Prime minister to say he 'has no shopping list' of powers to repatriate and that policy proposals would be for all of Europe

David Cameron will move to win over some of his fiercest critics in Europe when he rebrands his January speech on the future of the EU as a project for all member states rather an attempt to set out a "shopping list" of British demands.

Amid deep suspicion across the EU at the tactics of the prime minister, who pledged in January to hold a referendum on British membership by the end of 2017, Cameron will tell the leaders of France and Spain that his proposals are designed to bring the EU closer to all its citizens.

The prime minister will conclude his EU diplomatic charm offensive when he stays overnight on Friday as a guest of Angela Merkel at Schloss Meseberg, the German equivalent of Chequers.

Merkel and François Hollande, the French president who will host the prime minister at the Elysée Palace in Paris on Monday night, showed their unease with Cameron recently by boycotting a British exercise to assess the impact of EU laws across Europe.

As he prepared to travel to Spain and France, the prime minister reached out to his European critics by saying he was not looking for favourable British treatment when he outlined plans to hold an in-out referendum. In an interview with journalists from five EU member states – including Süddeutsche Zeitung and Le Monde – he said he hopes his proposed reforms, including changes to the working time directive, would apply to all member states.

Asked which policies he would like to repatriate, Cameron said: "I don't want to give you a shopping list. I think this should be a discussion across Europe about how we make the EU more flexible, and how we make clear that powers can flow back to nation states as well as flow forward to the EU. So I don't want to put a list of powers; I think it's more important to [ensure] the principles … that people talked about in the past, are more clearly established."

In the interview the prime minister added that other EU leaders might benefit from some of his changes as a way to tackle unease with the EU across Europe. "I think sometimes you might overestimate the extent to which everyone in all your countries has got a totally rosy view about everything that happens in the European Union."

His remarks about his ambitions to reform the EU as a whole were designed to address the impression that he would like to use a future revision of the Lisbon treaty to repatriate powers. Aides like to point out that the word repatriation does not appear in his speech.

His interview with the five European publications was intended to flag up a passage in the speech where he calls for EU leaders to implement the Laeken Declaration of 2001 which was designed to create greater transparency and democracy in the EU. He said: "Power must be able to flow back to member states, not just away from them. This was promised by European Leaders at Laeken a decade ago. It was put in the treaty. But the promise has never really been fulfilled. We need to implement this principle properly."

The prime minister adds in his speech that he would like the reforms to apply to all member states of the EU. But he added that Britain would demand the changes for itself if they were rejected by other member states.

In his interview Cameron repeats his warning that it is important to respond to falling support for the EU in Britain. He said: "The two themes of my speech are first that Europe needs reform. But the second is that we need to recognise that consent for Britain's membership of the EU and all the ways that it's changed has become wafer-thin in Britain. Politicians, if they do their job properly have to recognise this fact rather than try and brush it under the carpet."

Cameron will find common ground with Hollande, making clear Britain will call for the EU arms embargo to be amended, allowing weapons to be supplied to the Syrian opposition. If this is resisted they will call for the embargo to be lifted as a whole and for a new round of sanctions to be imposed on the Assad regime. Germany is a strong supporter of the embargo.