 Welcome to the 2012 MacKenzie Stewart Lecture, and a special welcome to the members of the MacKenzie Stewart family who are with us, Jack's daughter Amanda Hay and her daughter Mariana, where privileged to have with our lecturer this evening, Sir Conrad Sheeman, who as the present occupant of the UK seat on the Court of Justice of the EU is the most recent successor of Jack MacKenzie Stewart. Sir Conrad will be known to many of those here because he has been such a good friend to cells and a loyal supporter of cells activities since he joined the advisory board of the centre in 1996. Sir Conrad was born in Berlin just before the Second World War and came to England in 1946 as a small boy. He received the remainder of his schooling in this country, was commissioned in the Lancashire Fusolaires for his national service, read Lord Cambridge from 1958 to 1962 and then embarked on a career path which has been littered with glittering prizes. He started at the bar in 1964, took silk in 1980, became a high court judge in 1986 and the Lord Justice of Appeal in 1995, was treacher of the inner temple in 2003 and took up his present position at the Court of Justice in 2004. It will be of his background and his professional experience. There are few people as well qualified as Sir Conrad to remind us why we need the European Union and why we should feel inspired by it. So it's with keen anticipation that I invite Sir Conrad to address us on his theme, the EU as a source of inspiration. Thank you very much Alan for your kind words. I'd rather hoped that the 102 Tory MP's signatories of a recent letter to the Daily Telegraph, who obviously lacked inspiration, might possibly be attending tonight but evidently not. What you'll find inspiring depends to a degree on where you come from and what you're looking for. So applying the principle of transparency, let me put my cards on the table. Those who funded the European Communities and indeed both Jack Mackenzie Stewart and I went through the last world war. I imagine that I will be the last judge of the court in Luxembourg of whom this can be said. And if you've been through such an experience it does tend to mark your whole life. I was born, as you said, in Berlin, spent my early childhood being bombed there by the British. And then to escape the bombs moved to my grandparents in what is now Poland. However, threatened by Soviet armies, I moved thence to Bavaria where I waved a white-hank chief at advancing American tanks in 1945. My father, a German who had been born in what is now Poland, himself fell in Italy just before the end of the Second World War. He had been born in Stettin, as it then was, because his father had settled there. Why? Because as a result of the First World War, in which he had fought both on the western and eastern fronts, he had lost his family home in what is now Estonia. My mother, most of whose friends had been shot or hanged or bombed, died soon after my father. And I was eventually taken to England by my German uncle who had married an English woman before the war. And my wife's story is much the same. Her family comes from Austria and some escaped to England. She was born here in Cambridge. Others died in concentration camps. And we have known lots of such people. Now this background is similar to that of many of those who shaped the Union. And it is worth remembering that the last displaced persons camps established in Western Europe was not closed until 1957. Displaced persons were those who had been displaced by war from the place where they started. If you look at the preamples to the earlier treaties, you find evidence of what the founders of the communities were seeking to avoid. And what they were looking for. I quote, Considering that world peace can be safeguarded only by creative efforts commensurate with the dangers that threaten it. Resolve to substitute for age old rivalries, the merging of their essential interests, to create by establishing an economic community the basis for a broader and deeper community among peoples long divided by bloody conflicts. And to lay the foundations for institutions which will give direction to a destiny henceforth shared. Now when Jean Manet frequently referred to as the father of Europe saw the spectacle of ruins left by two world wars, he could have chosen a policy of revenge against Germany as Clemenceau had done after the first world war. Or he could have chosen domination as Stalin did in Eastern Europe. But he did not. He felt that the solution to age old conflicts lay in the peaceful organisation of common action by institutions created for the purpose. This choice of encouraging common endeavour was not the obvious one. However it is one which with hindsight one can see has been outstandingly successful in achieving his aim of peace. Certainly the policies of the communities have been infinitely less harmful to the world than the policies of Clemenceau or Stalin. Our daughter and currently active politicians born after the threat of war among the Western European states was all over, take it as a self-evident truth, unworthy of remark that there has been no war between states in Western Europe for the last 60 years and there is not likely to be one in the future. I imagine most of you belong to that generation. And the previous thousand years of which this could not be said have happily passed into history and this is manifestly a cause for rejoicing. There is a strong case for saying that this happy result has been achieved in part as a result of the existence of the communities. Now as I say this is now history but history can be a source of inspiration. With the passing of time the following questions pose themselves. Can what has worked in Western Europe be applied for example in the Balkans with their equally bloody history? Can it be applied to German-Polish relations? We are in the process of finding out that the auguries are in general good. What is worth noting is that the model established by the European Coal and Steel Community Treaty has worked in countries for which it was not designed and has proved useful in the search for world peace. I give you an example close to home. I once asked an Irish ambassador in Luxembourg whether he considered that the European communities had done anything to help the process of healing the centuries of