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Britain: Jack Straw and "The Invention of Peace"
By Ann Talbot
17 November 2001
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Speaking to the International Institute of Strategic Studies on
October 22, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw proposed a plan
to, as he put it, bring �order out of chaos.�
The speech was clearly intended as a major policy statement on
the broader significance of the bombing of Afghanistan and the so-
called �war against terrorism� for Britain�s foreign policy, which had
been drafted by better-schooled minds than his.
In it, Straw identified the main problem in the period of the Cold
War as states that had too much power, whereas the main
problem since the collapse of the Soviet Union was states with too
little power. The attack on the World Trade Centre had
demonstrated that the main threat to security now comes from
�groups acting formally outside states, or from places where no
state functions.�
While �distant and misgoverned parts of the world� could once be
ignored, he concluded, this is no longer possible. According to
Straw, terrorism is the result of weak states, where poor
governance has brought about the collapse of civil society. Quoting
from a catalogue of weighty authorities ranging from Nicolo
Machiavelli to Max Weber and the distinguished military historian
Sir Michael Howard, he declared that the great problem facing the
world was �failed states�.
Straw�s view of the state is remarkable for its conceptual paucity.
Quoting Machiavelli, he declares that all a state needs to thrive are
�good laws and good armies.� Weber is called to witness that a
state is �a human community that claims the monopoly of the
legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.�
One of these authorities dates from a time before the nation state
had come into existence and the other is a product of its
degeneration. By Weber�s day the working class and the
internationalist and socialist movement was a serious political
force, especially in Germany. As a result, the German middle
class proved incapable of forming a nation state on progressive
principles and left the task of unifying Germany to the Prussian
aristocrats, rather than risk the working class coming to power.
What is singularly lacking from Straw�s speech is any reference to
the nation state in its classical period, when it represented the
capitalist class at their most progressive, defending democratic
principles against feudal privilege. What would have become
apparent had he done so, is that all the most outstanding theorists
of that period recognise the citizen�s right of resistance to the state.
Locke, Jefferson, and Paine were entirely opposed to the concept
of the state as a mere monopoly of force. They saw the role of the
state as defending the rights of the citizen. Once it ceased to do
so, it had no legitimacy.
At one time a British foreign secretary, even at the height of the
British empire, would have felt obliged to make at least a rhetorical
gesture towards the liberal, democratic conception of the state. He
would have had to claim to be defending the best principles of
liberty and fair play in attacking a foreign country.
Not so today. Democratic rights do not figure in Jack Straw�s
thinking, as he consistently showed when he was home secretary.
Straw�s speech is an indication of how far removed is the outlook of
the present Labour government from that of its predecessors of
whatever party. While it is true that ultimately every state in class
society defends the interests of the ruling class by force, no state
has ever survived if this is the only way it can maintain its hold over
the population as a whole. But Straw either does not know, or does
not care, that an open acknowledgement that the state is based on
physical force undermines the work of generations to convince the
British, against all the evidence, that their island is the home of
liberty.
His ill-advised foray into political theory ran into trouble almost at
once. Machiavelli and Weber are safely in their graves and could
not speak for themselves. Unfortunately for Straw, however, Sir
Michael Howard is still in the land of the living and before the month
was out had denounced the bombing of Afghanistan. It was he
said, like, �trying to eradicate cancer cells with a blow torch�.
Speaking at a conference organised jointly by the Royal United
Services Institute and the Guardian newspaper, Howard warned
that the longer the present war went on, the greater the danger that
it would shatter western societies.
Its extension to other so-called �rogue states� such as Iraq would
be even more disastrous, he argued. The Bush administration had,
he said, made a �terrible and irreversible� mistake in calling its anti-
terrorism campaign a war.
What makes this speech all the more remarkable is that Sir
Michael Howard is not an instinctive oppositionist; he is no radical,
or anti-war protestor. He is a veteran of the Coldstream Guards. A
firm advocate of NATO, he is the former Regius Professor of
Modern History at Oxford, who has reached the threshold of his
80s respected on both sides of the Atlantic and laden with
honours, both academic and royal. Along with Professor Peter
Paret, he translated from German Carl Von Clausewitz�s On War,
now considered the standard English version, helped establish the
International Institute for Strategic Studies and was twice appointed
vice-president of The British Academy between 1978 and 1980. He
received the NATO Atlantic Award and the Paul Nitze Award from
the US Centre for Naval Analyses.
