wrong way, the use of Enabling Acts and Statutory Insturments to introduce a whelter of legisilation, without proper parliamentary scrutiny, all are tools used by pseudo democracies (Russia, China etc) to provide a democratic veneer to what is in reality an extremely undemocratic modus operandi.

Europe can and should be better than this, but unless it has the nerve to face its constituents and achieve its objectives with them rather than despite them, it will never gain their loyalty and trust. If that means that it can only proceed at the pace of the slowest ship in the convoy, then so be it.