20/10/2007
José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, "Europe and the Challenges of Globalisation," St Antony's College Lecture, Oxford, 11 October 2007

Chairman, Ladies and gentlemen,

I'd like to start by thanking Timothy Garton Ash and Kalypso Nikolaïdis for inviting me to speak here today, at one of the great centres in the world for the study of international relations and European studies. And a pleasure for me to be back in Oxford, fully twenty six years since my last visit.

I’m told that Oxford is always rather suspicious of lavish tributes paid by visitors to its beauty, to the excellence of its university, and so on.

So let me start by quoting someone who, I'm told, refused to study at Oxford University. That someone is John Stuart Mill.

Today, Mill is of course famous – along with his father - for developing Jeremy Bentham's ideas on utilitarianism, as well as writing key liberal texts on the nature of freedom, economics, and the role of the state.

He is less well known for his observations on Europe. In Chapter 3 of On Liberty, he compares European dynamism favourably with what he described as the 'stationary' nature of Chinese society. He concludes:

"What has made the European family of nations an improving, instead of a stationary portion of mankind?

Not any superior excellence in them, which when it exists, exists as the effect, not as the cause; but their remarkable diversity of character and culture.

Individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely unlike one another...Europe is, in my judgement, wholly indebted to this plurality of paths for its progressive and many-sided development."

I can't vouch for his views on China, particularly today. But on Europe he is spot on.

Europe’s unique strength is its capacity to combine unity with diversity.

I think it is important to stress that. Why? Because there is still a perception, particularly in the UK, that Jean Monnet's gradualist approach to European integration – effectively 'neofunctionalism', for anyone taking notes! – is inexorably leading towards a centralised superstate.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let's look more closely at what Jean Monnet actually said. Reflecting on his ideas to pool coal and steel resources – the raw materials of war – that launched the integration process, he said: ‘Europe will not be conjured up in a stroke, nor by an overall design. It will be attained by concrete achievements generating an active community of interest.’

In other words, by working together to deliver results that matter to our citizens, we build up the confidence and capacity to work together in more areas where there is clearly a common interest in achieving results. We create what is called in French a solidarité de fait. What emerges is a community of shared values.

This paints a very different picture to the caricature of the European Union as a distant elite trampling on diversity with endless diktats on harmonisation.

Member States do not transfer sovereignty, they share it. In the EU, sovereignty is not lost, it is pooled for greater effect. So for the UK, membership and influence in the EU, far from being a drain on her autonomy, is in fact a potent source of political and economic power. Monnet, indeed, was a good friend of Britain, having spent some time here during the war, and believed that the UK should be at the centre of this European "community of interest".

In short, then, European integration is about effective partnership. It's about respecting diversity by only doing at European level what cannot be done better at a national or regional level.

And it is proving its robustness in surprising ways.

By creating a genuine community of common interests, Jean Monnet's step-by-step approach is not just helping EU policies to evolve; it is helping the whole purpose of the EU to evolve as well. First, the internal challenges of securing peace, and establishing the single market and common currency, as well as pushing ahead with enlargement which has taken us all the way from six to 27 Member States.

Now, a whole new set of external challenges has emerged, linked to globalisation. Tackling climate change. Adapting to increasing global competition. Dealing with mass migration. Facing up to the scourge of poverty in Africa. Defending against international terrorism.

All these challenges have two things in common. First, they affect us all. Second, no nation state – even the most powerful - can hope to tackle them successfully on its own.

From being the guarantor of peace on a continent ravaged by war, the European Union has evolved into something quite unique: an effective instrument for developing solutions to the new, cross-border challenges thrown up by globalisation.

For anyone who follows these things – and I'm guessing that applies to virtually everyone in this room – this evolution has been detectable for many years now.

But it really crystallised, I think, when we relaunched the Lisbon Strategy for Growth and Jobs in the Spring of 2005. Lisbon is now focused squarely on giving Europe a dynamic economy which generates sustainable growth and high quality jobs, and which can stand up to the rigours of increased global competition.