It is with pleasure that I give this lecture tonight in my original home city in honour of Jean Monnet.

I still know the city well enough to know that in common with just about every other place in the UK, if you stopped pedestrians in the street and asked them “who was Jean Monnet”, probably no more than one in 50 would be able to make an intelligent stab at an answer. Even 1 in 50 might be an optimistic assessment.

That is in stark contrast to my current home city - Brussels or just about any other city in western continental Europe. Brussels, as the headquarters of the EU, is no doubt in a special category but few cities in the original six countries of the EU are without a prominent Rue du Jean Monnet or a Monnet platz.

If Britain knows little of Monnet, Monnet knew much of Britain. As General de Gaulle’s chief aide during the Second World War, he liaised with the British wartime Government on a daily basis. And while he had an affectionate respect for this country, he also knew that reconciling this country’s destiny with that of its nearest neighbours would be a difficult and challenging process.

So it has proved. That Monnet, one of the key original architects of the EU is virtually anonymous in the UK is testament to that.

If Britain’s relatively smooth exit from Empire at least compared to France’s - was a great achievement of foreign policy, so our biggest failure has been the lack of a clear and positive perspective on Monnet’s European Union. And the hangover of nostalgia for 1940 and before that our Imperial past and glory has been a major psychological barrier which we are yet to hurdle.

So as the late Hugo Young so graphically charted in his great book, our view of the development of the European Union has been depressingly consistent - and in my view, narrow minded and shabby.

The first reaction in the late 1940s to Monnet’s ideas for a union of European states with its own Commission (with Commissioners not responsible to any one state) and with intermingled economies and projects went through 2 steps:

Step one - was to stop it happening. One early victory for Britain was to make sure the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which was set up initially to deal with the Marshall Plan, was an inter-governmental body without an executive commission and any freedom from control by member states.

Another victory was to stop the Western European Union from becoming an effective body by making it dependent on unanimous decision making by the nation states.

But the third time, Monnet and Robert Schuman planned the European Coal and Steel Community in secret without telling Britain until it was a fait accompli. Crucially it had an executive commission.

At this point Step 2 was activated. Denis Healey, then international secretary of the Labour Party wrote a paper saying that in all probability, the new coal and steel community would not work; and anyway if, against the odds, it did, we could always join later. In the meantime, we should not join and should wait and see.

And so was laid the pattern for Britain and Europe which has accompanied every major development in the EU with one exception since 1951. The exception is the single market carried through by Mrs. Thatcher and Jacques Delors.

“It won’t work. If it does, we can join later. We will wait and see”.

You can add to that that when we do join, there is a tendency to present it to the British people as a minor step, not worth worrying about.

This brief historical picture should resonate now.

We are outside the euro, “waiting and seeing”, as John Major said, or “preparing and deciding”, as Gordon Brown has termed the same thing.

The new European constitution is a “tidying up” as Peter Hain called it and, any way, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have set down “red lines” on foreign policy, defence, taxation and, less publicly, on social policy which they are not prepared to let Europe cross.

When the stability and growth pact underpinning the euro was defied by the Council of Finance Ministers recently and, humiliatingly for the European Commission, no action was taken against breaches of the Pact by France and Germany, Gordon Brown hailed it as a victory for the “intergovernmental method”, reviving British dislike of the Commission.

There is this deep continuity in British policy towards Europe characterised by hostility, scepticism and suspicion. You can understand why General de Gaulle kept us out.

The Prime Minister is easily the most pro-European leader we have had since Edward Heath but so far he has not been able to change the national perspective. Indeed he has contributed to a strengthening of the sceptical view by delays on the euro and a half hearted approach to the proposed new constitution. And since the Iraq war in particular, the possibility of the UK leaving the EU is no longer the aim just of a few extremists on the Right and a small number on the Left. It is now perilously close to becoming the policy of the Conservative Party.

But it is not just the Iraq war and the deep divisions that it has caused with and between Europe’s nations, it is other factors too.

The business world, traditionally pro-European, see themselves tied down by regulation, much of it from Europe. They have totally failed to grasp that if you have a single market in the EU, a step they welcome, there would inevitably be rules and standards, for example, on environmental and labour questions.

Most of the media with the honourable exceptions of the Financial Times, the Independent, the Mirror and some of the Guardian are overwhelmingly hostile and gleefully report when things go wrong.

Thus when soon after its launch, the euro slipped to parity with the dollar, there was huge coverage and celebration, not least in the Murdoch press. They never of course mention that the euro has since risen 50% against the dollar, of course creating different problems but nonetheless a mark of undoubted strength.

To paraphrase Bill Bryson, these are all “small thoughts from a small island”,

One honourable exception in all this - there are others - is the trade union Movement which since 1988 and a famous speech by Jacques Delors to the TUC, has been supporting every major European development.

The TUC had already recognised that the process of globalisation was well underway, that the communist world was on the verge of huge change, and that the new argument was less about capitalism versus communism than about what kind of capitalism.

Was it to be capitalism, American style with the emphasis on maximising returns to shareholders and minimal regulation on entrepreneurs especially in relation to their employees’ interests?

Or was it to be capitalism of the social market type - enterprise balanced by encouragement for collective bargaining, welfare states and public services, with a large sector not subject to market forces and the rules of Wall St. and the City.

