 I thank you, Cymruuen. I thank you very much to the Institute for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here, delighted to be in Dublin, although I'm rather intimidated by all the intellectual firepower around. I'm a journalist, I'm an observer of the world rather than a great thinker. I'm not going to talk as a political scientist or an academic, I'm going to try to do what I try and do in my columns, which is to talk about the world as I see it. I've got a very small subject sovereignty in the globalized age. So I thought I'd try and split it up into three parts to make it slightly more digestible. So I thought I'd first look at the debate actually in Britain about sovereignty and the European Union. And then I want to go on to suggest that that debate about the national and the supranational is actually points up in microcosm, the challenge that faces all nation states in and outside Europe as they seek to reconcile domestic politics with the realities of globalization. And in the third part, briefly, I want to come back to some of the strains in Europe as it deepens integration in the Eurozone. Britain and Europe. Now, I suppose some of you will have noticed that there's been something of an argument in Britain about how or its relationship with the European Union. Now, in many ways, this is really an old debate. Britain has never quite joined the European Union, even if it signed the various treaties. And there have been, I think, two organizing emotions in the relationship during the past many decades. The first is superiority. The second is insecurity. It was superiority that informed Winston Churchill's famous Zurich speech when he called, I think it was in 1946, for the creation of a United States of Europe and then added, but of course Britain as a global power would have no need to join. The same, I think, dismissive attitude helped keep Britain out of the coal and steel community and made sure that we weren't present and represented at the founding conference of Messina. Now, this sense of superiority is rooted in history, in culture and geography. It says that Britain's mother of parliaments has a stronger democratic tradition as an island state with an imperial heritage. It looks out on the world, lifts its eyes above Europe, and of course it won the war. The problem is that it's a pretty hard act to sustain in the face of relative decline. What drove Britain towards the then common market at the end of the 1950s beginning of the 60s, Macmillan's first application for membership, was the other organizing emotion, insecurity. This is the realization of the middle-ranking power Britain simply can't afford to be on the outside looking in as the rest of Europe draws closer together. Much as it disdains the EU, Britain fears being locked out. Margaret Thatcher put it very well actually back in 1975 when she was campaigning for a yes vote in the referendum, when she said that Europe opens windows on the world for Britain that otherwise would be closing. And these are the two emotions, I think, that will be uppermost in any future referendum. The skeptics, urophobes, swivelide, I don't know what you want to call them. Swivelide or not actually to be fair, will declare that Britain can perfectly well make its own way in the world as an independent nation. The pro-Europeans will counter that the nation's prosperity and security remain inextricably linked to its capacity to shape events. The truly neuralgic word in this debate is sovereignty. Sovereignty is the standard carried highest by the Euro skeptics. Briefly put, their case is that membership of the European Union extracts too high a price in terms of, and I put inverted commas around this, surrendered sovereignty. On the populist level this says the nation has lost control of its own destiny, witnessed the supposed flood of immigrants from other European countries, the social policy decisions taken in Brussels, the rules and regulations that are said to strangle British business and finance. And just to confuse things, the skeptics lump in the European Court of Human Rights into the mix as allegedly stopping Britain from expelling terrorists and criminals. On a slightly more elevated level, the argument runs that Britain's mistake was made at the very beginning when it joined the Union. In doing so, it accepted the primacy of EU over Westminster law. Once the single act promoted ironically by Margaret Thatcher and the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties had been signed, with their provision for much greater majority voting among member states and a corresponding widening of the authority of the European Court of Justice, the primacy of European law gave the EU the right to intrude into too many dimensions of British life. Now, the skeptics do have a point. Pro-Europeans, and I'm one, have to acknowledge that the EU does involve an unprecedented pooling of sovereignty. It represents a major departure from the European state system established by the treaties of Westphalia after the Thirty Years' War. And indeed, that's the point. For the avoidance of war, the founding fathers of the European Union set about creating a new system. The Westphalian Treaty has underpinned a system under which rulers would be free of foreign interference in any of their domestic affairs. In the EU system, members have effectively had each other the right to interfere in each other's domestic affairs. This is what the distinguished British and European diplomat Robert Cooper has called the post-modern state. Now, the central claim of the Eurosceptics, or the Euro-Outs, is that by leaving, Britain can at once reclaim sovereignty and the capacity to shape its own affairs. In the first part of that proposition, as I've said, they are right. Sovereignty gives you the capacity to say no. But it's on the second, the idea that sovereignty confers the capacity to act, that they are so badly mistaken. At the heart, I think, of any pro-European case lies a recognition that the interdependence of states demands that they share sovereignty in order to exercise it. In this respect, you could say the EU is simply the most developed of the many international organisations in which states have acknowledged and accepted that trade-off. You can think of NATO, ASEAN and Mercasur. And this, for me, is the fatal argument, fatal flaw in the argument of the Euro-Outs. Where Britain to leave the EU, the Westminster Parliament could indeed say that it reclaimed untrammeled sovereignty, but that sovereignty would not translate into a capacity to act in the interests of British citizens. Most obviously Britain's prosperity would depend on replacing EU trade, investment and other economic agreements with other nations around the world with its own bilateral arrangements. And each of those bilateral arrangements would involve some seeding of sovereignty, so sovereignty reclaimed from Brussels would be expended in new agreements. Britain also would have to negotiate new agreements with the EU to ensure that it was not locked out of the single market. Notionally, it could close its borders to EU citizens, but we've