LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron promised Britons a far-reaching referendum on membership in the European Union in a long-awaited speech on Wednesday whose implications have alarmed the Obama administration.
The projected vote will be held only if his Conservative Party wins the election scheduled for 2015, he told an audience in London, and the ballot will take place in or before 2018.
Mr. Cameron had initially planned to deliver the address in the Netherlands last Friday but postponed it because of the hostage crisis in Algeria.
The speech was a defining moment in Mr. Cameron’s political career, reflecting a belief that, by wresting some powers back from the E.U., he can win the support of a grudging British public which has long been ambivalent — or actively hostile — toward the idea of European integration.
“I never want us to haul up the drawbridge and retreat from the world,” he said. “I am not an isolationist.” But he said Britons had a particular view of Europe. “We can no more change this sensibility than drain the English Channel,” he said.
The projected referendum is also a gamble since, if Britons chose to leave the union — a course Mr. Cameron says he opposes — they would be casting aside an engagement which has been a fundamental part of government policy here for four decades. A British exit would also mean the departure from the bloc of a major economic and banking power, placing new obstacles between British businesses and their main trading partners across the English Channel.
Speaking in London early on Wednesday, Mr. Cameron declared: “It is time for the British people to have their say. It is time to settle this European question in British politics.”
“I say to the British people: this will be your decision. And when that choice comes, you will have an important choice to make about our country’s destiny.”
Mr. Cameron said public disillusionment with the European Union in Britain was at an “all-time high” in Britain, and “democratic consent” for membership was “wafer-thin.”.
He ruled out an immediate ballot, saying that the turmoil within the 17-nation zone which uses the euro single currency, of which Britain is not a member, meant that the broader European Union was heading for sweeping reforms which his government wanted to influence.
A referendum before those changes are made, he said, would present an “entirely false choice” with the euro zone in crisis and the shape of the European Union’s future unresolved.
In his speech, Mr. Cameron said he will seek a mandate at the 2015 election for a Conservative government to negotiate a new relationship with the European Union.
“And when we have negotiated that new settlement, we will give the British people a referendum with a very simple in-or-out choice: to stay in the E.U. on these new terms, or come out altogether. It will be an in-out referendum,” he said.
Mr. Cameron added that he will complete the negotiations and hold this referendum within the first half of his next term, if he wins one, suggesting that the vote would take place in 2017 or 2018.
Mr. Cameron had been under mounting pressure from his Conservative Party to make the announcement. Quite apart from an instinctive and historical aversion to closer European integration among many of them, Conservative lawmakers are also concerned about a potential electoral threat from insurgent euroskpeticsin the U.K. Independence Party. The United States has been unusually public in its insistence that Britain, a close ally, stay in the union. Last week, a White House spokesman quoted President Obama as telling Mr. Cameron by telephone that “the United States values a strong U.K. in a strong European Union, which makes critical contributions to peace, prosperity and security in Europe and around the world.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Cameron noted “a gap between the E.U. and its citizens which has grown dramatically in recent years and which represents a lack of democratic accountability and consent that is — yes — felt particularly acutely in Britain.”
“If we don’t address these challenges, the danger is that Europe will fail and the British people will drift toward the exit. I do not want that to happen. I want the European Union to be a success, and I want a relationship between Britain and the E.U. that keeps us in it.”
