Britain? Where's Britain?: Europe may yet reject closer union. But it would be no thanks to our botched role, says Timothy Garton Ash

'Britain is out.' The words of a senior adviser to a European president sum up the message that I have heard again and again while travelling through 10 European countries over the last three months. It's not that Britain is seen as having a vision of Europe with which others on the Continent disagree. It's not even that Britain is seen as a major obstacle or problem. It's just that Britain is increasingly marginalised by its own inconsistency, contrariness and lack of any positive vision for Europe.

'John Major last night committed Britain to a decisive struggle with Germany and France for the soul of Europe,' trumpeted the Daily Mail on 1 June; as if the European election campaign were a new D-Day, but with France now one of the enemies. It doesn't much matter, though, because Europe didn't even notice that its soul was being fought for. 'Oh, just the usual fisticuffs on the white cliffs' is what Europe actually thought; if it thought about it at all.

'Towards a Europe fit for a free Britain' was the headline in last week's Sunday Telegraph over an article by Douglas Hurd aimed at getting Conservatives out to vote today. Now Douglas Hurd knows what he is doing, and, read closely, the article was also a plea for 'arguing from centre stage' and for an EU built 'around a solid core of common policies and rules'. But the headline really does come close to the famous 'Fog in the Channel - Continent cut off'. All Europe has to change so as to be fit for Britain to condescend to join it] Who on earth do we think we are?

Political leaders in France and Germany believe they can and must shape the future of Europe between them. This may, in the longer term, prove a dangerous illusion. But in the shorter term, the leading role of France and Germany is a political reality to which every other country in Europe is adapting, if only faute de mieux. It's distressing to find that even in countries such as Holland and Portugal, which have traditionally looked to Britain as well as Germany and France, this country is now seen as increasingly

irrelevant.

In post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe, Britain entered the post-Cold War period with a great stock of historic credit and goodwill - and there, unlike in Western Europe, notably enhanced by the Iron Lady. But this stock has been depleted over the last four years. Our businessmen have been notable by their absence while to the local politicians the key to Europe's future seems to lie in Bonn, Paris and Washington.

Our erratic European policy, and the confused and illusion-ridden debate that has accompanied it, has further damaged our relationship with the United States. Not only is America's 'special relationship' in Europe now with Germany. On many issues, her second partner is France. As the retiring American ambassador Raymond Seitz, a good friend of this country, recently warned: 'There is a simple observation that if Britain's voice is less influential in Paris or Bonn, it is likely to be less influential in Washington.'

This pretty pass is in some measure the culmination of the whole historical development over the half-century since D-Day. But in the past few years we have played our national game of missing opportunities more vigorously than ever. First, there was the opportunity offered by the coincidence of the end of the Cold War with the departure from office of Margaret Thatcher. Her legacy was that Britain's voice was heard in Europe - heard but also resented. The opportunity was to make Britain's voice both heard and appreciated, in a new Europe without the Iron Curtain. To see Britain 'at the heart of Europe' was always vainglorious, but John Major none the less made a fair start at seizing this opportunity. Then he and his party blew it.

Now we are told that attitudes in Europe are 'moving our way', that we are 'winning the argument'. This is a truth wrapped in an illusion - or perhaps an illusion wrapped in a truth. The illusion is that Britain has made the difference. To be sure, some very positive developments in Europe, such as the single market, the beginnings of an attack on corruption and a new taste for deregulation, do genuinely bear the British hallmark, even if most of our continental partners are reluctant to acknowledge it. It may even be that if we had not been so cussed about objecting to various things, others would have been compelled to stop smirking round the conference table and start objecting for themselves. (More fool us, you might say).

The deeper truth, however, is that other European countries are beginning to take a rather different - and potentially more congenial - attitude to further steps of European integration for reasons which have very little to do with British policy but everything to do with the end of the Cold War. 'Euroscepticism', in various forms, can now be found all over the EU, and even in countries which have just negotiated to join it - as Sunday's referendum in Austria may soon show. Everywhere I have been, the campaign slogans and posters for the European elections have been overwhelmingly national in emphasis. Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia has, of course, an unabashed appeal to Italian pride and prejudice. In Portugal I spied a poster which said simply 'Portugal]', with only the 'o' made of yellow Euro-stars hinting that this had anything to do with Europe.

The most important case is Germany. Here, the Social Democratic Party campaigns under the slogan 'to better represent German interests'. The Christian Democrats easily outstrip that, however, with the short but plangent appeal: 'Deutschland zuliebe]' For the love of Germany.

The buried iceberg of which this is but the rhetorical tip contains many elements, including concern about Germany's outsize contribution to the European Union's budget, fear of giving up the DM and a quite understandable reluctance to surrender national sovereignty so soon after regaining it. Yet not the least of those elements is Germany's very direct, national interest in enlarging the EU to the north and then to the east.

Now here should be an opportunity for Britain to start pulling itself out of its self-dug hole. There is a possible agenda for the inter- governmental conference of 1996 which would make sense both for Britain and for others in the Union.

This agenda would not start from the review and possible revision of the Maastricht Treaty - on which we would be well advised to take the well-known advice of the apocryphal Irishman at the crossroads: 'If I were you, I wouldn't start from here.' Rather, it would start from the fact of the northern and the prospect of the eastern enlargement, and address one central question: how can a political community of more than 20 states and more than 400 million people be made to work at least as well, if not better, than the present EU?

The answers to that question are very complicated, and the subject for another article. But they almost certainly involve more majority voting in the councils of ministers, more direct involvement of both national and European parliaments, and more common policies on such issues as immigration, law and order, security and foreign affairs.

To use the hackneyed vocabulary of Euro-debate, widening requires deepening. If Britain were ready to accept that as necessary and even desirable, and if other major states in the Union were to agree that this is the central question for the inter-governmental conference to address, then this country might, just might, again have a chance to play an important part in shaping Europe's future.

I fear that won't happen, though. What I fear is that the 18- month rolling German-French- Spanish presidency of the EU, starting on 1 July, will set an agenda which will be portrayed here as 'Maastricht plus' or 'a blueprint for a federal superstate', or some such guff. What looks like one more round of a familiar challenge will therefore continue to obsess, coarsen and distort the British debate about Europe.

Then, in 1997 or 1998, when we have completely infuriated everyone else in Europe and consigned ourselves firmly to the sidelines, or when the Conservative Party has split on the issue, or both - then the deep forces in Europe working against the further development of a Little Europe, built on the Messina-to-Maastricht model around a Franco-German 'core', will break through. Then Europe will really begin to 'go our way', but without us.

The writer is a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and author, most recently, of 'In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent' (Jonathan Cape, pounds 25).

(Photograph omitted)