“The Europe of the 21st century takes its inspiration in many ways from Britain,” said José Manuel Barroso yesterday, in London for talks with Tony Blair ahead of a key European Union summit. “Britain has this global approach, the approach that I am trying to push forward,” added the President of the European Commission.

Almost everything Mr Barroso said, talking to The Times, could have been designed to allay British fears that the EU will fashion itself into an overbearing superstate. He went out of his way to say that Europe, to stay competitive in a globalising world, needed to take its cue from Britain.

Yet Mr Barroso, halfway through his first term, has taken on the helm of the club of 27 countries at a point when failure to agree its own rules threatens to choke off its decisions and prevent it accepting more members.

“We need Britain in Europe for many reasons,” he said. One of the reasons is climate change, a passion that Mr Barroso shares with Mr Blair. Next week’s meeting of the European Council is “one of the most important summits” in its history, he says. “The world will be watching, from the US to Russia, to see whether we are serious about climate change and energy security.”

He is backing proposals to set targets on EU countries to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 30 per cent by 2020. “We have set targets which would have been impossible five years ago,” he said. The choice of such targets owed much to Mr Blair, he said.

He has acknowledged that greening Europe “has a cost, in some cases an important cost,” and his office has, to its credit, commissioned broad estimates of the economic impact on Europe. Mr Barroso justifies this demand by arguing that “the Stern report makes clear the cost of doing nothing”. Sir Nicholas Stern gave extraordinarily high estimates of the impact of climate change on the global economy.

Britain (and Mr Blair) are particularly valuable in helping the EU to try to persuade the US of the benefits of action on climate change, Mr Barroso said, adding that he was encouraged that the Bush Administration appeared more receptive.

But reconciling Britain’s view of Europe with that of other members continues to be difficult, and nothing has changed to make British voters more likely to back a European Constitution in the ambitious form rejected two years ago by France and the Netherlands.

Mr Barroso, while maintaining that it was not his job to recommend a new form of the Constitution, said some resolution was necessary. “We cannot solve the problems of the future with the mechanisms of the past,” he said. “What are the challenges of the globalising world? Climate change, terrorism, how to help poorer countries. Europe is part of the solution but we must work more efficiently.”

Whatever set of rules emerges for running a union of 27 countries “will be a different text” from the 400-page Constitution drawn up in 2004, he said. “The danger Europe faces is not overcentralisation, it is lack of coherence.”

On one point he may disappoint Britain; although he is a passionate supporter of European enlargement, calling it “one of the greatest successes of human history”, he does not believe there can be further enlargement until there is a new agreement on the internal workings of the Union. That will alarm Croatia, which hopes to be the next to join.

On March 25, Europe’s leaders will publish the Berlin Declaration, a statement of common principles, marking the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. The declaration “performs a political role, not a legal one, of [setting out] the commitment of member states to our common objective”. He dismissed concerns, voiced particularly in Britain, that the document would “compromise our freemarket principles”. But he added: “Europe is not only a market — it is important to have a sense of social and economic cohesion.”

That is his job: to dole out reassurances to glue the whole together. But the tough decisions remain to be taken; Mr Blair’s successor will have to decide whether Mr Barroso’s compliment that Britain is an inspiration has really yielded deals that it can comfortably accept.

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