LONDON: Predictably the European Council has taken an acrimonious look at the Irish referendum result and decided to do nothing about it until the autumn.

Unfortunately the harsh questions of purpose and power, now hovering over Europe’s capitals like birds of prey, will not be disposed of so easily. “When I want to talk to Europe,” Henry Kissinger famously said, “whom do I call?” At the time, the resounding silence that greeted his question scarcely mattered. Eastern central Europe was imprisoned in the Soviet bloc; the western half of the continent sheltered beneath the capacious skirts of its superpower protector.

Even the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet Union made surprisingly little difference to the fundamentals of Europe’s place in the world or its understanding of itself. Europeans no longer needed the protection of the United States against the Soviet threat, but in the unipolar world that took the place of the bipolar world of the Cold War, they still lived in the shadow of overwhelming American power. Their inability to speak with one voice in world affairs was humiliating, but not humiliating enough to force them to put their geopolitical house in order. In any case, the triumphant launch of the euro, and the somewhat questionable triumph of helter-skelter enlargement, gave them more than enough to do.

However, unnoticed by many of Europe’s leaders and most of its peoples, times have changed, and the pace of change is speeding up. The unipolar world of the 1990s and early 2000s the world of overwhelming American predominance, with no other superpower in sight is not yet dead, but it is certainly dying. A more complex and infinitely more dangerous multipolar world is coming into existence, with China, India and perhaps a revitalised Russia as superpowers alongside the US.

For the foreseeable future, the US will be the strongest of these superpowers, but it will not be the only one. Economically, it has already ceased to be a hegemon. In different ways, China’s authoritarian capitalism and continental Europe’s social market economies have both turned out to be more successful than the hyper-individualistic capitalism of the US. In Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s huge military arsenal and sclerotic military doctrine have turned out to be unfit for purpose. Like Britain around the time of the Boer war, when its highly trained professional soldiers were outmanoeuvred by insurgent farmers, and British manufacturing was losing ground to its more adept German and American competitors, the US is today going through a painful process of relative decline as fleeter, slimmer rivals begin to catch up with it.

We cannot know how this new, multipolar world will evolve, but there is little doubt that it will be an unkind place, riven by quarrels over constrained resources and the divergent impacts of climate change. The great question for Europeans as it takes shape is brutally simple. Do we want our children and grandchildren to live in a world run by the Americans, Chinese, Indians and perhaps Russians, or are we prepared to make the qualitative leap towards the federalism that Kissinger’s question implies, and become at least a quasi-superpower in our own right? By a tragic irony, the Lisbon treaty that the Republic of Ireland rejected made a tiny, rather half-hearted gesture towards the second alternative. That was the meaning of the full-time president and the foreign policy supremo. In voting against the treaty, the Irish were voting for Europe to remain a fat, rich political pygmy, in a world dominated by potentially predatory giants.

But they didn’t know that that was what they were voting for. No one told them. According to the conventional wisdom, the Irish vote shows that Europe’s elites pay too little attention to their peoples. The truth is very nearly the opposite. For the most part, our elites have succumbed to a kind of populism that makes courageous political leadership virtually impossible.

Seemingly, they have forgotten that the statesmen who launched the European project 50 years ago were taking immense political risks, and that if they had submitted their project to a referendum, it might well have been defeated. In France, the Communists and Gaullists were hostile; in Germany, the Social Democrats were at most ambivalent. The founding fathers Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman, Paul-Henri Spaak, Alcide de Gasperi and Jean Monnet did not follow existing public opinion. They dared to create a new one.

Today’s European elites, by contrast, have been frightened of their publics. In their innermost souls most of them probably know that the institutional changes envisaged in the Lisbon treaty were, if anything, far too modest to give the EU even a modicum of the political clout it will need as the 21st century progresses. But they were afraid to say so. Indeed, their treaty was expressly designed not to say so. Their whole object was to present the narrowest possible front to Eurosceptic opposition, to smuggle barely adequate changes into law, in the hope that nobody would notice.

The result was that, except to skilled Brussels watchers, the treaty was virtually incomprehensible. Although nobody can be certain, the most probable end to this inglorious chapter in European history will be another helping of fudge, slapped over an even less adequate agreement.

Yet Kissinger’s question will not go away. Sooner or later, Europe will have to find an answer. We cannot know when or how it will do so, but I don’t think there’s much doubt that during the course of the next 20 or 30 years, the core countries of the EU broadly speaking, the eurozone will in effect federate. What the rest will do is unknowable at this stage, but I suspect that more of them will join the core than the current conventional wisdom envisages. The moral of the past 60 years of European history is that bold steps by a few eventually win over the timorous many. My only real doubt is whether Europe’s leaders will find the courage to lead. I console myself with the thought that even small men and women can be capable of great deeds in times of crisis.

—Dawn/The Guardian News Service

David Marquand is a former member of the UK parliament and a visiting fellow in the department of politics at Oxford University