Last week’s Future of Progressive Governance conference brought together policy-makers and politicians from European social democratic parties to debate ‘a new 21st century vision of social democracy’. Listening to some contributions I was reminded of the thesis of Robert Kagan’s famous book: Europe is wont to see itself as a post-historical Kantian paradise of peace, prosperity and law, while the US and its allies are left to exercise power in the Hobbesian world outside.
Now don’t get me wrong. As Albert Camus said, ‘There is no shame in preferring happiness’. Or paradise. And these social democrats were brimful with ideas about how to get there. Carlos Mulas Granados is the man in charge of drafting the election manifesto for the Spanish PSOE and he spoke thoughtfully about a new green industrial revolution, the expansion of rights for minorities, and of the responsibility to recapitalising Africa rather than draining it of scarce human capital. Our own Ed Miliband conjured a compelling vision of the next stage of public service reform. Having built the ‘first floor’ of basic security, the task was now to construct the ‘second floor’ of self-actualisation – personalised, flexible high-quality services in which users are co-participants, even co-architects.
What was missing from the discussions was what Leon Wieseltier says has been absent from recent talk of ‘change’ in the US: ‘any lasting allusion to the darker dimensions of our strategic predicament’. I doubt I heard the word ‘threat’ more than twice all day. Some seemed more worried about ‘the politics of fear’ than they were about the Taliban. What was missing was a politics of power.
Kajo Wasserhovel, minister of state at the German Federal Ministry for Labour and Social Affairs, claimed that the new SPD manifesto had taken account of all the major changes of recent times. The fall of the Berlin wall, globalisation, and climate change, he said, meant the SPD faced new policy ‘challenges’ relating to the management of waves of enlargement, global economic change and environmental degradation. Fair enough. But where was 9/11, Jihadi terrorism and the rise of Islamism? For that matter where was Putin or Ahmadinejad or a predatory China.
Loukas Tsoukalis, president of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy spoke of the importance of holding on to Rousseau’s view of the individual. (After that century!)
I had enough when Kajo Wasserhovel proclaimed ‘mutual obligation’ to be the founding principle of the new Hamburg Manifesto of the SPD. Oh, really? I stuck my hand up and asked this question.
‘Excuse me, as we are being lectured about the centrality of mutual obligation, I would like to talk about Afghanistan. An op-ed in today’s International Herald Tribune, written by Jan Techau and Alexander … argues that Germany is committing a ‘grave foreign policy blunder’ by refusing to commit combat troops to the south of Afghanistan … Are European social democratic parties losing their political nerve – running scared of, rather than educating their electorates, and so failing to make the case for the projection of military force as one part – no more but equally, no less – of the strategic response we need to defeat the threats we face?’
What happened next was interesting and maybe revealing. No one on the panel answered or even acknowledged my question. Leon Wieseltier says that too often liberals fail to find ‘the disabused tone that the present world demands’. This was more a case of omerta.
This inability to hold paradise and power in one political space is the site of an ongoing crisis for European social democracy. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than Afghanistan. The soldiers of the great democracies are facing down fascists who throw acid in the faces of women and shoot teachers who educate girls. The geopolitical consequences of a defeat to the new totalitarians would be enormous. Yet the European contribution is so pitiful it has placed the very survival of NATO in doubt. And European social democrats are often the keenest to starve the alliance of the combat troops it needs to win. The German social democrats won’t even agree that 250 German combat troops can replace the Norwegians in the north.
Sitting there, it struck me that we tend to underestimate the sheer novelty of New Labour. When Gordon Brown ended the conference with an inspiring vision of a ‘global Europe’ leading the way to a ‘global society’, he was hailed, of course. But Brown knows that 21st century social democrats must be at home in the worlds of paradise and power. He moved to a proposal for a European Rapid Reaction Force with new configurations of military, police and civil capacity to wage the peace-keeping, reconstruction and counter-insurgencies of the 21st century, alongside America. He talked of making poverty and tyranny history and of wielding soft power alongside hard power to achieve those ends: ‘smart power’.
A few days later, David Miliband gave the most important speech made by a British Foreign Secretary for many a year. Facing a dangerous world, as it is, and upholding the values that constitute our tradition, Miliband established the intellectual foundations of a post-Blair rather than an anti-Blair foreign policy and identified the great progressive cause of the 21st century – ‘the democratic imperative’.
The task now is to hold open the political space that this kind of hard-headed democratic internationalist foreign policy needs. And to say bluntly to our continental colleagues that the road to a global Europe runs through Helmand.