But what would a positive agenda for a new Conservative (or Conservative-led) government look like on the EU, given (i) the dreadful problems facing the Euro (a debt crisis from which sterling is not immune); (ii) broader strains in global strains (fall out from the financial crisis, growing competition for resources, nuclear proliferation etc.); (iii) the Conservatives’ historic ambivalence about the European Union?

Here are six pointers for Cameron, should he become PM.

First, get stuck into the Eurozone crisis aiming for (in order of preference): (i) A strengthening of the Euro with greater sharing of economic sovereignty among Eurozone members (but with the UK left on one side); or (ii) An orderly removal of the weaker economies from the single currency.

Even on the Euro, the UK has some influence as an honest broker, given its position as an interested party, but not a full player. Cameron should adopt this role wholeheartedly – reminding British voters that the disorderly breakup of the single currency would be absolute disaster for the UK economy.

Second, recognise the severe dangers posed to the UK by a loss of cohesion in European societies.

It is tempting, but foolish, to see a breakdown in social order in Greece as only being a peripheral issue, or to fail to take seriously signs of a loss of trust between ethnic and religious groups across a number of European countries.

Maybe this is just a passing blip, but if I was Cameron I’d accept that it only makes sense to talk about a resilient nation within the context of a resilient European neighbourhood. We live in an era where social movements hop borders with ease. The last thing the UK needs is to get sucked into an era of riots, strikes and violence within its communities.

This may be a low probability/high impact threat to British national security, but we all remember a time when global economic collapse was regarded as so unlikely it wasn’t worth planning for, don’t we?

Third, pursue a vision of turning Europe into an outward-facing platform for managing global risks.

As Alex and I have argued, globalization is in the early stages of what is likely to prove a ‘long crisis’. The UK has made a one-way bet on a rules-based international order and we need to fight for our interests in this wager (even though meaningful progress on most issues is going to be hard to achieve).

The world is now shooting the rapids. The new government must be a clear and consistent voice arguing for Europeans to start looking outwards, making whatever contribution we can to charting a course through turbulent waters.

Another era of navel gazing is the last thing the EU can afford.

Fourth, accept that the development of a multi-layered Union is now inevitable, with the EU running at different speeds and on different tracks.

This could be good for the UK, if we: (i) don’t sulk on the sidelines; (ii) see that a distanced-but-engaged stance will often make us a more attractive partner (e.g. for the French, as they seek to balance German hegemony); (iii) take an extremely active leadership role on policy issues that matter most to the UK, compensating for times when we choose not to get involved.

Finally,  become an intelligent advocate for subsidiarity.

It should be absolutely clear that Europe is yet to work out which issues need to be managed at European, national, or more local levels. But, so far, the Eurosceptic position on this has won few friends, coming across as unconstructive and lacking nuance to many Europeans.

But that could change if Cameron is prepared to reframe Euroscepticism as an ongoing search for a more balanced, flexible and adaptable union between European nations.

Carefully tuned, that message could resonate well with at least some of our European partners, while also helping Cameron triangulate divergent camps at home, including the pro and anti-European factions on his own backbenches.

[Read the rest of our After the Vote series.]

This morning sees early evidence of the difficulties David Cameron will face on Europe, if he ends up leading a minority government or has a very slim majority.

The Spanish presidency has set out proposals to amend the Lisbon Treaty in order to allow 18 additional MEPs to take up their seats (read Bruno Waterfield for background). The Conservative Party’s Eurosceptic wing sniffs an opportunity: maybe this will allow a new PM to throw the entire treaty back up in the air.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance leads the charge:

It has been widely assumed that the hope of a Lisbon Treaty referendum was dead and buried, but this development brings it back to the fore. David Cameron has always claimed that had he been in Government when the Lisbon Treaty passed through Parliament then he would have held a referendum. Will he now promise to hold a referendum on this new version of the Lisbon Treaty if he is in charge after the General Election? [...]

Grasping this opportunity would be popular, strategically shrewd and – perhaps most importantly of all – honourable to the spirit as well as the letter of the Conservatives’ EU pledges. The failure to grasp it would not only be astonishingly shortsighted; it would be the final brutal betrayal of the pledges made to the British people in a general election – the election of 2005.

ConservativeHome weighs in, to great excitement in its comments, while England Expects mutters darkly about an entirely new Lisbon Treaty being ‘rammed’ through both Houses of Parliament.

This is a storm in a teacup, it seems to me – but it’s a sign, surely, of battles to come.

If he emerges from the election as PM, I expect David Cameron will need votes from Labour and Lib Dems if he is to avoid a series of fruitless rows with the UK’s European partners.

[Read the rest of our After the Vote series.]

- John Gapper takes a look at Warren Buffett’s $27 billion deal to buy the railroad company BNSF, and explores what the “Sage of Omaha’s” latest move says about the basis of US economic recovery. Harold James, meanwhile, assesses the current state of monetary policy following the financial crisis, suggesting that we may be heading towards “international monetary chaos”.

