Blair will never fulfil his European dreams unless he comes out fighting

The constitutional convention ? isn't that the thing that's going to enslave us and end a thousand years of British history?

As ever, the great European debates pass Britain by. Over the last year, the peoples of Europe have assembled a constitutional convention – like the Americans in 1787 – to craft a legal and political foundation for a Europe that from 2004 will run from Portugal to Estonia. This has been marked by us Brits with, um, well... there was a story in one of the broadsheets, I think, and, er, Newsnight mentioned it a few times and – ah, yes – there have been a crop of scare stories in the tabloids. The constitutional convention – isn't that the thing that's going to enslave us all to the Germans and end a thousand years of British history? Yes, you've got it.

The facts about the new European constitution – which is still being written – are fairly straightforward. After decades of "ever-closer union", the arguments are moving in Britain's direction. Today, even a German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, talks about "repatriating" some powers from the Commission and codifying in the constitution the decision that key powers must remain at the national level. The 10 new members from Eastern Europe did not gain their freedom from Moscow a decade ago only to hand them over to Brussels now; they are far more sympathetic to the British view (as we saw over Iraq) than to the hyper-integrationism of, say, Joschka Fischer. You can't run 24 countries from Brussels, and few people want them to be.

What they do all want is to co-operate in their common interest, not least in establishing a single market for goods and services. Why do Eurosceptics find that so hard to understand? The legitimate European debate is about whether we, as a nation, make a net gain from the inevitable compromises inherent in membership any club, never mind one as complex as the EU. The evidence clearly indicates that we do – so the Eurosceptics change the subject and pretend that the EU is really a secret, evil conspiracy. The historian Andrew Roberts – a key figure on the Eurosceptic right – has written an appalling novel, The Aachen Memorandum, which perfectly illustrates this view. Europe in just a few decades is painted as a fascist state which drives (among others) John Redwood into a patriotic underground. They seem in all seriousness to think that this is the covert agenda of the EU.

Back on the planet earth, Britain will, of course we will, through the convention, pool some bits of sovereignty, as we have for 30 years. The idea, however, that this means losing control is based on a misunderstanding. As Edward Heath, our most pro-European PM to date, argues, sovereignty isn't something you hoard in your cellar like a miser, and go down once a year with a candle to check it's still there. It's something you spend and use. We can cling to the illusion that we have our sovereignty by hugging it close to our chest and telling the world to go away; but while we do that, the real decisions that affect us will be made elsewhere without our input. We are interlinked with Europe in a thousand ways, and we always will be. The convention is simply a sensible way of carving up which decisions should be taken collectively and which will be taken internally. It looks like the balance – once the convention's decisions are published – will fall, as it always has, towards leaving the vast majority of decisions up to us.

But the Blair government cannot avoid some of the blame for the fact that the convention and EU enlargement have been seen in Britain (when noticed at all) as a threat rather than a vindication. Even at his most astronomically popular, Blair chose to politely cross the street when he saw an alcoholic Eurosceptic tramp in his path, rather than interrupt his mutterings to point out that they contain some serious misunderstandings and paranoias.

The PM knows that Europe comes very low on voters' list of concerns – in the pollsters' jargon, it has no "salience". So long as politicians deliver on other issues, the vast majority will let their leaders do what they like on Europe – an issue that seems distant and irrelevant. Voters will acquiesce in pro-Europeanism if it is done quietly, they believe; why provoke a pointless row with the likes of Rupert Murdoch, and needlessly risk turning powerful figures against everything the Government does?

But this approach means that the only time the average Brit ever hears about the EU is in a hatchet job. There is a vacuum where pro-European arguments should be. As Blair's old friend, the late Roy Jenkins, pointed out, great politicians make the weather; others shelter from it – and on Europe, Blair has occasionally tiptoed out of the shelter, only to retreat at the first sight of a raincloud. The result is that too few British people know that in 1972, the year before we joined the EU, only 42 per cent of goods exports went to EU countries; by 2001, 58 per cent went to the rest of the EU – in addition to, not instead of, our exports to the rest of the world, which have also grown. The EU is making us all richer – and has been for a long time – but who knows it?

The only area (other than asylum) where the Tories are supported more than Labour is Europe – and IDS is the most Eurosceptic leader the Conservative Party has ever had. The man is an obsessive anti-European headbanger: he admitted in an interview last year that he missed the birth of one of his own children because he was so engrossed in a telephone conversation about Maastricht. He and his fellow Eurosceptics predicted, in the same apocalyptic tone they use today about the convention, that the Maastricht Treaty would mean "the end of Britain as a self-governing nation". So, um, why do you want to be Prime Minister now, Iain? And why don't you say you'll repeal Maastricht and advocate withdrawal from the EU, the only logical conclusion to your views? Yet if pro-Europeans like Tony Blair don't give voice to their arguments, people like this set the tone.

The tragedy is that these silly debates – usually based on a fictional EU which has never existed, and will never exist – prevent us from discussing the important questions about the new Europe. What does it mean to be European? Is our identity based on, in Giscard d'Estaing's words, "a shared Judaeo-Christian heritage" (in which case Turkey is excluded), or is it based – as I'd prefer – on shared social democratic values? Another huge controversy: do we want to build Europe as a partner of the US or a rival to it?

Some Europeans – Jacques Chirac is the most obvious, although British intellectuals such as Will Hutton agree – see the EU as a alternative power-block to the US, protecting its social-democratic vision against neoliberalism. Others see this as a nightmare – Tony Blair and the recently retired Czech President Vaclav Havel are the most eminent – because it would entrench pointless conflict, distracting both continents from their shared interests in tackling Islamofascist terrorism and spreading democracy and some form of capitalism.

These are big, meaty rows – yet what are we talking about in Britain? Whether we are about to be conquered by a dastardly Fourth Reich. Are we Brits really incapable of discussing Europe seriously?

j.hari@independent.co.uk