I am very interested that in this morning’s session you were exploring how we organise the world, and I want to push that a little bit further and then to stop talking and listen to you, so this isn’t going to be a lengthy lecture, you will be most delighted to learn.

I think, with the events in Serbia and another country finding, we hope, some sort of liberation from tyranny, it’s a good time to start looking at how on earth we should be organising the world. Clearly, I think we are some way off having a world government, but I think probably many in the room would envisage that in due course we might look at that. We can see the trends which may move us towards it. We have to have the rule of law and security for people wherever they live in the world, and there is obviously a requirement to look at disparities and what they bring about in terms of human misery but also in terms of conflict. We do need to look at the conflicts going on throughout the world, those that have gone on in our lifetimes, and those that are ongoing, to see if we couldn’t start foreseeing the sorts of situations which might lead to them.

We also live on a fairly vulnerable planet where the environment and our human actions have a very strong interplay, and in all of these areas that I have mentioned so far the United Nations is of very great significance. We live in a world with resources which are plentiful but which are very unequally shared, which are squandered, and which are being used in a profligate way. So given that that’s the sort of set-up we have, let’s look at the various ways in which we have tried to organise it.

The nation state I suppose seems a natural way to proceed in that you get people who feel some sort of identity, possibly because of language, because of geographical nearness, because of a shared culture, a shared history. So the nation state seems to be a little bit stronger than we might have thought at one time, and seems indeed to be increasing in strength. One of the reasons the Danes for example said ‘no’ to joining the Euro was nothing whatsoever to do with the effect of the currency on the Danish economy because they are in any case linked to the Euro and their policies all depend on the Euro. It was far more that they were unhappy at losing Danishness and becoming swallowed up, and we know that there are those fears in this country too. People, and perhaps English people even more than Welsh or Scottish people, do feel that there is something they value which is under threat from sharing sovereignty with others.

Alongside nation states of course went empires, and we must remember we are operating in a world very strongly stamped by colonialism. We of course, as many of the larger European countries, were big movers in that colonialism, having ourselves been colonised by the Romans, except that my lot ran to the hills and my compatriots swam across the Irish Sea!

Alongside the nation states there certainly have been empires, built by force, not in the same category at all as some of the international groupings with which we operate, for example, in the EU. Most of those empires were conquests done by force.

Regional groupings are a feature of the world, and in most continents you see some attempt, certainly on the trade level, but in the continent of Europe much more so, in terms of legislation, environmental rules, and amongst some people quite certainly a wish to have real federalism and to bring together those small countries within Europe, and to extend the current European Union to what looks like the natural geographical boundaries if we are to operate on the continental basis, i.e. those countries which form part of the former Soviet Union, the communist countries – all expected to join, in due course, with the European Union.

In America we have the trade agreement NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Area, which encompasses Canada, the United States and Mexico, so on that basis only, since no one would claim I think that the relationship between the US and Mexico was other than one of a very big powerful country and a very poor aspiring country. Canada, although larger in area I believe, is sparsely populated and the relationship between Canada and the US is more equal, economically obviously, than that between the US and Mexico, on that continent.

Africa certainly moves to work in a Pan-African basis, particularly I suppose if you make the split between the Sahara northwards and Africa south of the Sahara which more or less would correspond to racial sub-groupings of people of Arab origin and black African people although that as we know is by no means a strong difference. But certainly African countries meet together and more and more are finding common policies and common wishes to represent themselves.

Asia is different of course. You have got two enormous countries in terms of population: China and India have one-third of the world’s population between them, about 1.2 billion in China, and just about a billion in India now and growing fast. Those countries don’t really need to look any further, and India, on a sub-continent where there is very considerable disparity of religious groupings, and in that area of course that often corresponds to the countries as in the partition of Pakistan from India, largely because of the difference of religion. Asia too is working more and more as a trade area, including Australia.

The religious groupings I just mentioned, some believe, including NATO to my astonishment, will become extremely significant and that the old raison d’etre of NATO, which was in Cold War times to protect Western Europe and the United States from the Soviet menace, as they put it, they now see the north/south menace, where you have obviously impoverishment in the south of the world, but you also have a religious divide between Islam and other religions, either Christianity or none. That’s a way of looking at the world I hadn’t thought of until NATO told me that this was a new raison d’etre for them to protect the north of the world from the rest. You may have some views on that: I certainly did.

There are certain ex-imperial groupings which are linguistic, and the Commonwealth I suppose would be an example there, where although other languages are spoken, English is widely spoken. The French are very very committed to maintaining Frenchness in the world: the French speaking parts of Africa, and the Pacific islands and their Departments in the Caribbean for example and North Africa. This Francophone grouping is one that’s encouraged by the French, they are trying their best to have a counter-balance to the onward move of English. Spain and Portugal of course are both completely outstripped now, as we are, by their former colonies in terms of population. Look at Portugal compared to Brazil – Angola, Mozambique and the other Portuguese-speaking areas – the comparison between the country of origin of the language and the colonies is absolutely enormous. Nevertheless that linguistic link, albeit in Brazil there are other indigenous languages not Portuguese, is important, as is in South America and Central America the link with Spain because of Spanish, and although they speak quite rightly very scathingly of Spanish conquest and of some of the atrocities that took place then, nevertheless there are strong cultural and trade links and friendship links which are based on languages and former imperial groupings.

Now, trade areas. The EU is a trade area, it has a single market. It tries to be much more and is probably the most ambitious international grouping in terms of what it has achieved and what some would like it to go on to achieve. Other examples are in South America, MERCOSUR, which is the two huge countries, Brazil and Argentina, plus Uruguay and Paraguay, setting themselves up. Those countries punch way, way, below their weight. They should be rich countries: Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world, and perhaps we could explore why it isn’t any longer. Those countries are certainly important, and the EU in turn is forming links with MERCOSUR, as it will do eventually I think with NAFTA and with the Far East groupings.

Those are trade areas, pure and simply; they don’t have a democratic element and they don’t have joint legislation. They don’t pool their sovereignty very much to have, for example, the same environmental standards. That’s in theory what we do in the EU, it’s one of the tasks of the EU: environment is a big area. After this meeting I am going to do a short TV interview to explain why our recycling record, which is meant to be the same as that of other EU countries, is nowhere near as good. I don’t know the answer why, but I have to admit that that’s true. Anyway

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