Unlike the United Nations, the European Union last week gave "unconditional support" to the British government in its showdown with Iran. I quote from a statement by EU foreign ministers, representing 27 countries, nearly half a billion people, and more than a third of Iran's trade, which also unreservedly accepted the British version of events, described the Iranian kidnapping of British sailors and marines as "a clear breach of international law" and called for their "immediate and unconditional release". Could we expect more of Europe, in its present stage of development? If you want it to hit harder, you must give it a bigger stick and a stronger hand to wield that stick.
Now that the British hostages have been released, the larger question remains. What do we want Europe to do for us? And what are we prepared to do in return? Here in Brussels, you appreciate that this question is likely to be posed very directly within the next three months and that it will be addressed above all to one man: Gordon Brown. Brown himself argues that the real issue for the EU at 50 is how it faces up to the great challenges of the 21st century: economic reform in an age of globalisation; energy security; sustainability in the face of climate change; trade, debt and aid policies that help lift the world's poor out of conditions unworthy of any human being; supporting desirable change in the world of Islam; and managing the emergence of China and India as world powers.
I agree. In all these areas, size matters. Where the main achievements of Europe in the past 50 years have been inside Europe, the challenges of the next 50 will be mainly external. Enlargement of the union to take in other European countries, up to and including Turkey and Ukraine, remains vital unfinished business, but increasingly Europe will be judged on what it does in relations with countries that are not going to be members of the union. For its first half-century, the European project was mainly about what we did to ourselves. For the next half-century, it will mainly be about Europe in a non-European world.
Brown, and, for that matter, David Cameron, who agrees with much of Brown's analysis, would be surprised to find how far it is shared at the highest levels of European institutions. This approach coexists with more traditional French and German visions of European unification as an end in itself or a means to compete with the US. But the Brownian globalisation analysis (which it would be vainglorious to call merely British) is present in force here in Brussels, and altogether in the debates of an EU massively transformed by what commission president José Manuel Barroso calls its "great enlargement" of 2004-07.
However, virtually all our continental European partners agree that the union needs some institutional changes to make it fit for these new purposes. Whatever their differences in philosophical approach, European leaders are increasingly converging on a new deal, to be put on the table at the European Council in late June. This is likely to propose that a new inter-governmental conference should rapidly negotiate the terms of a new treaty.
The hope is that this could be ratified in all 27 member states by 2009. The EU could then present itself as a more credible strategic partner for the new administration in Washington, not to mention in its relations with Russia, China, India and the rest of the world. The new treaty, which would not be called a constitution, would contain many of the key institutional changes in the old one, but stripped of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's portentous preamble, probably also of the Charter of Fundamental Rights (which would remain as a freestanding document), and of some other elements.
There would be a longer-term president of the European council, rather than the current rigmarole of a different national leader taking over the chair every six months. There would be a larger role for both the European and national parliaments. There might be some modest extension of qualified majority voting. There would be an "exit clause" so countries that wanted to leave the EU would have a clear procedure for doing so.
Crucially, there would be a single person to "speak for Europe" in foreign policy, combining the roles currently played by Javier Solana and the European commissioner for external relations. This person would chair the council of foreign ministers, be a vice-president of the European commission, and head a single European "external action service". Most states want him or her to be called "foreign minister", but "high representative" would surely do as well, and might even be more accurate.
All this would be subject to negotiation in the intergovernmental conference, but the terms of reference for that conference would already be set at the summit in late June. Although some other member states are kicking up a fuss, with Poland and the Czech Republic being more British than the British, the chances of this happening now depend crucially on two things: the outcome of French presidential elections, and the politics of the Blair-Brown transition. If the new French president is Nicolas Sarkozy, he'll almost certainly go for some version of this proposed deal. Tony Blair - one of whose last acts in office the European council is likely to be - would almost certainly go for it too. But what about Brown?
The optimistic school of Brownologists says he well understands the intellectual case for a stronger Europe, that he is at heart less Eurosceptic than he has seemed as chancellor, and that anyway the nice Mr Brown at No 10 Downing Street will be a different one from the nasty Mr Brown at No 11. Where you stand depends on where you sit. Pessimistic Brownologists point to his well-documented distaste for European meetings and networking. ("Do you want to meet the new German finance minister?" he was once reportedly asked by one of his officials. Answer: "No.")
They argue that he will do anything to avoid the referendum which Conservatives and the Eurosceptic press will inevitably demand on any new treaty, however modest, especially in the run-up to a general election. They also suggest he has long-since entered a Faustian pact with Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers, including the hugely influential Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, and Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of the Times and the Sun.
Crudely expressed, the pact is this: you stay Eurosceptic and we support you in the next election. (Or, at the very least, we don't throw our full weight against you.) In other words, he will put short-term personal and party-political concerns above the long-term national interest. But which way will Gordon go? Nobody knows - for Brownology is the Sovietology de nos jours.
Eurosceptic journalists on the Daily Mail and the Sun like nothing more than to denounce a European Union allegedly run by a conspiracy of unelected Brussels bureaucrats. They have yet to explain why it would be more democratic to have an EU whose shape is dictated by a conspiracy of unelected British newspaper proprietors. If Brown is to prove himself a statesman, and not merely a politician, he must call their bluff.
Timothy Garton Ash