Thomas Friedman, the influential New
York Times columnist, recently wrote that the Democratic party in the United
States had only one viable candidate for the presidency in 2004: Tony Blair.
Friedman wrote: "He's tough on national security, he has an alternative global
vision, people like him and he is a beautiful, reassuring speaker" (1).
Unfortunately for the floundering Demo crats, Blair is not currently available.
The irony is that his approach to Iraq and the war on terror has won fewer
friends in the country he is elected to lead than in the US. In the rest of
Europe Blair's approach is viewed with deep suspicion.
In 2003 Blair will have to confront directly the
challenge that his skills in diplomacy and persuasion, as well as Britain's
military power, are being applied in deeply misguided ways. The coming year will
test his strategy to its limits, and clarify its depth and substance. What is he
trying to do? To understand his current position we have to examine the frame of
reference he uses to interpret international affairs. Blair's approach to
foreign policy and military strategy combines two positions that do not easily
coexist. The first is Britain's history as a colonial, trading and
Atlantic-leaning island nation. The second is his aspiration to make Britain
pre-eminent as a post-modern European power of the 21st century.
When Blair was elected prime minister in 1997, his
primary objective was to show how, under contemporary conditions, a centre left
administration could make government deliver. He also aspires to be a great
British leader in the historical mould, and to define a new approach to
diplomacy and foreign policy in a period of intense globalisation. These
motivations have produced three main imperatives for Britain's foreign policy:
to achieve a place at the heart of a reshaped European Union; to recover a wider
strategic influence that Britain is perceived to have lost since the second
world war, and to strengthen the capacity of an international community to
prevent and respond to global injustice.
Blair's modernising, pragmatic form of social
democracy attracted worldwide interest and admiration. In a post-cold war
climate, his central accommodation with the right was to accept liberal
capitalism as the sole basis for wealth and social order. But Blair has always
prioritised social, as well as individual goals, and his central doctrine
revolves around the idea of community. He regularly argues that "individuals
thrive when they are backed by a strong community" (2).
Domestically this has meant a piecemeal and shifting
set of social policies, focused on modest redistribution and on reform of public
services, combined with a sharp increase in public investment. New Labour has
achieved both political dominance and widespread disenchantment. Blair's
emphasis on modernisation is reviled with equal ferocity by the right and by the
old left. The government's ability to keep the Conservatives at the absolute
margins of political influence has only increased the fury of those in Britain
culturally, morally or politically opposed to his evangelical form of social
centrism.
One reason that Blair has not won more admiration is
that New Labour is ruthless in its commitment to pragmatic opportunism. While
Blair has always claimed to be grounded in strong principle, his government has
unashamedly taken magpie opportunities to advance its cause. Its social and
economic policies borrow ideas and practices from all over the ideological
spectrum. Combined with New Labour's unrivalled ability in political
communication and media management, this has reinforced the suspicion that the
project lacks substance, and is defined more by its desire for power and
relevance than by anchorage to any more enduring principle.
This background matters because, as far as Blair is
concerned, domestic and foreign policy are intertwined. The strengths and
weaknesses of his approach are now manifesting themselves on the international
stage, and being brought to a climax in Britain's strategy on Iraq.
Like his domestic philosophy, Blair's view of the
world centres on the idea of community. Still the most important guide to his
views is a speech in Chicago in 1999, attempting a "doctrine of international
community". This doctrine was rooted in the experience of conflict in Kosovo,
and sought to make the case for "a just war, based not on any territorial
ambitions but on values". The essence of this argument is that new forms of
interdependence, from environmental change to global financial systems,
interactive media, cross-border criminal networks, and population mobility have
created the need for a new capacity to intervene in external affairs. In
particular, both conscience and enlightened self-interest should dictate that
some kinds of repression and injustice are not ignored. Blair's argument was,
and is, that isolationism by rich and powerful nations exacerbates further the
risks facing the world. According to this view, failure to act in the face of
such risks, and the crises they generate, is unacceptable, for reasons of
prudence (if too many parts of the world are left to decay or collapse into
chaos, interdepend ence means that we will eventually suffer anyway), and of
ethics. In his speech to the 2001 Labour party conference immediately after the
September attacks, Blair upped the stakes further by declaring that: "The state
of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world. But if the world as a
community focused on it, we could heal it."