- Elsewhere, the Daily Beast reproduces the “lost” victory and concession speeches that Sarah Palin never gave on election night one year ago – making for interesting reading indeed.

- Finally, over at Oxfam, Duncan Green laments the familiar refrain of NGOs, international institutions and governments alike to the need for “political will” and “good governance” when trying to achieve reform. Greater investment in “political literacy” and deeper “power analysis” instead, he suggests, should underpin attempts to bring about such change.

In recent years, Klaus has carved out quite a niche for himself, trolling other governments on climate change, European integration and a host of other issues. His latest trick is declare that Lisbon will leave the Czech republic open to legal claims from 3.5 million ethnic Germans expelled at the end of the second world war – a red line he somehow forgot to mention before now.

As he clearly hoped, other European governments have responded furiously. But the German reaction must be beyond his wildest dreams – an insane suggestion that he should be impeached on the grounds of, wait for it, high treason.

The Times has even managed to find a German diplomat dumb enough to give the following quote (whose idiocy is such that I wonder whether the paper simply made it up)::

If the president is obstructing the democratic process and opposing the decision of parliament as well as the will of the people, he is moving beyond the law and will need to face the consequences.

Assuming the quote checks out, I can’t even begin to imagine why the Germans would allow themselves to be caught so obviously bullying a neighbour.

After all, it’s not as if they don’t have form. As the Times points out, “A comparison is being drawn in Prague [between Klaus and] Edvard Benes, the pre-war Czech leader who in 1938 had to flee to Britain after refusing to cede territory to Hitler under the Munich agreement.”

Now that ratification of Lisbon has moved a big step closer (not only with the Irish yes, but also the news that Czech President Vaclav Klaus is likely to bow to pressure not to hold it up), the idea of Tony Blair being the first permanent President of the European Council is looking a lot more likely. Predictably, a large strand of liberal opinion is furious about this.  As an e-petition currently being circulated has it,

In violation of international law, Tony Blair committed his country to a war in Iraq that a large majority of European citizens opposed. This war has claimed hundreds of thousands of victims and displaced millions of refugees. It has been a major factor in today’s profound destabilisation of the Middle East, and has weakened world security. In order to lead his country into war, Mr Blair made systematic use of fabricated evidence and the manipulation of information …

The steps taken by Tony Blair’s government, and his complicity with the Bush administration in the illegal programme of “extraordinary renditions”, have led to an unprecedented decline in civil liberties.

All true.  But for all that, Blair is far and away our best option for the job.

Think about it. The issues on which Europe must make an impact over the next five years are global issues – above all climate change, and the impact of multiple sources of turbulence on low income countries. These are issues on which Europe can sometimes be pretty good – but it needs constant prodding. We very nearly didn’t hold the line on our 2020 climate targets. We still haven’t grasped the nettle on ag subsidies. We’re not facing up to tough decisions about energy security. Blair, who manifestly minds about these issues, and is also extremely good at them, would be well placed to do that prodding.

On top of that, there’s the fact that Europe’s been punching well under its weight internationally of late. At the London Summit; at Pittsburgh; in the UNFCCC; on aid volume and delivery; we have not had our shit together. This has been widely noticed, not least by the White House, which actively wants Europe to be better co-ordinated. The only way we will do this, and thus have the progressive influence we want on issues that we mind about, is to raise our game on foreign policy co-ordination. And let’s be clear: Blair is Europe’s best shot at doing that (as William Hague pointed out in January last year).

Most importantly, Blair is the best person to sell Europe’s foreign policy internationally – and in particular where it really counts right now, on Capitol Hill. The US Senate is becoming a highly significant problem on multiple international issues – climate, ag and biofuels, trade and others besides; as I noted a couple of weeks back, Europe is only just starting to realise that having Obama in the White House doesn’t necessarily get us that far.

Blair is one of very, very few – I can’t actually think of any others – Europeans who excel at bringing the internationalist perspective to the US political class with charm and persuasion, in the same way that Kevin Rudd can woo the Chinese. Remember the kind of reception Blair got when he addressed Congress in 2003. Then ask yourself: can you see Jean-Claude Juncker managing this?

Which leaves the question of Iraq, renditions and the war on terror. Progressives are right to be incandescent about these issues. But we should ask ourselves: would having Blair at the helm of Europe lead to War on Terror Episode II? Hardly. It was always the US that called the shots on this (as progressives never tired of pointing out when they called Blair Bush’s ‘poodle’), and with Obama in charge, that era is closed. The debate now is over whether Europe will even stay in Afghanistan – not whether to invade anywhere else.

To be very stark, the choice progressives now face is whether they want to be right, or to be effective.  In other circumstances, perhaps it would be more important to be in the right. But these are not normal times.  Time is running out on climate change. So progressives should hold their noses if they have to- but they should back Blair for the Presidency of Europe.