Howard does not even dispute the claim that Osama bin Laden is
guilty of planning the attack on the World Trade Centre and the
Pentagon. His objection is that he thinks the attack was the work
of a criminal conspiracy and that the act of declaring war has given
terrorists the legal protection of combatants in a conflict between
states. He wants them brought before an international criminal
court.
His sympathies do not naturally reach out to the victims of the war
in Afghanistan, but to the governments that are perpetrating it.
Attempting to explain the political damage that the bombing of
Afghanistan could do, he reminded his audience about the
experience of Northern Ireland.
The British government, he said, had never recovered from the
effects of the Bloody Sunday Massacre in 1973 when paratroopers
gunned down unarmed civil rights protestors. �If so much damage
can be done with bullets, what can be said of bombing?� he asked.
What he means is that Bloody Sunday damaged Britain�s
reputation abroad and exacerbated the conflict. It enabled the
Provisional IRA, then only a tiny organisation, to recruit members
and to raise money. He anticipates that the bombing of
Afghanistan will have a similar effect on Al Qaeda.
Howard represents an older and more politically astute generation
of the British ruling class. He went through the experience of the
Second World War when he fought in some of the bloodiest battles
of the Italian campaign. Specialising in military history, he also
believes that the US and Britain should still heed the military
lessons of Vietnam, which demonstrated to him that a small
cohesive force can withstand a larger power armed with
sophisticated weaponry.
Even before the present conflict he was sceptical of the high
technology warfare advocated by the US military. He pointed out to
an interviewer that, �Its weakness is that it assumes a
confrontation against a comparable, if not equal, power with the
same kind of technology and weapons. But most of the conflicts
now and in the foreseeable future will not be between, as it were,
Goliath and Goliath but between Goliath and lots of little Davids
whose little sharp stones from the brook may be more effective
than the huge technological armor of great superpowers.�
Above all else, however, Howard fears that the political system that
has sustained capitalism for centuries may be destabilised by the
war against Afghanistan. What is at risk in this present war, he
insists, is the very system of nation states.
In his recent essay The Invention of Peace, [Profile Books, 2001] to
which Straw refers, Howard traces the history of the system that
was created by the Peace of Westphalia. This ended the Thirty
Years War in 1648, through a succession of crises associated with
wars and revolutions, after each of which a new world order was
established.
Straw seems to imagine that strong states automatically produce
peaceful international relations. But Howard is well aware that 300
years of history after 1648 prove that this is not the case. Nation
states also go to war with one another.
The central theme of his essay is that it has always been
necessary to establish a world order that regulates the relations
between nation states if peace was to be maintained. He also
recognises the intimate connection between those wars and
periods of revolution.
In the course of his 100-page essay, he briefly charts the history of
these wars. He describes how the great European powers met at
the Congress of Vienna in 1815 when they had defeated Napoleon.
They restored the monarchs and ecclesiastical authority that the
French revolution and the revolutionary wars had overthrown. Their
aim was to re-impose a conservative world order that would
suppress any future revolutionary movements.
In 1848 the European order created at Vienna was threatened by a
series of revolutionary upheavals. They were a continuation of the
French revolution in that they expressed the opposition of the
bourgeoisie to the aristocracy�s domination of political power. In
Italy and Germany they expressed a desire for national unity and
an opposition to the feudal particularism that was embodied in the
many small states that then divided these nations.
But the difference between 1848 and the French revolution of 1789
was that the working class had appeared on the scene. In England
they were organised in the Chartist movement. In Germany workers
played a leading part in the 1848 insurrections.
Howard has read enough Marx to know that disaster was averted
because �the bourgeoisie took fright and aligned themselves with
the forces of order.� By exploiting national movements and creating
representative political institutions, the leading European
statesmen such as Bismark and Napoleon III succeeded in turning
the tide of revolution. They created a new world order based on the
modern industrialised nation state.
This ensured peace, in Europe at least, Howard argues for the next
40 years until the First World War. But in the aftermath of that war
it was no longer possible to create a stable world order based on
the nation state system because of the Russian revolution, the first
socialist revolution. In 1918, Howard recognises, Lenin and
Trotsky, the leaders of that revolution, had every intention of
assisting revolutionary movements in the rest of Europe.
