The Foreign Office recently produced its first systematic strategy in the history of UK government. The UK’s international priorities stresses how the UK must work with international partners and organisations to achieve shared priorities. The most important of these are countering global terrorism, drug trafficking and illegal immigration.
Security, drugs, immigration: for years, daily political discourse in the UK placed these issues firmly within the domestic realm.
But no longer: 21st century international terrorism has heightened the awareness of all citizens to the way our ‘domestic’ lives are shaped and enriched, and sometimes threatened or even potentially destroyed, by events on the global stage. Five years before September 11 2001, Robert Cooper wrote a pamphlet for Demos called The postmodern state and the new world order. Postmodern states, argued Cooper, express their interdependence through supra-national organisations such as the EU. Such states reject force as a means of solving disputes, while their transparency and co-operation reflect mutual vulnerability to threats that might originate from outside their domain.
Elsewhere, said Cooper, ‘modern’ states would continue to rely upon classic models of nationalism, local hegemony and potential or actual force. And ‘pre-modern’ areas would remain – areas where state power was ineffectual or even absent, leaving scope for non-state actors to present threats outwards to modern and postmodern states. Cooper’s paradigm has been revisited by a number of writers, including Cooper himself, since 2001, yet its fundamentals remain sound.
By the 1990s, most people recognised that energy and capital flows were the stuff of geopolitics. People have understood that markets are made in three or four of the world’s great cities, only one of which is London. And as trillions of dollars shift around the world at the behest of traders and fund managers, this directly impacts on all things prosaic, from mortgage rates to the price of bananas.
Such trading also has the potential to affect regional stability, and to therefore act on our domestic and collective security.
Today, therefore, government policy needs to acknowledge that our ability to promote sustainable economic development and good governance will have a direct bearing on the security of people within the UK. This is because these activities, through our own bi-lateral efforts, and through the operations of the EU, UN and other alliances, address the conditions that assist the operations of international terrorists.
Where child poverty is reduced and education radically improved in developing countries, for example, the scope for influence by extreme philosophies is likely to be greatly lessened.
Until now, most Labour activists have supported on moral grounds Gordon Brown’s aim of increasing our expenditure on development aid to 0.7 percent of GDP.
It is now necessary to convince the wider electorate that helping expand expenditure upon, and international trade with and between, developing countries is not only the right thing to do, it will also reap direct medium and long-term economic and security benefits to the UK.
This will not be easy. For example, some trade unionists argue for greater expenditure on development, but also baulk at the loss of their members’ jobs to workers in the sub-continent.
Equally, high labour mobility produces contradictory arguments amongst the centre-left. Should we appreciate more in-bound contributors to a dynamic economy, or instead fear cheap labour that displaces UK-domiciled workers?
In general, the more liberal our position, the better for the developing world and for our national security.
This broad, internationalist agenda lies at the heart of the Labour movement. However, some on the left choose to avoid the hard edge an effective internationalism must include. International development – the softer side – must be complemented by our ability to understand, anticipate and counter potentially dangerous states and non-state actors who may threaten either the postmodern states or the growing number of states striving to join us in democracy and affluence.
The word ‘containment’ has been freely used by some on the left recently in the specific context of Iraq, yet we should be sparing about exactly why and when we use that term. While utility may from time to time force it, we can never be proud of ‘containing’ tyrants to their own domain of perhaps tens of millions of people. The internationalist agenda, as our forebears recognised in two world wars, in the Spanish Civil War and elsewhere throughout the twentieth century, requires us to be unafraid to take effective military action where it is required as a last resort.
But of course the most effective ‘security’ policies, as the Foreign Office’s international priorities document makes clear, will always orient around building strong and effective relationships with peoples who strive for better than they have. There are many states – not primarily Christian – across the Middle East, Far East and Africa whose direction of development we must continue to encourage, on grounds of both ideology and self-interest; on both economic and security grounds.
This means that we will need to convince such new partners that liberal, democratic values are not bound by culture or religion. There will be an important part to play in this for our own minority ethnic communities, most notably our muslim communities.
Finally, the US, as the world’s only superpower, will continue to set much of the international agenda, and its priorities will have a significant effect on the security interests of the UK and EU. Our future security and prosperity will therefore require us to give our relationship with the US the highest priority, as we work to build a shared agenda between the UK, US and EU aimed at spreading by gradations the benefits of liberal democracy to those parts of the world which do not presently enjoy them.
Our collective capability to deploy force where appropriate, in conjunction with our allies, will continue to underpin the security of our interests at home and abroad. Liberal democracies provide, by our very nature, open opportunity targets for those determined to attack our way of life. We must neutralise such people and organisations as soon as we have tracked them down. But in the long term, the developmental agenda and the encouragement of free and fair trade will do most to remove the threat from terrorist extremists once and for all.