learnt from bitter experience that actually Britain can't operate its own borders effectively without the cooperation of countries like France, Belgium and I'm sure Ireland. The reality is that for a middle-ranking nation sitting on the edge of Europe, the option of an independent sovereignty is a mirage. We were talking earlier about Michael Heseltine, a former Conservative pro-European politician, and he had a good phrase for it. He said, the man walking alone in the desert is entirely sovereign and equally entirely powerless. This brings me to my second point, the globalisation more generally and the challenge to states. The state remains and I think will remain the basic building block of political organisation and international relations. But globalisation, I'm looking well beyond Europe here, has imposed significant stresses. The UKIP or the Eurosceptic Tories are not alone in their hostilities towards Brussels in Europe. We've seen the rise of populist nationalism elsewhere in Europe. But we've also seen the rise of nationalism more generally across the world. And at times of economic stress and insecurity, the populist turned nationalists, harm a seductive tune, that nations can throw up the barricades against the world beyond. Here they ignore the central fact of modern political life, that nations have to act together if they're to confront the biggest challenges of the age. If you think of the danger from pandemics and other risks to human health, that you find national borders, the need to confront climate change, arguably the biggest challenge we've ever faced to human welfare, all the effort to prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or the spread of identity-based terrorism. The interdependence is immutable. The world's becoming, sad to say, at once more multipolar and less multilateral. Rising states are sceptical about handing power to international organisations, especially the established ones of the post-war order. And hopes, I think, that the G20 would provide a broader architecture for international cooperation have gone unfulfilled as yet. But the result of that is that there's a gap, the gap between the demand for and the supply of international governance. Multilateralism isn't about to collapse but it is fracturing. If you start at first principles, stability and prosperity rest essentially on the capacity of states to meet the demands of their citizens for security, economic and social as much as physical. But the big consequence of globalization, I think, has been to weaken those same states and governments. Powers become a lot more diffuse as international corporations, non-governmental organisations and other non-state actors erode the capacity of the state to act. You can see this in tax arbitration of multinational corporations, been in the news a bit lately. The multi-country supply chains that distribute profits and jobs around the world. In the cross-border identity politics facilitated by the web. And in the louder voice, and this is welcome, of course, of civil society and political decision making. It seems to me that the crisis in the eurozone may have owed quite a lot the mistakes made by policy makers. But it also demonstrated the power of international markets to force states to adopt particular economic strategies. So states are also finding it more difficult to control their own borders, to regulate migration, to tackle cross-border crime and to prevent the spread of terrorism. The two men who killed a young soldier in London recently were probably radicalized by being exposed to jihadi propaganda on the web. So, as I've said, what we're witnessing here is a widening gap between the supply of and the demand for governance at the level of states. As power flows from state to non-state actors, it's also moving, as we've seen, from established powers in the west to rising powers in the eastern south. The result? Well, the result is that citizens are demanding from governments protection from all these insecurities, from all the insecurities thrown up by globalization. But governments are actually finding it harder to provide that security. And that, I think, sort of brings me to what I think is the central paradox of our age. Sovereignty is increasingly prized by nations, but even as it is prized, this sovereignty is increasingly ineffective. The weakening of global governance, the weakening, if you like, of the pooling of sovereignty threatens to weaken the power of individual states. The obvious conclusion for me is that states share an unavoidable interest in fashioning a system of international governance that recognizes their mutual as well as their national interests and recognizes that the national interest often lies within that mutual interest. Domestic progress can't be separated from international rule setting and cooperation. Threats, wherever they come from, nuclear proliferation, climate change or global financial weaknesses simply do not respect national boundaries. I'm going on too long, so I'm going to very briefly turn to Europe, but very briefly. My view on where we're heading in the Eurozone is that further integration is both inevitable and necessary. Inevitable because the completion of monetary union required to sustain the Euro over the medium to long term requires much closer economic. Coordination but also I think collective decision making. Necessary because the shift in global power eastwards and southwards makes it more essential for Europe to act as one if it's to succeed in promoting its interests, norms and values in the wider world. But to say that closer integration, more shared sovereignty if you like is inevitable and desirable is not to say it would be easy or popular. Many people, not just anti Europeans, are worried about sharing authority over national budgets, tax and spending levels. These are issues at the very heart of democratic states. There should be, I think, a recognition to that the European Union has often, has too often belonged to its elites. And this incidentally, I think, is where populists of both right and left at the moment are striking their most powerful cord. I was in Italy last week and I heard the new Prime Minister and Ricoletta say there that the great tragedy of the European elections next year could well be that the most successful candidates are anti Europeans. So it seems to me that a more integrated Europe does demand more transparency, more accountability and a much clearer chain of responsibility for decisions taken at the European level. Now whether the answer to that is much closer engagement by national parliaments or more democratic institutions at the European level, I'm not sure. I tend towards the former, but what's clear, I think, is that national electorates need to be able to see the identity of interest between the national and the European. The sovereignty demanded by anti Europeans is a chimera in a globalised world. Interdependence can't simply be wished away. But those like me who argue that pooling sovereignty is the only answer have to make that case and it's not an easy one to make in an age of austerity. Thank you.