tensions between Britain and Ireland. He said he had no doubt this was so not because of anything that the communities had done as such but because the decision making process within the union was such that there had to be weekly meetings between Irish ministers and British ministers and between Irish civil servants and British civil servants. He said that those meetings were about problems they had in common and that after a while it became clear to each that the other was not exclusively peopled by devils and bigots and that common solutions to common problems could be worked out by patient negotiation. Monet would have been pleased. The steady growth of the union from the original six to the present 27 with Croatia due to join us next year and others in the wings shows that the union has continued and continues to attract some, many. Moreover, it has become much more outward looking than it was in the beginning. So let us leave the history of wars behind and see what is inspiring the current generation of politicians around Europe. The preambles of the Lisbon treaties contrast interestingly with the preambles of the original treaties and give us an insight into what has attracted the newer member states. In noticeable contrast to the preamble of the ECSC treaty, the preambles of the Lisbon treaties on European Union and the functioning of the European Union make no mention of bloody conflicts. In those preambles we find the heads of state including of course MPs will note Her Majesty the Queen confirming and I quote their attachment to the principles of liberty, democracy and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and the rule of law. Confirming their attachment to fundamental social rights as defined by the European social charter and in the community charter of the fundamental social rights of workers. Desiring to deepen the solidarity between their peoples while respecting their history, their culture and their traditions. Intending to confirm the solidarity which binds Europe and the overseas countries and desiring to ensure the development of their prosperity. Anxious to strengthen the unity of their economies and to ensure their harmonious development by reducing the differences existing between the various regions and the backwardness of less favoured regions. Resolve to achieve the strengthening and the convergence of their economies and to establish an economic and monetary union including a single stable currency. Determined to promote economic and social progress for their peoples. Resolve to implement the European identity and its independence in order to promote peace, security and progress in the world. Resolved and I finish by thus pooling their resources to preserve and strengthen peace and liberty and calling upon the other peoples of Europe who share their ideals to join in their effort. Now that's what I meant by being outward looking. It's not stopped. These preamples clearly echo the aspirations of current member states. Now it's often forgotten in England that many of these are countries which have escaped dictatorships with their secret police, their absence of freedom of speech and their absence of any rule of law worthy of the name. Many are countries which have in the life of the European communities been occupied by foreign forces or which have been ravaged by military formations of one sort or another. For all these countries the EU provides something which they desperately lacked. It seems that this is something either not understood or not regarded as significant by many in the UK. But it is hugely important to realise that by the citizens of such countries the institutions of the EU and the Council of Europe are regarded as safeguards for a better life. I have talked to judges who have had all their telephone conversations taped by government for years. They desperately longed to be under a regime which doesn't permit this. Now, I don't know, maybe just me, but I sometimes have the feeling that in the UK a judge of the European Court of Justice or of the European Court of Human Rights is simply by virtue of the office he holds widely regarded with something varying from distaste to bemusement. I remember when I was appointed by some of my colleagues in the Court of Appeal, I said, What on earth persuaded you? How did they on earth persuade you to go off to Luxembourg? And it was really quite interesting to contrast that with reactions from abroad where people said, Gosh, how wonderful, what a fascinating job you've got. It's just a different way of doing things. But in countries which have escaped from fascist or communist dictatorships, the approach is totally different. There we tend to be looked up to with hope and expectation. Now, I read these preambles and many in the UK find the phraseology used in the preambles overblown because we are or in any event used to be less used to phraseology of this kind than lawyers and politicians in many other countries. Roy Jenkins in his autobiography referred to, I quote, our national habit of never joining any European enterprise until it is too late to influence its shape. Then when, highly predictably, we are eventually forced to apply for membership, we complain bitterly that the shape suits others better than it suits us. I fear he has a point and the point not only applies to policies such as the common agricultural policy and the fisheries policy but also to the very way in which language is used. We might prefer to say we are all equal before the law. That doesn't make anybody here feel that they're being unduly overblown. But when others say that we must act in accord with the principle of equality, they say, oh principles. The reaction, it's partly simply a linguistic thing. One thing which seems clear to me is that we mustn't let such linguistic differences get in the way of our common endeavours. Many people in this country think that the mission of the union should be purely to encourage more trade. They are, and this has been the case for decades, suspicious of wider aims. Although it has to be said they regularly sign treaties which affirm their attachment to those very aims. In this I have no doubt that they are out of step with much of what the union stands for so far as other member states are concerned. Now selfishness is a human characteristic which we all display from