The world of 1918 was, says Howard, divided between �two
universalist concepts of world order,� Communism and liberal
democracy, �both claiming the heritage of the Enlightenment.�
A new world order based on the nation state system could only be
arrived at after the Second World War because of the role played
by the Stalinist bureaucracy, which had usurped power in the
Soviet Union. As far as Howard is concerned, Stalin�s betrayal of
the international socialist revolution was a sign that he was a
shrewd politician with whom the West could do business.
At no point between 1648 and the present did the nation state
system ever lead in itself to peace and stability. On the contrary,
throughout modern history, whether at Vienna or at the
conferences that followed the Second World War, Howard
recognises that the great task facing the major powers was to
establish an international system of relations between themselves
that could avoid avert war and suppress revolutionary movements.
Even in so short an essay, his views reveal a degree of profundity
that escapes the British foreign secretary. It is based on a
lifetime�s work and level of political understanding that is unknown
among the current crop of Labour politicians. He correctly
conceives of history as a series of inter-related wars and
revolutions. He recognises the important role that the Stalinist
leaders of the Soviet Union played in maintaining the stability of the
capitalist system after World War II. He is aware that liberal
democracy must be able to lay claim to certain Enlightenment
values if it is to have any credibility.
But that is not to say that there is anything progressive about the
views he expresses. He speaks as a defender of British
imperialism�s interests and is as impeccably right wing in his
perspective as any guards� officer could be expected to be. The
unprecedented slaughter of the First World War, in which half of an
entire generation of men was wiped out, evokes no criticism or
regret from him. �Contrary to general belief,� he writes, �the conduct
of that war had not been completely sterile, nor were memories
entirely negative.�
The great development of the First World War, for Howard, was that
it produced �keen young specialists in violence.� He admires �the
flexible use of artillery in support of storm troops capable of
providing their own fire-power with light machines guns, flame-
throwers, grenades and mortars�. When added to air-power and the
radio, �far-sighted strategic thinkers� could now �visualize a new
kind of war that would give scope both for professional skill and
individual heroism.�
Hitler, of course, was one of these �specialists,� who as Howard
acknowledges, used violence against both external and internal
opponents. Although he disapproves of fascism, he cannot resist
admiring the �brilliant campaigns of 1940��which saw the
bombardment of European cities from the air, Rotterdam
destroyed; Belgium, Holland and France conquered. The murder of
communists, the deportation of Jews and Gypsies that followed
receive no attention. His view of war remains essentially soldierly.
Military power is in and of itself admirable for Howard. He views
military dictatorships in former colonial countries as necessary
because �stability in these countries could be provided only by
authoritarian rule; usually by a Western-trained military.� Reagan�s
�star wars� project was �visionary,� if impractical.
Why then does such a man oppose the war in Afghanistan? What
Howard fears most is that the war will have political repercussions
internationally, including within the major capitalist countries.
In an interview earlier this year he explained how, after the
Congress of Vienna, a supranational class of aristocrats
maintained the 19th century �Concert of Europe� through which
they avoided a major war because they knew that such a war
would lead to revolution.
By declaring war on Afghanistan, Bush has disrupted international
relations, which were already under strain because of the end of
the Cold War, the globalisation of the economy and the growth of
nationalism. Howard�s knowledge of history tells him that this may
not only lead to a wider war, but to a revolutionary upsurge that will,
he warns, threaten to shatter what he describes as our own
multicultural societies.
His concern is shared by former senior Labour minister Lord Denis
Healey, the defence secretary and chancellor in successive Labour
governments during the 1960s and 1970s. He called for the
bombing of Afghanistan to stop because it is �creating more
terrorists, turning more people throughout the Muslim world against
the West.� He warns that, �it is undermining governments which are
presently friendly to the West and which it is very important to
keep on-side, particularly the governments of Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan.�
Right-wing regimes, such as those in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan,
were put in place by the West to prevent revolutionary upheavals
among the oppressed colonial and semi-colonial masses. Healy
recognises the danger that these regimes could be toppled and
that the West would have no reliable local forces to call upon in the
event of mass movements re-emerging.
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