A social democratic foreign policy should be a policy for parties and movements as well as governments, and it should seek to advance two goals. First, the security of the British people in the context of new and deadly threats. No progressive government is going to get elected, or deserve to get elected, that can’t get that right. Second, the pursuit of social democratic values in a world rendered one by globalisation. I think the prize is a successful response to the threats that, in part at least, advances these values. The underlying idea: idealism is the new realism, or, as Michael Walzer puts it, ‘justice is the key to victory’.
A social democratic foreign policy should adopt the notion of ‘the responsibility to protect’ as something like a Kantian categorical imperative. As set out in the 2001 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty report, the ‘responsibility to protect’ is an umbrella concept more capacious and more political than people think. It refers to the responsibility to prevent, the responsibility to react and the responsibility to rebuild. It should be adopted by modern social democrats as a categorical imperative not just in regard to acute humanitarian catastrophes and crimes against humanity but also to the chronic conditions of global poverty and environmental decay.
As such, the notion of ‘a responsibility to protect’ could form the basis for a new agenda for 21st century global social democracy.
I would propose five general kinds of policies we need to pursue under that broad umbrella concept of ‘the responsibility to protect’.
First, the doctrine of the international community. The defeat of the enemy we face, totalitarian political Islam, will be the work of an international community. The internationally co-ordinated humanitarian interventions of the late 1990s, and the partnership at its heart – strained but real – between Europe and America, must be restored.
We social democrats will have to do this in the face of both a US tendency to unilateralism, set out in the 2002 National Security Strategy which – with its talk of US hegemony and preventive war – was a disaster, and European tendencies to anti-Americanism and unserious bluster about Europe becoming a ‘counter-power’ to the US.
The creation of an international community is going to require urgent reform of global institutions. For example, an international community that aspires to rescue will require a military force capable of rescue. I do not think the United Nations is capable of creating such a force.
The community of democracies needs to urgently discuss the creation of such a force and the means by which it can be rendered compatible with international law and effective.
Second, we should have faith in and adherence to our own constitutional identity. We must respect the rule of law, the Geneva Convention, fair trials, oppose torture, extraordinary rendition, and so on. Why? First, it’s morally right. Second, it’s how we are going to win. Here again, idealism is realism. Martin Shaw’s notion of ‘global surveillance warfare’ is useful. That’s the kind of warfare we fight now. The radical Islamists understand this. They seek to intimidate, demoralise and detach democratic public opinion from democratic governments. We should not help them.
Third, a global battle of ideas against totalitarian political Islam.
A YouGov poll taken after 7/7 found that six per cent of British Muslims thought the murders were ‘fully justified’. That translates to 100,000 British Muslims. Now, even if we relate to that statistic sceptically, as I think we should, there is plainly an ongoing cultural crisis that cannot be tackled by policing alone.
The 7/7 terrorists emerged from a crisis within a stultifying traditionalist world that – unless it is reformed – threatens us all. We democrats should aid those who seek an historic reformation of Islam. Salman Rushdie says ‘[we need] nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age’. Islam, says Rushdie, must be prised free from ‘the hands of the literalist Islamofascists’ who have imprisoned Islam in their ‘iron certainties and unchanging absolutes’. I agree with that. Look at the writings of the Islamist theoretician, Sayd Qutb, for instance, and trace the influence of those writings on the Muslim Brotherhood, and the influence of the Brotherhood’s ideology around the world, and the relationship of that ideology with al-Qaeda-type organisations.
We have to tackle the threat in the round. The idea that we can separate off the people who are prepared to make the bombs, and deal with them separately from the social and cultural base they come from, from the organic crisis in their societies, or from the deeply reactionary ideology that blocks any coming to terms with modernity, well, I just don’t think that’s right.
My complaint is different. My complaint is that we are not getting the back of the progressives. The Iraqi unions funds are frozen while the Islamists intimidate the democrats across Iraq, and it’s often worst in the British-controlled areas.
At home, while the prime minister gives a speech arguing the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood is at the heart of the threat we face, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office seeks to solve that problem by reaching out to … the Muslim Brotherhood. Tony Blair often appears to be a dissident within the government, let alone the party.
Fourth, urgent global international solidarity with democrats in the Muslim and Arab world. This is the task of our political generation. If there’s not always to be another terrorist to interdict then civic cultures have to overwhelm despotic cultures. Regimes really do have to change. That doesn’t mean we become the new Jacobins. It does mean, however, that the left, as currently constituted, is in large part irrelevant to what has to be done.
Solidarity has been shamefully lacking in Iraq. And the current international ‘anti-war movement’, as it is currently constituted and led, is actually an obstacle to the kind of international solidarity movement we need.
Fifth, pursue global economic development-as-freedom and global economic justice. This is the distinctively social democrats approach to democratisation. Once more, idealism turns out to be realism. Our deepest social democratic instincts turn out to be a form of realpolitik – the defeat of totalitarian political Islam is ultimately inseparable from the pursuit of global economic development-as-freedom, to use Amartya Sen’s happy phrase.
These series of five steps need to be adopted from below, by movements, and from above, by governments. They stand in continuity with much of Tony Blair’s policy. But they also imply some significant changes. We need to argue much harder in any future coalition of the willing for our terms and for this social democratic agenda. We need to become unwilling if necessary. The ‘doctrine of the international community’ is simply incompatible with much of what has been done by the US before, during and after the invasion of Iraq. If social democracy is not going to be an appendage to somebody else’s agenda, we do have to be willing to become unwilling.
The Labour party should sponsor a wide-ranging public discussion about a British national security strategy, one that takes into account both the threat we face, and our European and Atlantic alliances. This might help regain intellectual legitimacy and popular understanding in the country. A progressive government needs both to pursue an active internationalist foreign policy.
Second, while it is absolutely right to talk of economic justice in the way Tony Blair has as an important part of the fight against terrorism, and while it is true that the Labour government has led the way, we need a step-change in the radical reform of the architecture of global economic governance. And we need much more emphasis on the role of global trade unionism in any future global social democracy.
At a recent Progress conference I asked a question of several government ministers: ‘What is the progressive labour agenda for modern trade unionism?’ There was a slightly non-plussed and ad hoc quality to the response, I thought. Social democracy needs to renew an older understanding of the importance of trade unionism and from-below civic society, organising to the pursuit of social democratic values.
Finally, there needs to be a change in sensibility in the Labour party and on the wider liberal left.
This change in sensibility will require us to see the threat plain. It would be very healthy if we were able to say things like ‘Michael Moore is an idiot’. Let’s stop projecting these cartoonish figures as if they’re profound thinkers. Michael Moore wrote in one of his books, ‘there is no threat, repeat after me, THERE IS NO THREAT’. We need to stop being merely negative, reducing politics to the performance of identity by waving ridiculous placards that say ‘Bush is the Real Terrorist!’ We need to get positive and make practical solidarity with Egyptian bloggers, Iranian students and Iraqi trade unionists.
My fear is that over the next period we may see a drive to ‘McGovernise’ the Labour party. When American radicals in the early 1970s flocked to Democrat George McGovern’s disastrous presidential campaigns, they saw themselves as internal exiles, living not in America but in ‘Amerika’. They were trounced at the polls. Today the danger is of ‘Pilgerisation’ or ‘Chomskyisation’. Those who want a different future had better start making their case.