babyhood onwards. We can all understand complete selfishness both in individuals and in states. However, I think no one finds such an attitude a source of inspiration. There are two ways of combating the fact of widespread selfishness. One is to expand the concept of self and the other is to recognise a duty to help one's neighbour who is not oneself. They come to very much the same thing. We widely accepted that we shouldn't act purely selfishly but should include in the concept of one of us of the rest of the family. Most I think would go further and to differing degrees so as to extend the concept of one of us to the village, the town, the county or the country. One of the inspiring aspects of the European enterprise has been the attempt to widen the concept of one of us at any rate to all those within one of the member states. Perhaps the width of the circle of those with whom a sense of solidarity can be felt can be regarded as a measure of the success of any civilisation. A good essay topic. The width of the circle of those with whom a sense of solidarity is felt can be regarded as a measure of the success of any civilisation. Look back on Rome, Spanish Empire, and it's actually quite an interesting topic. I'm sorry, I'm adlibbing as I read my own text. Some understandably have an instinctive difficulty in regarding a German, an Italian or a Romanian as one of us. If you're not familiar with such people, their literature and their music, they seem very strange. For persons with this difficulty, the concept of a duty to help one's neighbour is perhaps more useful in the fight against selfishness. Even those who do not like the social habits of the man next door will recognise the sentiment. He's not one of us, but he is, after all, human and our neighbour. What causes the difficulty, to some, is exactly the difficulty which gave rise to the parable of the Good Samaritan. Who is my neighbour? Could he possibly include an Italian? Is the Scott my neighbour? If so, will he still be my neighbour if he votes for independence? Is the Ulsterman, but not the Irishman who lives in Dublin? For the other member states, many of whom have had borders which have shifted frequently over the centuries, these puzzles are very real. I find that the approach of the communities and the union which attempts to say one way or another, we must solve our problems jointly and help one another, eminently inspiring and, moreover, eminently practical. It is important for us to realise that for most member states, new and old, social solidarity, both within and outwith national borders and indeed union borders, is an important part of the creed they profess in public. I accept they do not always act in accordance with the tenets of their creed, and I confess that one of my disappointments in Luxembourg has been to witness the degree to which member states do not live up to their own promises. But they deeply believe them nonetheless. One can be too cynical about this, who in their personal life does not fall short of his own genuinely held ideals. Politicians by the need to get elected are strongly tempted to promise whatever will secure them a vote. Of course, it is easier for the recipients of aid to approve of the principle of solidarity than it is for the givers of aid. But even the latter, including the United Kingdom, in fact and in principle approve of using their own resources towards helping the ex-fascist states and the ex-communist states and other poor countries to achieve a higher standard of living and a more decent society. I have just come back from a meeting with Albanian judges which in part was paid for by the Foreign Office in just this sort of exercise. It's obvious to all that those states simply cannot pull themselves up by their own unaided efforts and that it would be disastrous for the peace of Europe if those states became lawless and irresponsible. There are inevitably arguments about quantum but the principle of helping your neighbour is accepted in the Union just as it is in the United Kingdom where no one thinks twice about the richer helping the poorer. Nobody suggests we should all pay exactly the same amount of tax however much we earn. I have the impression that those who have joined the Union in the last ten years and those who plan to do so have all been influenced by the feeling that their economic prosperity will be advanced by so doing. Having had the experience many of them have closely regulated and state directed economic activity. It seems that the market orientated philosophy of the Union is broadly to their taste. For all its defects they find it more inspirational than the systems from which they manage to break away. That said they seek to soften its hardness by applying what they call the principle of solidarity. There are also those who have found the establishment of the Euro inspirational both as a practical reality and as a sign of solidarity. If you live in tiny Luxembourg as I do where practically every citizen goes abroad every week or if you are in the export or import business or if you are a frequent traveller the shared convenience of the Euro is of course more self-evident than if you are a local journalist in rural England and don't go abroad. What is becoming increasingly self-evident although it was in fact seen by some both within and out with the European institutions from the very beginning is that the existence of the Euro in effect compels moves towards more solidarity. And this is not merely among those countries who have adopted it but also those who have not. The outsiders recognise that they can be so damaged by what is happening to the insiders that it becomes evident that they must act to help the insiders to overcome their problems. Thus the interests of the insider and the outsider coalesce. I do not say that the way the Euro crisis has been allowed to happen and the way it has been managed is by any means ideal. But I do say that we can learn from the experiment and that the experiment has been inspirational and the experiment continues. Monet proclaimed presciently in an oft quoted remark that Europe will be forged in crises and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises. Well, we may be living through one such time. Many have been inspired by the sheer freedom to move themselves, their families and their