Democracy is on the brink of a sea change The core message was pounded home relentlessly: American government is now in the redistribution and welfare-provision business, and this is not (contrary to appearances) at variance with the founding fathers" conception of a nation that is inherently opposed to state interference and domination over the individual. This is the new credo of American nationhood: the government, not the community or the household, will be the moral arbiter of social virtue. The traditional suspicion of the overweening power of the state is now a thing of the past. Democracy is about electing a government that will be there to protect you from hardship, shelter you from the storm and absolve you from sin. Well, no, maybe not that last one - but the concept of the state as moral saviour is not so remote from this, is it? Then we got Mr Cameron's offering, which, by comparison with the Obama message, seemed to be coming from a future world: from those who had learnt the lesson of overly powerful centralised political institutions that have spent money like there was no tomorrow on programmes that were steeped in benign rhetoric about "social fairness." Mr Cameron had a dream of the European Union as an open, flexible, freely diverse fellowship of nation states, each of them democratically accountable to its own electorate, and all of them able to cooperate in whatever ways suited their individual needs at any given time. The speech was everything everybody said it was: eloquently argued, irresistibly persuasive to British ears, and logically faultless. But does he not appreciate that this is the very antithesis of the founding principle of the EU? That its deliberate object was to curtail the power of its separate member states and the dangerous impulses of their volatile electorates, whose inclinations had a tendency to end in mass murder? It is not a travesty of the European project to say that it was a conspiracy of the European elites against their own peoples: it is the literal truth. Of course, the EU, with its unelected centralised governing bodies, overrides the democratic wishes of the nation states. That's the whole point. This was a post-war French and German idea, devised to prevent any possibility of the hideous conflicts that devastated the continent during the last century. Its imperatives - the irreversible political integration of member states, a guarantee that national governments could never again go rogue, and the disempowering of electorates - arose directly from the 20th-century experience of criminal national leaders. The nation state, driven by the will of its own people, had been the demonic enemy of peace and the EU would put an end to it, once and for all. So was Mr Cameron making the EU an offer he knew it could not accept? Or was he trying to appeal to the restive, disempowered peoples of Europe over the heads of their leaders? Mr Obama was speaking from what is, for us, a discredited past in which the will of government is always seen as just and merciful. And Mr Cameron seemed to be offering an impossibly perfect future, in which the power of distant governing institutions is once more made to answer to the people. Between them, they drew the outlines of a discussion that will certainly dominate our politics for a generation. What does it mean to be a democratic country? Does economic equality, or international stability, trump everything? Maybe this debate suggests that Western democracy is entering a new, more mature phase. Then again, perhaps it means that it is finished.