This view is a mix of evangelical concern for the
world's dispossessed, and a determination to maximise Britain's influence and
strategic significance in a post-colonial era. It implies a willingness to
engage in certain kinds of armed conflict; and Blair's record since 1997 proves
this. He has committed British forces to Northern Iraq, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and
Afghanistan, apart from the current prospect of war in Iraq.
ONE problem with his approach is the difficulty of
separating principle from self- interest. It is worth quoting part of the
Chicago speech at length: "The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is
to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other
people's conflicts. Non-interference has long been considered an important
principle of international order. And it is not one we would want to jettison
too readily. One state should not feel it has the right to change the political
system of another or foment subversion or seize pieces of territory to which it
feels it should have some claim. But the principle of non-interference must be
qualified in important respects. Acts of genocide can never be a purely internal
matter. When oppression produces massive flows of refugees which unsettle
neighbouring countries then they can properly be described as threats to
international peace and security."
Blair is arguing that the sovereignty of other
states should not always stop intervention to prevent certain kinds of outcome.
He is not alone; many on the left have argued that state sovereignty is a
critical weakness of the United Nations' capacity to enforce international law.
The problem is that the US position on Iraq cannot
claim to be entirely benign. The US has clear energy interests in the Middle
East, as well as a complicated historical role, just like Britain. While Bush
and Blair are using the tactic of public diplomacy, producing dossiers and
seeking to manage public opinion towards accepting armed conflict, they are
inevitably partial and selective in the issues they are prepared to debate
openly. When dominant force is controlled by those who have their own interests,
it is impossible to argue that they are acting solely for the sake of the larger
world community unless they are able to demonstrate that by other means.
Blair's approach is not just framed by personal
style or conviction. It has a more robust conceptual grounding in the arguments
of Robert Cooper, a British diplomat who now heads the secretariat of Javier
Solana, the EU's representative on foreign policy. Cooper's thesis (3) is that
the world is now divided into zones of modern ity: pre-modern states, such as
Afghanistan and Somalia, that are incapable of establishing basic governance and
domestic security; modern nation states, such as India, China or Brazil, focused
on acquiring the status of a classic great power, like the European nation state
of the 19th and early 20th century; and postmodern states, defined in practice
by western Europe. Cooper argues that the tools of security in the postmodern
zone are transparency and interdependence. Nations that once relied on the
balance of powers or the threat of mutually assured destruction now routinely
inspect each others' weapons and intervene in each other's affairs through the
EU and many other agreements. As Cooper suggests in the original pamphlet, this
implies "a new form of statehood", and raises major questions about security and
law in the wider world.
Much of his thesis has been borne out: for example,
the nation state competition between India and Pakistan has become more
dangerous, and failed states such as Afghanistan have been recognised as sources
of instability and threat that richer nations cannot afford to ignore. But the
most intriguing and difficult part of Cooper's argument concerns the place of
the US in this new world. In 1996 he wrote: "It is not clear that the US
government or Congress accepts either the necessity and desirability of
interdepend ence, or its corollaries of openness, mutual surveillance and mutual
interference." If that was true in 1996, it is doubly so now, and proved not
just by President Bush's refusal to ratify the Kyoto treaty or to accept the
authority of an international criminal court, but by the publication of a Bush
doctrine that openly asserts the legitimacy of pre-emptive military attack by
the US, not to enforce global justice or prevent wider conflict, but to defend
its own national interest (4).
The dominant thinking in US strategy currently
reinforces the idea of raison d'état - the protection by any
means necessary of national interest, and the suspension of normal rules of
ethics and law in the international arena. Despite its status as the world's
only superpower, and its acceleration of defence spending towards a position in
which no other nation could approach its military power, the US clings to the
defining logic of a modern nation state. President Bush is very successfully
using the war on terror to re inforce a sense of national unity and identity in
the US, mainly to strengthen his domestic political position.
