If the arch-Europhile Lord Owen wants out of the EU, it should make us all stop and think

Many of those clamouring for Britain to leave the European Union have always loathed it. Not so David Owen. All of his political life, he has been a proud European – and has been prepared to stake his career on it. He resigned from Labour’s front bench in protest against its lack of commitment to the EU, then became foreign secretary when this was remedied. Later, after his party turned against the EU once again, he resigned to help set up the Social Democratic Party. He has always been a forceful critic of what he calls the “chauvinistic and unrealistic” idea that Britain can, or should, act alone.

So when he declares, now, that it’s time to leave the European Union, then his reasons are worth listening to. This is not the war cry of a Little Englander or a starry-eyed attempt to draw the sword of British sovereignty from the stone of Brussels. Lord Owen has carefully weighed his own pro-European ideals against the hard lessons of recent history: contrasting what the EU says with what it does. Just because it aims to promote unity, it’s hard to ignore that its policies have brought sado-austerity, scandalously high unemployment and the rise of the far-Right. So Lord Owen has become part of a group that may well decide this referendum: Europhiles for Brexit.

His particular concern is security, precisely the issue that David Cameron is campaigning on. Three months ago, the Prime Minister decided he couldn’t realistically claim that Britain needed EU membership to guarantee prosperity, especially not when Britain had been creating more jobs than the rest of Europe put together. So he decided to revive the “security” theme of his general election campaign, and introduce the notion of the EU acting not just as a common market but as a common shield against regimes such as Iran and Russia. As he put it earlier this week: “The only person I can think of who might want us to leave the EU is Vladimir Putin.”

In so doing, he makes Lord Owen’s point: that the idea of the EU guaranteeing security is not just laughable, but downright dangerous. Even half-believing it is, Lord Owen says, a threat to our security.

Not for the first time, Mr Cameron is picking up an old Tony Blair idea: that the EU should be a “superpower, not a superstate”. A fine theory, but does anyone remember the Balkans? When fighting broke out in 1991, the then chair of the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council declared that this was “the hour of Europe, not the hour of the Americans – if one problem can be solved by the Europeans, it is the Yugoslav problem.” This suited the Americans: by all means, let the uniting Europeans pacify their own backyard without the help of the US Air Force. But the EU failed and Yugoslavia fell into an abyss of ethnic cleansing at the cost of 150,000 lives.

Since then, the EU has doubled its membership. But Lord Owen points to a more recent example: Ukraine. In a lecture last autumn, he noted how the EU blundered its way into a confrontation with Putin by pledging “military-technological cooperation” with Ukraine – suggesting that (as Moscow feared) the EU wanted to become the new Nato. Yet no one in the EU seems to have realised how sensitive the Kremlin was to all this, and how ready it was to act. Ukraine, like Bosnia, was intended to demonstrate the “hour of Europe”. Like Bosnia, it only served to demonstrate that the EU cannot be trusted with security.

All of this is, for Mr Cameron, a tough argument: that far from making us safer, the EU has become a source of instability because it keeps opting for tasks that its threadbare militaries and hopeless diplomats are unable to undertake. A reminder of EU hopelessness came in the Libyan campaign, where member states who were involved in the bombing started to run out of munitions just 11 weeks into the mission. So leaving the EU in charge of security is like asking a choirboy to act as a bouncer in a Swansea nightclub.

An internationalist must recognise that Nato, and not the EU, is the guarantor of European security, a fact underlined by every conflict in the post-war years. Even today, with the European refugee crisis, Nato is being asked to intervene in the refugee crisis and confront human traffickers. This makes sense because Turkey, from where most boats depart, is a member of Nato, so the operation is now in the hands of a general from the US Air Force. An EU that was unable to confront Slobodan Milošević by itself is now unable to confront gangs of people-smugglers without American help.

As a trading bloc, the EU has its merits – but it is no guarantor of our security. In arguing to the contrary, Mr Cameron risks alienating voters by insulting their intelligence. Since when was Putin terrified of EU trade embargoes? What makes him think that Britain, after an “Out” vote, could not join in such embargoes? And anyway, the EU is compromised by its dependence upon Russia for a third of its oil and gas imports; the EU’s foreign spokesman, Federica Mogherini, is herself an apologist for Putin. If anything, the EU’s defence pretensions suit Putin: it risks annoying the Americans with its parochialism and reducing Nato to a “relic”, precisely as Bill Clinton’s defence secretary warned in 2000.

It is hard to be a Europhile, to love Europe, and to be relaxed about the way in which the EU’s vanity and its bungling is threatening the security of the continent. Like many Europhiles, Lord Owen had wanted radical reform of the EU and has spent the past decade arguing for it. This is what Mr Cameron set out to achieve, with pitiful results. It poses an awkward question to Europhiles (myself included): why did the Prime Minister fail? Because he did not try hard enough in his 30-hour sessions in Brussels? Or because the EU, with 28 bickering and veto-wielding members, is structurally incapable of serious reform? And if reform is a lost cause, then are we safer In – or Out?

Lord Owen has made up his mind. The Prime Minister had best come up with some more convincing arguments if he wants to stop other Europhiles from drawing the same conclusion.