When German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer gets up to give his after-dinner speech at Claridges in Mayfair on Wednesday, he will probably breathe a sigh of relief that his life is getting back to normal.

After all, it is not every week that a Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor is called as a witness in the trial of a terrorist accused of murder.

Fischer was in court in Frankfurt last week to testify on behalf of his old friend Hans-Joachim Klein. Klein, who was arrested after living under an assumed name for 20 years, is on trial for his part in a Red Army Faction attack on an OPEC meeting in Vienna in 1975, during which three people were murdered.

As students in Frankfurt in the Seventies, Klein and Fischer wearing motorcycle helmets and carrying batons took part in the fighting during various protests. Fischer led a gang called PUTZ the Proletarian Union for Terror and Destruction.

Photographs from 1973 show Fischer beating a policeman to the ground with a baseball bat and then stamping on him. One policeman, who was nearly killed in 1976 when a petrol bomb blew up his car, accuses Fischer of attempted murder.

Nowadays, Fischer is considered by the Euro-cognoscenti as 'one of Europe's most original thinkers', a man committed to a federal Europe.

This is why he has been invited by former British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd to address the German-British Forum on Wednesday.

But what is remarkable is that Fischer is not alone in being a Seventies Leftwing radical who has transformed himself into a passionate pro-European.

On the contrary, many of those who were so virulent and in some cases violent in their opposition to the old EEC are now among those who most earnestly seek a united Europe. Why should this be?

The answer lies in the Leftwing beliefs these people have never truly given up: the desire to wield power and dictate people's lives with no democratic restraint. Suddenly, they have discovered the society they once sought to create by revolution can easily be achieved through the EU.

The leading pro-European in the British Government is a former Communist.

Peter Mandelson joined the Young Communist League in the Seventies and took part in Soviet-organised events such as a visit to Cuba. These days he tries to play down his Communist militancy, but it was serious enough for MI5 to open a file on him.

The other leading pro-Europeans in the British Government are Tony Blair and Robin Cook. Both belonged to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

This meant Blair supported 'the unilateral abandonment by Britain of nuclear weapons and nuclear bases'. These men did not belong to the cuddly old Labour Party which believed in social justice and workers' rights.

Instead, they came from the extreme edge of the Leftwing movement which campaigned for the free West to disarm in front of the dictatorial East. The activities of CND were an integral part of the peace movement which was, in reality, controlled by Moscow.

All today's great pro-Europeans made their choices when it mattered during the Cold War and they opted not to defend the democratic West.

When you look at other European nations, a similar picture emerges. In Germany, both Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Interior Minister Otto Schily were lawyers for members of the Baader-Meinhof gang, which carried out bombings for its East German paymasters. Schroeder even wrote letters to East Germany's Communist dictators in 1986 to wish them luck in forthcoming 'elections'. Meanwhile, in the European Parliament, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the May 1968 student rebellion in Paris, is a leading advocate of European integration (and an old friend of Joschka Fischer). All these men are now ardent pro-Europeans.

In France and Italy, the picture is similar. The Italian Communists, also enthusiastic supporters of a federal Europe, were brought to power by none other than Romano Prodi, current President of the European Commission. He was the architect of the compromise between the Social Democrats and Communists which won them power in 1996 and continues to control the government. In France where the pro-European government includes Communists, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin is accused of being a former Trotskyite.

In Britain and elsewhere, many of these extreme Left-wingers were convinced until the mid-Eighties that the European Community was a capitalist bloc. As such they opposed it, as did the Soviet Union.

Blair's personal election pamphlet in 1983 vowed that Labour 'will negotiate a withdrawal from the EEC which has drained our natural resources and destroyed jobs'. Cook said in 1974 that 'the Tories have handed control of Britain over to Brussels'. In 1984 he said Britain should withdraw from the EEC.

Those people who now say we should abandon our national currency and give up control of our economy were saying 15 years ago that we should leave Europe altogether.

As if by command, this all changed in the mid-Eighties. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow in 1986 and ended the Soviet Union's hostility to the European Union.

Jacques Delors was appointed President of the European Commission and turned Brussels from a forum for arguing over milk quotas into an exciting New Left project to lead Europe to a post-national future.

The peace movement was run by Moscow

Serious old Lefties looked to the EU as a substitute for the Soviet Union.

The EU offered plenty for admirers of Communism. Whereas there had been commissars, now there were commissioners; where power had once been vested in 'soviets', or councils, now there was the European Council; where there had been a Central Committee, now there was the European Commission. In the EU, the Left realised, there was the chance for planners and administrators like themselves to run the lives of ordinary people.

The EU began to dedicate itself to the task of eradicating nationhood.

Internationalism was always the Left's core value. Nationalism was not only seen by the New Left as common and vulgar it also represented an obstacle to their vision of a managerially run society. The nation, after all, is the indispensable framework for democracy, and free citizens have a nasty habit of voting for the wrong people.

The Right in Britain is insufferably complacent. It believes Thatcherite reforms in the Eighties continue to set the agenda. What no one on the Right seems to have grasped is that the Left was reconciled to the free market long ago, especially to global capitalism, which it regards as a revolutionary force. While the Right rests on its laurels, the Left continues with its traditional programme of dismantling democracy and establishing elitist control over all our lives.

Its commitment to dissolving European nations into one centrally controlled structure is only part of an old, and frankly Communist, dream.