And the trade union analysis was clear - the American way was failing too many of its citizens - 40 million without any decent health care, massive inequality in wealth and income, two million citizens in prison and union activists widely victimised. The European way of balancing entrepreneurship with obligations to other stakeholders was highly preferable, not just in Europe but as a model for globalisation.

After all, is globalisation not being carried out largely according to American rules with the World Bank, IMF and WTO preaching free trade, privatisation, shareholder value, and no emphasis on worker protection. Europe does provide an alternative model of development, one which is far more successful than its critics recognise, even though I, in return, have to recognise the huge success in the 1990s of the American economy in generating jobs and growth at a time when Germany was coping with re-unification, and neighbouring countries were struggling with a restrictive macro-economic policy framework.

The European Union nonetheless has been characterised by a strong commitment to its social dimension.

From the start, the economic development of Europe was to be balanced by social development. And this tendency was strengthened markedly when Jacques Delors became President of the European Community in 1985.

When the single market was developed, he managed to include in it, requirements on health and safety where the issues would be settled by majority voting rather than unanimity.

And at the Maastricht negotiations in 1992, with Delors’ encouragement, a Social Chapter to the Treaty was signed allowing the ETUC and the employers to negotiate legally binding agreements on social policy questions with the Commission able to prepare legislation if the partners were unable to agree.

In true British character, John Major insisted on an opt out from the Social Chapter, an opt out revoked by Tony Blair in 1997 but replaced by a determination not to let new matters emerge from the Social Chapter process.

However the Social Chapter and other relevant processes have been a fertile source of new labour standards in Europe with new laws on health and safety, maternity leave, pro rata protection for part-time and fixed term contract workers, working time regulation including a normal weekly working of 48 hours and also a minimum of four weeks holidays, the introduction of European Works Councils in large companies and a much more general requirement on companies to inform and consult before deciding on major changes at the workplace.

Currently four issues are in the system. I have to say blocked in the system - with the British Government among others leading the opposition. These are a draft directive on temporary agency workers, a review of the working time directive, a review of the European Works Councils directive and a directive on mergers and takeovers with effective information and consultation procedures.

The Labour Government tends to regard all these as unnecessary and harmful, and that regulation in these areas might curb enterprise and cause unemployment. Gordon Brown has been talking in the past few days of applying tests on all new European laws to see if they cost jobs. Moreover the Government has been uneasy about proposals to uphold a strong commitment to social development in the proposed new constitution. If there is to be a social dimension, it should concentrate on change issues like lifelong learning and it should not introduce new regulations. The Employment and Social Affairs Committee of the European Parliament is preparing taking infringement proceedings against the UK Government over its failure to implement the Working Time Directive properly.

Today and tomorrow are big days for the Government with the challenges on university fees and the Hutton report. However its continued opposition to almost any regulation at European level in the social sphere is causing huge concern among Europe’s trade unions.

The Government has been more positive then its Conservative predecessor but currently it risks coming across as anti-worker. I do not doubt the sincerity of the Government’s arguments. With EU unemployment at 10% and with growth stagnant, the UK position of 5% unemployment and a higher average rate of growth since 1994 makes it is easy to appreciate why the Government is seeking to stop the moves to take our labour market in a German or French direction.

But in this argument they overlook that some European economies combine higher growth and lower unemployment than the UK with a high degree of collective bargaining and regulation. These include the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, and Austria.

They ignore the fact that Germany and France, despite a period of low growth, remain richer per capita than we do with far more generous welfare states and that their economic record and Italy’s the whole period since 1957 and the Treaty of Rome has been far more impressive than ours.

There is also a tendency when counting unemployment to use different definitions about who is unemployed and who is unable to work for health reasons. If you add the two figures together to produce an inactivity index, you get similar figures - between 10% and 12% - in France, Germany and the UK.

In fact, this country aspires to reach average European levels of provision on health, public transport and vocational training. We are off the pace in all these areas despite considerable efforts by Labour since 1997.

The truth is that the development of Europe cannot just be found in the single market and single currency. These are producing huge restructuring and there is a need to ensure that this is done with proper regard for workers’ interest with decent standards of information and consultation, with a strong trade union movement as a social partner and through dialogue, not dictation.

That’s the European way. Jean Monnet was no socialist or social democrat but he recognised that. Those who don’t and I include the Labour Government in this are putting at even greater risk the idea of popular support for Europe.

We can’t build the future of Europe on Monnet’s fear that France and Germany might be involved in another war. That spectre has passed to be replaced by the threats and new fears.

But we can look ahead and see that in 10 years or so, the post war picture of North America, Western Europe and Japan being the unchallenged success stories will look very different. China and India with their vast populations are booming economically. Brazil, Indonesia, and Russia could well be very different than they are now.

What will be the British response - to keep harping on about our uniqueness, our differences. Or to plunge with enthusiasm into a close alliance with our neighbours to forge a unit big enough to maintain influence in the rapidly changing world.

It is a choice between the past and the future, a matter of debating our destiny rather than celebrating our uniqueness. Monnet saw that. Even Edward Heath saw and sees that as far as Europe was concerned.

Tony Blair senses it too. But few of those pedestrians in the streets of Manchester do. It’s time to wake them up and for the pro Europeans to fight back.