Conservative leader David Cameron has vowed to reverse the transfer of sovereign powers to Brussels as part of a new-generation European Union.
He said the current EU was too inward-looking - bidding for more power, creating new institutions and trying to breathe life into a Constitution which was effectively dead and buried.
Instead it should be about trade and closer co-operation between nation states, he said, adding: "The European Union needs to change if it is to be fit for the challenges of the new century, not stuck haggling over the debris of the last."
His landmark policy speech on Europe since becoming Tory leader came the first conference of the Movement for European Reform (MER), which Mr Cameron launched last year with the Tory's sister party in the Czech Republic, the ODS.
He said he wanted to see a "3G Europe" - concentrating on globalisation, global warming and global poverty.
Mr Cameron said the MER was setting up an independent "European Reform Commission" - and one of its jobs would be to review the range of EU powers and see how they could be made "reversible".
The Tory leader was speaking to a Brussels audience of politicians and business leaders from 18 political parties and 17 different countries, according to the organisers. Ninety A-Level students from 10 UK schools were also in the audience - invited to represent the next EU generation Mr Cameron says want a new role for the Union.
"The European Union needs to change if it is to be fit for the challenges of the new century, not stuck haggling over the debris of the last," he said.
"There is no case for the Constitution, or Constitution-lite. Change should open the EU up, so that it can prosper in the new world that is being created.
"That means putting an end to the sense that Brussels is a ratchet, accruing more and more powers to itself at the expense of national or local governments."
