Every decade something genuinely disruptive happens which allows the rules of the world to be rewritten: World War One, the Great Depression, World War Two, Suez, Vietnam, the Oil Crisis, the end of the Cold War. The events of 11 September may turn out to have even more long-lasting consequences than 1989. They did more than tear down the Berlin Wall, they blew a hole in the iron curtain between home and abroad – foreign and domestic policy. For Britain the message is clear: our response must coherently marry our domestic values with our global actions.
Martin Luther King’s moral claim – ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’ – rings out with enormous poignancy at this time. This has been demonstrated by the rash of conflicts since the end of the Cold War. Milosevic’s policies of ethnic hatred in Kosovo were a blot on Europe’s conscience. But they also strengthened the forces of organized crime, threatened a massive influx of refugees into the EU and instability across Western Europe.
Robert Cooper, a serving British diplomat, recently outlined this world of interdependence. He argues that we are seeing the emergence of an entirely new form of order, in which states defend their interests through mutual vulnerability, pooled sovereignty and transparency. However, order applies only to a handful of post-modern states, operating alongside the modern – such as Brazil and China – still primarily concerned with their sovereignty and maintaining regional balances of power – and the pre-modern, which are unable to achieve basic conditions of statehood.
Cooper argues that the new foreign policy challenges would not flow from the rise of a great power, but from clashes between these different kind of states. He cites Somalia, Afghanistan and Liberia as examples of a pre-modern world where warlordism thrives and non-state actors – terrorist groups or drug traffickers – are more powerful than the government.
But any response will be fraught with difficulties for the post-modern countries. The term ‘asymmetrical warfare’ was coined to describe the threat that guerillas pose to conventional armed forces. The biggest threat to the Coalition is not an asymmetry in military strategies: it is the asymmetry in our societies and their assumptions. In Afghanistan war is not a state of last resort, but has become a way of life for much of the population – troops change allegiance regularly, the same hardened warriors have both collaborated and fought with the Americans. Conflict is a means of survival – soldiers get paid and fed – and a means of maintaining power. The distinction between ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ has been eroded by decades of war and turmoil.
In contrast, post-modern states only use war as a last resort when political avenues have failed, and take scrupulous care to avoid civilian casualties. This reached its apotheosis during the Kosovo conflict when human rights lawyers were installed in the Nato Command Centre to advise on whether hitting individual targets would be compatible with international law. These distinctions alone should make it easy to demonstrate a clear moral difference between those who intervene on behalf of human rights and those who create disorder.
But liberal interventionism is fraught with difficulty – precisely because of the sensitivity of modern western societies to loss of life. Our free media rightly question every decision made by politicians and generals in battle. Whereas they are free to report any anti-war sentiment in Britain, they are given selected access to war zones – whether Serbia during Kosovo or Afghanistan – and therefore cannot avoid reporting conflicts on the terms of the host governments. Post-Vietnam, governments are acutely sensitive to public opinion in war, prompting some to ask whether modern democracies would find it possible to fight a sustained campaign with heavy casualties. It is not just that terrorist leaders and autocratic regimes have the luxury of ignoring these concerns, they have become adept at playing them up and making the most of liberal guilt.
Many of the countries involved in these interventions – particularly countries like the US, which engaged in gunboat diplomacy during the Reagan era – are uniquely vulnerable to the accusations of imperialism. But the most frequent accusation levelled at the West is that of hypocrisy. Bin Laden was originally trained by the CIA in their Cold War battle against the Russians; Saddam Hussein was seen as a convenient buttress against Islamic fundamentalism in post-revolutionary Iran.
In these parts of the world, where many of the countries are guilty of human rights abuses and harboring terrorists to a greater or lesser extent, how do we justify forming coalitions with the bad to try to defeat the worse? Tony Blair faced exactly these questions on his recent visit to Damascus. There are no easy answers to the critiques of the past, but we must not allow these failures to paralyse us in the future. The feverish media debate about an ‘ethical foreign policy’ too often presents an impossible choice between a holier-than-thou aversion to even talking to unsavoury regimes and a cynical desire to develop short-term deals with whoever is in power. The challenge for a progressive government is to stake out a middle ground for an effective foreign policy rather than be forced into a dangerous choice between Henry Kissinger and John Pilger.
Where the West has seemed cynical in the past is through recasting its choice henchmen as heroic freedom fighters with a love of peace and democracy. But if governments are forced into it, as with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, they should be more open about the dilemmas – and not assume there is a contradiction between general support and specific criticism on human rights issues.
In fact, those who level the charge of liberal imperialism fail to acknowledge an obvious truth: most countries are profoundly reluctant to intervene anywhere. Waging war and accumulating territory is no longer considered the route to riches. Land and natural resources are no longer a source of power for most industrialized countries. Where post-modern states have entered other countries – Britain in Sierra Leone, the international community in Bosnia – it has done so hesitantly, to defend human rights rather than to exercise power. That is why nation-building in Afghanistan is such a critical test of Western credibility. Instead of imposing an imperial regime or allowing the country to descend into chaos, we must ensure that we help the Afghans develop the capacity to make a success of their troubled country. If the legacy in Afghanistan is a good one, it will legitimate the intervention in the minds of the developing world.
So what does this mean within the UK? We must begin to promote the kind of cosmopolitanism that allows people to combine their ethnic identity and their allegiance to the UK. This does not mean retreating into the old-style multi-cultural policies of the 1970s which divide the nation into ever smaller tribes and allow a multitude of old sins, from forced marriage to discrimination against women, to be protected by the shield of cultural relativism. It means broadening our notion of Britishness so that it is inclusive enough to make young muslims in Bradford feel the same sense of belonging as their white middle-class counterparts in Berkshire.
Our appeal to other countries to modernise themselves must be backed up with some long-overdue modernisation at home. This has far-reaching implications for the umbilical link between The Church of England and the state in Britain, a stultifying anachronism in a country where less than five percent of the population regularly go to church. But it also means phasing out state funding for religious schools of every complexion – Anglican, Catholic, Hindu, Muslim – and replacing them with multi-faith schools and secular schools.
Above all, we must create a space for different groups to interact and change without feeling under threat from a smothering ‘majority culture’. This will allow British Muslims the self-confidence to question the behaviour of their so-called community leaders both here and abroad. One way to encourage this process would be to follow the practice of several other European countries of state funding for religious leaders.
If we are to oppose an international ‘clash of civilizations’, we need to oppose it domestically too. In our febrile, borderless world, we must make sure that our domestic values define our foreign policy – for inextricably linked reasons of altruism and self-interest.