Like the executed British admiral in Voltaire’s famous phrase, Lehman had to die pour encourager les autres – to convince the other banks that they needed injections of public capital, and to convince the legislature to approve them.

- Sticking with matters financial and economic, Der Spiegel has an interview with the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on the Fund’s actions during the crisis and the potential for a new role for the institution going forward. Former MPC member, David Blanchflower, meanwhile, offers a telling insight into the inner workings of the Bank of England’s decision-making as financial meltdown ensued.

- Elsewhere, the WSJ reports on President Sarkozy’s call to broaden indicators of economic performance and social progress beyond traditional GDP, following the findings of the Stiglitz Commission. Richard Layard, expert on the economics of happiness, offers his take here, arguing that “[w]e desparately need a social norm in which the good of others figures more prominently in our personal goals”.

- Wolfgang Münchau, meanwhile, assesses the implications of an Irish  “No” vote in the upcoming referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.  “There is an intrinsic problem for the Yes campaign in Ireland”, he suggests, “which is that the core of the treaty was negotiated seven years ago. This is a pre-crisis treaty for a post-crisis world… If we had to reinvent the treaty from scratch, we would probably produce a very different text”.

- Finally, last week saw the German Marshall Fund of the US publish its Transatlantic Trends survey for 2009. Unsurprisingly, a majority of Europeans (77%) support Barack Obama’s foreign policy compared to the 2008 finding for George W. Bush (19%); though the “Obama bounce” was less keenly felt in Central and Eastern Europe than Western Europe. A multitude of other interesting stats – on attitudes to Russia, Afghanistan, Iran, the economic crisis, and climate change –  can be found here (pdf).

When I was in Dublin on the eve of the first Lisbon referendum, a taxi driver explained his reasons for voting ‘no’. “Ireland got a great deal from Europe in the past,” he said. “Now we have to make sure we get as much, or more, from Brussels in the future”.

Can the EU continue to deliver dividends over the next thirty or so years? I think it can. But only if its energy is focused on managing the long-term and highly complex global risks that now govern the fate of European citizens.

Europe’s leaders may not like to admit it to their voters, but they are finding themselves increasingly impotent in the face of forces that cannot be controlled at national level. 9/11 and last year’s economic meltdown made a mockery of domestic political programmes. They will not be the last global emergencies to shake the foundations of even the most powerful and prosperous countries.

The drivers of instability are well-known. We are in the midst of a fundamental change in the way people associate with each other, as vast global networks cut across the nation state. Destructive technologies are also proliferating fast, making war cheaper to wage, and more expensive to deter and prevent.

Population growth, meanwhile, is concentrated in some of the world’s least stable countries. The world will have 1.5 billion more people by 2030, almost all of whom will live in the fragile towns and cities of the developing world. Resource limits – energy, water, food, land, atmospheric ‘space’ for emissions – are beginning to bite, and will increasingly drive conflict between and within nations.

Today’s global challenge recalls the predicament facing the European continent at the beginning of the 20th century. Then, the first period of globalization came to a swift and unexpected end. It took two world wars, and the intervening depression, to put the world back on its feet. The European Union was a response to this devastating failure, fulfilling Churchill’s vision of “a kind of United States of Europe” structured to allow its citizens to “dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom”.

Now we need the European Union to act once again as a platform for achieving security and prosperity – but with its efforts focused on managing risks that lie as much outside its borders as within. In theory, Europe’s experience of pooling sovereignty should make it a leader in navigating turbulent waters ahead. In practice, of course, its lack of coherent leadership means it punches well below its weight on the global stage.

This, then, is the significance of the Lisbon Treaty and why – for all its many imperfections – I hope the Irish people vote ‘yes’. Lisbon’s most important reforms will begin to sort out Europe’s ability to interact with and influence the rest of world.

The treaty’s new institutional arrangements should enable European countries to caucus more effectively and present a unified position on the great issues of our age. This will provide a basis for rebuilding the transatlantic relationship and, then, for coming to some kind of agreement with China, India and the other rising powers.

A ‘no’ vote, in contrast, will lead to yet another round of navel gazing, at a time when European countries desperately need to devote their energies to building a global system capable of taking us through the 21st century without too many major catastrophes.

If the Lisbon Treaty is finally approved, however, Europe’s elites should not forget how close they have taken the Union to the brink. As the EU’s global responsibilities increase, it must focus on key priorities, pushing all other business back to national and local levels.

Leaders must also do a much better job of explaining to people like my Dublin taxi driver why Europeans have little choice but to band together when faced by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, global terrorism, a changing climate, or competition for natural resources.

To do that, they will have to direct at least some of their attention away from short term squabbles tailored to an increasingly frenetic media cycle, in order to create a vision of the great challenges the next generation is destined to face.