So now we know: Europe will be roiled by internal turmoil for another five years. While Germany, France and others struggle to build a stronger core for Europe around the euro zone, British Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives, if elected in 2015, will try to renegotiate the terms of Britain's membership in the EU and then put that "new settlement" to the British people in an "in or out" referendum by the end of 2017.
World, you have been warned. Europe as an economic giant? Yes, still. Europe as a strong force in a new multipolar world? Postponed indefinitely.
But what of the speech itself? Well, it could have been a lot worse. As a pro-European who has argued that Britain should hold an "in or out" referendum in the next Parliament – once the shape of euro zone-Europe and the results of any attempted renegotiation of the terms of Britain's membership are known – I can hardly complain when the British Prime Minister plumps for exactly that. While much of the phrasing of his announcement was patently crafted to please euroskeptics, some of his criticisms of today's EU are also justified.
Above all, the peroration of the speech was as clear, eloquent and forceful an argument for Britain staying in the EU – on clear-sighted, hard-nosed Palmerstonian grounds of national interest – as you could hope to hear from a leader of today's British Conservative Party. Those last minutes confirmed me in a view that I have taken against nervous British pro-Europeans for some time: When it comes to the point, the British people will vote to stay in the EU.
Yet they also confirmed the futility of his entire strategy. Those basic arguments of national interest for Britain to stay in the EU will remain true however paltry the results of any formal renegotiation after 2015. In fact, since Europe is a permanent negotiation, Britain would get a better deal if it remained fully involved and visibly committed all the time.
If other EU member states agree on nothing else, they agree on this: Britain should not be given any major new exceptions from the rules of the whole EU club. Now they will concede even less. If EU politics were a game of bridge, Mr. Cameron has just effectively thrown away his ace: the credible threat of Britain leaving.
It's also bad for Europe. Some of the good reforms Mr. Cameron is preaching at continental Europeans are now even less likely to happen, since, whatever he says, Britain's partners all feel that he is batting for Britain, not for Europe. In a rare and revealing stumble by this otherwise accomplished speaker, when he was arguing for his preferred option of a new reform treaty for the whole of the EU, he said, "But if there is no appetite for a new treaty for us [pause, stumble] … for us all …" Freudian slip or Thatcherite one: That's what most continental Europeans think he subconsciously means.
And yet, even though it would have been better for Europe to carry on without this added diversion to the core problems of the whole project, a referendum would have come sooner or later anyway. With the stakes raised like this, it will be hard for other parties to refuse the British people a direct choice. As a nice Polish phrase has it: We have to swallow this frog.
Meanwhile, the world will yawn its way through five more years of euro shemozzle. And it will deal with Europe as it finds it: economic giant, political hydra.
Here in India, one hears of a liking for London as a place to live and do business; of admiration for British universities (if only the Cameron government's misbegotten student visa squeeze does not prevent their children from studying there); of some attachment to British traditions of literature, good government and common law (an Indian shipping merchant tells me he makes contracts with Chinese partners under English law). But there is absolutely no echo of the neo-Tory idea that a special relationship between Britain and India or Britain and the whole Commonwealth could be any substitute for Britain's place in Europe.
Ultimately, the point is this: History has dealt Britain an amazing hand. While a shadow of its former imperial self, the country has unique ties to Europe, to the United States, to the rest of the English-speaking world and to quite a few other places (in Latin America, for example) as well. Who but an idiot would throw away one of his strongest suits? And we Brits are not idiots, are we? Are we?
Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.