The reader will no doubt already have detected the central paradox in the thesis I am advancing. It arises from the fact that politicians are basically avid for power, and work hard to get more of it. Yet here we have a political class with a remarkable passion to devolve power away from Britain to, well, anywhere really, starting with the EU, and extending to those who want to come and live in Britain, as well as to international committees and declarations of rights. Even when Margaret Thatcher faced invasion of the Falkland Islands, this passion was evident. Many of her colleagues, wanted to hand the matter to the UN in the search for a negotiated settlement. This would have risked consigning the fate of British subjects to the mercy of a particularly vile military regime. But our oligarchs are dedicated to internationality. They deplore the selfishness of national sovereignty and see wisdom supremely in foreigners sitting in committees.

Why then are these politicians so different from others? The answer to this question is complicated because it must take us back to the Enlightenment, that crucial 18^th-century period when, according to legend, Europeans threw off the yoke of religious superstition and began to respect evidence-based science. Here was the beginning of those passions to perfect society that we now recognise by such names as nationalism, anarchism, positivism, Nazism etc. They were all grand projects of politics designed to make people happy. Such grand projects of course had variable fortunes, but the most deeply entrenched of all was some version of socialism or social justice, a project so powerful in its claim to good intentions that its adherents could stomach as supposedly socialist rulers such unsavoury figures as Stalin, Mao and many others. But by 1989 that particular game was for the moment out of contention. The question faced by Enlightenment idealists was thus: where do we go now?

    The answer was: into the international world. Two world wars had focussed the minds of naturally quarrelsome European states on the principle that jaw-jaw is better than war-war. Such politicians as Anthony Eden were accustomed to tossing off remarks about the obsolescence of the age of national sovereignty. The thought behind these remarks was vaguely Kantian, assuming that a world of republics (or democracies as the idea is currently advanced) would inevitably be peaceful. It seemed obvious that the people themselves had no interest in going to war. Here then, in a world of global republics was a new version of that elusive perfection of society, and indeed of the whole world, towards which the Enlightenment never ceased to point. The move from the rule of law to an international version of the same thing would at last bring civilised standards to the world. A useful rhetorical benefit of this new version of perfecting society — indeed, even better, the world — was that it was much more satisfactory to attack the Iraq war as being illegal (which might be given a certain precision) rather than immoral (which fatally depended on values and argument.)

The plausibility of this new perfectionism clearly depended on self-renunciation. Europeans had to surrender some of their own interests in order to demonstrate that their codifications of morals and international life were more than merely a cunning version of imperialism designed to Westernise the world. The way Europeans showed the new order to be the way forward was to offer up some of their own interests as exemplary sacrifices. Preferably, they had to renounce much of their patriotism.