It is worth emphasising this point because it helps
to clarify the fact that Bush and Blair's doctrines are clearly different. Blair
aspires to a logic of community which could genuinely hold the rich and powerful
or the industrialised world to stronger obligations elsewhere. In practice, this
set of principles is only partially expressed. Blair demonstrated clear
leadership in galvanising Nato into military action over Kosovo. But he left
East Timor to others, and was heavily criticised for approving the sale of
military equipment to Indonesia in 2000.
The problem is that Blair's style of issue by issue
leadership does not do much to clarify or strengthen the set of structures
through which more equitable international relations might be created in the
long term. Blair is a pragmatic opportunist when it comes to pursuing his idea
of the just war or the obligation of international community. That said, he has
none the less chosen to engage in areas, such as Sierra Leone, that bring little
tangible reward but where Britain arguably carries a particular responsibility.
He has also pursued, along with colleagues including the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Gordon Brown, and International Development Secretary, Clare Short,
policies aimed at justice for poorer countries, including reform of the EU's
common agricultural policy, cancellation of international debt, and an Africa
initiative aimed at producing development and aid programmes. It is worth
remembering that in advocating intervention in Kosovo, he risked both his
international standing and his domestic political career for a process that has
resulted in Slobodan Milosevic's prosecution under international law.
The doctrines may be different, but Bush and Blair
clearly converge over Iraq. Why should the British leader put himself in a
position where he is so easily caricatured as the US's poodle, making the case
for a war which is clearly in US strategic interests, but not so obviously
serving the cause of international justice? The answer is three-fold. First,
pragmatism. Blair's assessment is that, without influence over the course of
events, principle is irrelevant. His strategy is therefore to offer unwavering
support and loyalty to the US, while seeking to guide and shape the evolving
American position. Since September 11 he has become the most influential foreign
voice in the debate, and arguably played a direct role in persuading Bush to act
through the UN. Whether Blair's strategy will end up having any real influence
in the long term is an open question.
SECOND, conviction. Blair believes, as do many
others, that Saddam Hussein's potential threat to order in the world is great,
and growing. As in Kosovo, he believes that galvanising an effective response to
this threat is necessary, although a coherent, legitimate alternative to
Saddam's regime has not been put forward.
Third, leverage. Blair believes that Europe will
never be able to exercise a proper influence on the world unless it develops its
own capacity for unified strategic and military action. His policy on issues
such as Iraq is to use them as the focal point for building new relationships
and encouraging new approaches. A clear example is his use of the post-September
11 period to propose Russian membership of Nato and initiation of a Russia-Nato
council. Blair seems to believe that imperfect action is preferable to inaction.
He has gone beyond the attempt to preserve national interests from a narrow,
historical perspective. But in the process he is trying to carve out a new and
influential role for Britain in mediating and managing international conflict,
as well as in influencing the decisions of the US.
Whether he is able to do this depends on two
unresolved questions. It may be possible for Blair to argue that invading Iraq
is the best of a range of highly imperfect options. This would be a more
credible argument if he were also prepared to admit that the policy of
containment through sanctions and no-fly zones, which Britain has helped keep in
place, has been a dismal failure. But the strategy of engaging opportunistically
in such issues for the sake of longer-term progress can only be effective if
social justice and peace are enhanced in the long run. Britain is still
strangely quiet on the questions of what could, and should happen in places like
Palestine, Afghanistan or Iraq, although it is actively involved in a wide range
of diplomatic activity on such issues. And it is similarly quiet on the issue of
how law and the UN could be the basis of a period of international relations.
The major conclusion of the last two years of instability and insecurity is that
the 1945 framework of international institutions needs radical restructuring to
be effective in the 21st century. Whether the right kind of reforms can be
created opportunistically out of the current conflicts remains an open, and
troubling, question.
