National conjectures …….
The Chatham House Commission on Europe After Fifty concludes in this new report that Britain's ability to deal with the principal external challenges of the 21st century will depend on its active participation in effective EU policies. Is Great Britain going to change its attitude towards the European political project? If one reads the introduction of the report A British Agenda for Europe, it seems that it is not the case. Let’s read some excerpts from it:

<<It is important to acknowledge that any notions of creating a European super-state have long since collapsed under the weight of political reality. An EU which comprises such a large and diverse membership makes impossible, both politically and practically, the level of centralization of power within supranational EU institutions in Brussels that a super-state would require.
Driven, therefore, both by the awareness of this rare moment to redefine Britain’s relationship with Europe and by our frustration with the sterility of the current national debate, we suggest a different way of approaching the vexed question of Britain’s relationship with the European Union. We examine a set of policy areas vital to Britain and ask not how Britain can accommodate them to the European Union but how, to what extent and, indeed, whether the European Union can help Britain to pursue itsnational interests in these areas, however defined…..
In coming years, therefore, British governments can no longer assume that their international policies should be coordinated first in Washington and then sold to their European partners. Nor should Britain start by trying to serve as a bridge between differing US and European approaches. It should treat the need to develop a common approach with key European partners on major foreign or security policy challenges as, at the very least, an equal priority to that of engaging the United States, if necessary, on joint or coordinated EU–US action….
The adjustment to its relationship with the United States raises the question of how Britain should approach the future development of foreign and security policy-making within the EU. The central question is this: even if Britain is dealing with equals in the European Union and even if it shares the bulk of external challenges with them, can the EU emerge as a serious player on the international stage and so further the collective interests of its members?.....

Therefore, the fact that the EU is not always as united or strong as it needs to be should serve as an incentive for Britain to try to strengthen EU external policy-making and make it more agile and coherent, not to complain that it is intrinsically ineffective. Members of this Commission do not envisage achieving this by transferring foreign policy-making of the type concerned with major questions of international security from the intergovernmental to the Community method of decision making, with its provisions for qualified majority voting, the right of initiative for the Commission, co-decision with the European Parliament and jurisdiction by the European Court of Justice. This is not politically feasible in an EU of nationally elected governments, all of which wish to retain sovereign choices in matters that affect national security. But scepticism about an expansion of ‘Community competence’ in this field does not preclude Britain from helping to strengthen the processes that will enable it and its EU partners to work more effectively together on the international stage.>>

…… and federalists’ refutations
That’s the point! “To work more effectively together on the international stage” doesn’t mean to build an effective European political power which is impossible, as the report points out, in the European Union. If the EU is not always as united or strong as it needs to be that’s because the EU is an oganization of cooperating sovereign nation States in the crucial fields of defence, security, fiscality and even economy in spite of the existence of a European Monetary Union. The British agenda for Europe is not so new as it would like to be. It doesn’t provide any new political receipt to emancipate the Europeans from their national divisions. Indeed it cannot, because it confirms the British opposition to any perspective to build an effective European federal State.

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