possessions from one state to another without being subject to state control. Forgive me, I don't know what that sounds like amplified but most of us in the UK have not had the experience of being in effect imprisoned in our own countries. And do not instinctively appreciate the sheer exhilaration felt by those who have been so imprisoned and can now move as a right to other countries. Not merely does the existence of such a right add to their personal freedom but it also provides a spur to the improvement for those states which find that their populace or their assets are leaving because of various things which are wrong in their state of origin. If you see everybody leaving, which is what happened in East Germany, there are two things you can do. You can either shoot them, which is the East German solution, or you can say well why not try and make things better in our country so they don't want to leave. Now in the UK we have not had a significant control of travel for years although I am actually old enough to remember when it was forbidden to take more than 50 pounds out of the United Kingdom on holiday. But the citizens of many member states were not permitted to travel at all and as I say they find this freedom exhilarating. Many have been inspired by the attachment of the union to human rights. That attachment is in my experience much stronger in those who have lived in polities which do not respect such rights than in those who have benefited from such rights much as they benefit from air without giving either very much thought. Things look very different if you have been imprisoned for disagreeing with the government, tortured to betray a friend or simply had to exercise permanent self-censorship in order to avoid some sort of damage either to yourself or to your family. I suspect that many have been inspired by the progress made in the union in providing for mutual recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil matters and also mutual cooperation in criminal matters. It is a very common thing for parents to break up and one to take their common children to another country and then the courts of the two different countries being faced with disputes as to who should decide who should have control of the children. And while such disputes are raging if there is no system for regulating such a thing that children are growing older in miserable circumstances and the solution which might have been sensible at the beginning ceases to be sensible at the end. This is a very common thing and the communities in the union have worked hard in trying to work out systems which can be operated so as to avoid them. There are snags and difficulties in both these fields but what exists is, I would have thought, clearly better than the previous situation. I conclude this catalogue of developments in the union which have proved inspirational for many people by recalling its emphasis on preserving and safeguarding the environment. Now that is a field where it is obvious that the problems are such that many of them simply do not admit of national solutions. Pollution, whether travelling by air or by river or underground drifts across frontiers. This is less obvious if you are an island but even we must acknowledge that if an atomic reactor explodes in Calais the people of Dover will be affected whether or not they have signed saying this is a nuclear free area. Having looked at the position within the union to see what inspiration has been given to those who are currently within it. I turn now to note that it is clear that the union has already proved an attractive model not merely for those who have joined since 1952 and those who still wish to join but for those outside Europe who to a degree have been inspired by the union. One could give examples from many fields but since I am a member of the court it seems appropriate to cite an article in the current journal Western European Politics by Professor Karen J. Alter which she introduces with these words which I cite because she has done the research and I haven't. Quote. Up until the creation of the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights international courts were primarily designed to adjudicate disputes between states when both parties desired it. With consent required for litigation to proceed governments could simply refuse to litigate cases where serious issues were at stake. The architects of the European community however wanted meaningful international oversight of state behavior. They added design features to make international oversight possible including compulsory jurisdiction so that states could not block valid cases from proceeding and the right of non state actors to initiate legislation. There are now she says 11 operational copies of the European Court of Justice. Europe's most important legal export is not so much its formal legal institutions but rather the embedded approach to making international law effective. European style international courts exist where international legal rules are part of the national legal orders and where national and international judges mutually converse about the application of these rules in concrete cases. Because Supra and subnational actors are applying the same or similar law to concrete cases, European style international courts are generally perceived to be better able to work with domestic lawyers, administrative actors and judges to facilitate the domestic application of international law than are interstate courts. Professor Alter concludes that quote the ECJ model has clearly diffused around the world. The best explanation for this fact is that regions are drawing lessons from the ECJ's experience. Supra national legal architects also learned from the ECJ's experience. They also explicitly incorporated the ECJ's revolutionary doctrines of direct effect and the supremacy of community law and the idea that community law is distinct from traditional international law. Judges and lawyers working in regional international courts also learned from the ECJ's jurisprudence although they use this jurisprudence as a guide rather than as dogma. I agree with Professor McCormack who died not very long ago that the European Union offers the hope of transcending the sovereign state rather than simply replicating it in some new super state, some new repository