HOWZAT

While the President and the Prime Minister were discussing the Anglo-American alliance in London, President Chirac of France and Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, were discussing the Franco-German alliance. One cannot consider these two relationships separately. As a senior French official put it last week, “the British must choose. Either they are with us, united in Europe, where they should be, or they are destined to become united with America, something like an American state.”

This is an exaggeration. I know many Americans who value Britain’s close alliance with the United States highly but hardly any who believe that a federal merger of British and American sovereignty is either desirable or practical. If our objection to the European constitution is that we do not want to be submerged in a federal structure, we are unlikely to seek a federal marriage with the United States. After all, Canada has never felt it necessary to seek admission to the Union. Nevertheless, there probably will be a choice to be made.

The development of the European constitution, and the ever-closer links of the Franco-German alliance, could present us with the choice British statesmen have been trying to avoid since 1945: Europe or America? Are we a Continental or an Atlantic nation? The combination of the centralisation of the new constitution with the close Franco-German alliance creates the difficulty.

If France and Germany act together, as a federation inside a federation, they can dominate Europe under the new constitution. Even in qualified majority voting terms, they will effectively have the power to block any European laws they do not like. We shall lose our veto, but France and Germany will, in practice, keep theirs. Britain might conceivably be persuaded to join a democratic European federation of the 25. Britain is likely to recoil from a bureaucratic European superstate dominated by France and Germany.

So will other European powers. When I was last in Denmark I was astonished by the depth of Danish fears of Franco-German dominance; they are particularly suspicious of the French. Similar fears are felt in Poland, Italy and Spain. These fears of a Europe which would really become a Franco-German empire, as Germany became the Prussian Empire after 1871, could lead to the rejection of the draft constitution, itself a French document.

Last week’s visit by President Bush confirmed the importance of the Anglo-American alliance to Britain and to the United States. In today’s talks, President Chirac will be discussing the European constitution with Mr Blair. The Prime Minister believes in the American alliance; he also believes in Britain’s European future. The draft constitution would make it impossible for him to remain loyal to both alliances.

If he agrees to President Chirac’s proposal that the constitution should go through almost unchanged at next month’s Brussels summit, the Prime Minister will be opting for integration in a Franco-German Europe, as against alliance with the United States. If that is what he prefers, he must at least be open about it. Such an historic decision is not for him alone: it must have the full, informed consent of the British people, which can be expressed only in a referendum.

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