Why the Left should stop whining New world politics throws up new challenges - to those who seek practical solutions and to anti-globalisation nihilists The globalisation debate - Observer special
Peter Hain Sunday January 20, 2002 The Observer Globalisation is a force that does not allow the luxury of saying, 'Stop, I want to get off'. It is impossible to stop satellite television, the internet and telecommunications. It is impossible to ban air travel or pop culture; impossible to ban the mobility of capital. The question, therefore, is not whether it can be stopped or abolished. Globalisation is a fact of life and the real question is: 'What sort of globalisation do we want and how can we get it?' Between the balaclava rock-throwers with their nihilist ideology on the one hand and Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Drop the Debt on the other is the same split there has always been. Two centuries ago as industrialisation got underway, the former would have been Luddites, trashing factory machines; the latter the embryonic labour movement. The divide is also between failure and success. Like the Luddites, the balaclava boys are totally ineffectual and, in the long-term, irrelevant. While the Genoa G8 summit last July was being besieged by violent elements from Europe's middle class on the outside, the voice of Africa's poor was being heard for the first time inside. Britain's Labour Prime Minister had insisted that leaders from South Africa and Nigeria should be invited to put their case for debt relief, fair trade and investment - a case first heard by purposeful campaigners at the Birmingham G8 Summit in 1998 - proof that the left can succeed through targeted and effective protest. Our task is to master globilisation in the interests of the poor and not just the rich and in the interests of the environment and not just the multi-nationals. By deploying the European Union's huge resources, together with its potential as a catalyst for progressive change, we can push for an international agenda of which the left can be proud. It should be an empowering agenda for fighting poverty, redistributing wealth and eliminating weapons of mass destruction, an agenda that recognises there is no security at home without freedom and good governance abroad, and that the environment is not a free resource that we can continue to plunder at will. This agenda needs to be promoted beyond Europe through the United Nations, the G8, the OECD, the Commonwealth - and through Nato. Such international diplomacy is difficult and often frustrating. It needs prodding and pushing by protest but ultimately it is the only mechanism for action. Too many on the left are trapped in a Cold War time warp. Of course, we were right during that period to protest as the US, purporting to act in the name of freedom, trampled over Vietnam, or propped up brutal dictatorships in Latin America. We were right, too, to attack the Soviet suppression of democratic uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Cold War also saw proxy wars fought throughout the developing world: for example, Angola torn apart and virtually destroyed by Unita, a force of murder and terror backed by the CIA and South Africa, just because the government called itself 'Marxist'. But we can no longer look at the developing world through an East/West prism. Russia and China both backed the US-led international action in Afghanistan. Russia is also seeking a partnership with Nato and the EU. If the left is about anything surely it is about recognising change and pressing for more of it, rather than being trapped in the past? After Britain and our allies intervened to save the people of Kosovo from ethnic cleansing and genocide in 1999, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for a progressive new doctrine of 'humanitarian intervention'. It should get our full support. Take Sierra Leone. Who really objected to British troops intervening in 2000 in support of UN peacekeepers to prevent a legitimate government being destroyed by rebels whose speciality was chopping off the limbs of babies? Why, John Pilger, who wrote that this was a classic imperialist mission to grab the country's diamonds - left-wing paranoia of the first order, since the diamond fields were controlled by the rebels and are now gradually being returned to the government. The truth is that our intervention there - as in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Macedonia and Afghanistan, was necessary. And it was successful. Rather than classic wars between states, or even progressive revolutions against corrupt old orders, we have new phenomena: states that have failed, like Afghanistan, being dominated by a terrorist clique. Or neighbouring peoples brutalised by tyrants like Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic. Or wars like in Angola, the Congo or Sierra Leone, where rebels fight, not for noble causes but to grab personal power. On Afghanistan, I still see banners saying, 'Stop the War'. I have seen no apologies from critics who relentlessly predicted reckless US escapades, failure and mayhem - no suggestion that it might, after all, and despite all the problems, have been the correct course. Such critics have turned a blind eye to the liberation of millions of Afghanis from the al-Qaeda backed Taliban, probably the most odious regime in the world. I would like to see the left recognising the pivotal role Britain, under this Labour Government, now plays. Being a steadfast ally of the US doesn't mean being a patsy. Otherwise, how would we have been able to develop good relations with Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Libya? Or stand up for the Kyoto Treaty on climate change? Being an ally gives us influence which is no less effective because it rarely appears in headlines. We should build on the international unity following 11 September to create a new world order shaped by the left's values - of democracy, human rights, environmental protection, equality and justice. Ours should be a project for the globalisation of responsibility around which everyone on the left could unite, from Greenpeace militants to Labour Ministers. To unite on such a new agenda is the biggest challenge of our times. · Peter Hain MP is Minister for Europe