of absolute sovereignty. It creates, he said, new possibilities of imagining and thus of subsequently realizing political order on the basis of pluralistic rather than monolithic conceptions of the exercise of political power and legal authority. And it has been suggested that one should see the community as constituting the first truly multi-centred polity since the emergence of the European state system in the 16th century. Instead of a new, hierarchically organized sovereign construct modeled after the nation state, we are confronting a situation where different authoritative orders and circles overlap and compete and collaborate. Back to the Middle Ages in some ways but none the worse for that. Professor McCormack pointed out some time ago that the key question becomes whether there can be a loss of sovereignty at one level without its inevitable and resultant recreation in another. Is sovereignty, like property, which can be given up only when another person gains it, or should we think of it more like virginity, something which can be lost by one without another gaining it, and whose loss in apt circumstances can even be a matter of celebration? The idea of subsidiarity points us to better visions of democracy than all purpose of sovereignty ever did. This is a possible future reality preferable to the past of nostalgic mythology. In short, he saw the union as a source of inspiration. My former colleague, Professor Poirish Maduro, wrote that the discovery four or five hundred years ago that different melodies could be heard at the same time in a harmonic manner was one of the greatest developments in musical history and greatly enhanced the art and pleasure of music. In law two, we have to learn how to manage non hierarchical relationships between different legal orders and institutions and to discover how to gain from the diversity and choices that are offered to us without generating conflicts that ultimately will destroy those legal orders and the values they sustain. There is much to be said, much to be gained from a pluralistic conception of the EU legal order. In a world where problems and interests have no boundaries, it is a mistake to concentrate the ultimate authority and normative monopoly in a single source. Legal pluralism constitutes a form of checks and balances in the organisation of power in the European and national polities and in this sense it is an expression of constitutionalism and its paradoxes. The European Union undoubtedly is one of the great political and legal experiments in world history. Some things have worked well, others less so. The same is true of the governance of each member state. Since you are largely academic, I imagine, perhaps I can suggest that he is one of your tasks to help us all identify what has gone wrong so that others can learn not to make the same mistakes and what has worked well in the union, so that others may draw inspiration from it. A recurrent question is whether everything must be resolved before anything can be sensibly resolved. To take the example of the day, the single currency. Was the creation of a unified currency before one had agreed a unified fiscal policy a good idea? It seems generally agreed that to have a unified currency has advantage, but that to have such a currency without having a unified fiscal policy will not work in the long run. Given that member states had resolved to pursue an ever closer union, Monet's approach was to establish a monetary union before having a fiscal policy. In order in effect to force the member states to agree in due course a unified fiscal policy. This is a development of the original 1951 Schumann ideal. Now other states can see to what that has led and we've all observed it in the last few months and they will consider whether even at the risk of not achieving anything it is better to wait until you have a unified fiscal policy before establishing a single currency. So they can seek inspiration going this way or that from what has happened in a very bold experiment. Another recurring question worth studying is whether the governance of a union such as ours should be inspired by the old model of heads of individual states each briefed by their own civil service meeting to achieve as much as possible of what was on their national agenda. Or whether it should be inspired by a system such as established by the Coal and Steel Treaty with its strong high authority to which substantial powers had been delegated and which could propose things which it regarded as being in the common interests and in which the discussion focus on whether the proposal was indeed in the common interest. General De Gaulle made clear his preference for the first course. Monet had an equally clear preference for the second. There are arguments either way but the experiments have been going on long enough perhaps to enable one to draw some conclusions as to the relative efficiency of these approaches and as to whether one should pay the price of loss of efficiency in order to gain some other desiderate. The Prophet Joel tells us that it shall come to pass that your old man shall dream dreams and your young man shall see visions. When I was an undergraduate here at the time of the first United Kingdom application to join the communities, some of us organized a seminar in Jesus College to which students from all over Western Europe were invited. We wanted to demonstrate enthusiasm for a closer European Union. We saw visions if you like. Now I'm older and I may be dreaming but I'm convinced that in many respects the EU can be seen as and has been seen as a source of inspiration. So I leave you with the conclusion of Monet's memoirs. Have I made you understand that the community which we have created is not an end in itself. It is a process of transformation which continues that from which our national forms of life have emerged in earlier phases of history. Like our provinces yesterday, our peoples today, if they wish to measure up to what is required to achieve progress and to remain masters of their destiny, must learn to live together under rules and institutions freely accepted. The sovereign nations of the past are no longer the framework in which the problems of the present can be resolved and the community itself is only a stage towards methods of organization of the world of tomorrow.