Global Challenges

Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Lords Chamber

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[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

That this House takes note of the United Kingdom’s role in addressing global challenges posed by terrorism, conflict, climate change and mass migration.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege for me to lead this debate on behalf of my party.

A little over 100 years ago, in the midst of the last conflict in which a collection of military primitives in a faraway mountainous country defeated the most powerful military force on earth—I refer of course to the Boer War and the British Army—AE Housman wrote the poem A Shropshire Lad. It is famous for marking the futility of war and its pity. What is sometimes a little overlooked is the fact that it was also predicted that we were seeing a change in the times. I draw your Lordships’ attention to one stanza in particular—which, by the way, was said to echo in Churchill’s brain in the 1930s:

“On the idle hill of summer,

Sleepy with the flow of streams,

Far I hear the steady drummer

Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder

On the roads of earth go by,

Dear to friends and food for powder,

Soldiers marching, all to die”.

What Housman seemed to identify was that the long sylvan summer of stability of the 19th century was drawing to a close. The years in which he wrote the poem marked the last great shift of power from the old nations of Europe to the new rising nation of the United States. In the vacuum left behind by the old powers of Europe was played out the two great, terrible Golgothas of the 20th century.

You might argue that history comes in two phases. In one of them, the gimbals on which power is mounted are steady, stable and unchanged—these are predictable times, times when we can look ahead with confidence and know what will happen. They are not necessarily peaceful times but they are at least unbewildering times. Then there are the second phases, which are the times of change, when power shifts—these are turbulent times, puzzling times and, all too often, bloody times. We are living through the second of those, not the first. All is changing, although you would not think so to look at our foreign policy or our defence policy, for they are anchored firmly in the past and pay no attention to the new world which is now emerging. In this speech, I want to talk about two of those power shifts and then a third element which I think changes everything and needs to be addressed if we really want a foreign policy that serves the interests of our country.

We are experiencing not one power shift but two. We are experiencing a vertical power shift. Power is now migrating out of the institutions of the nation state, created to hold power to democratic accountability and to legality, on to the global stage, where, by and large, the institutions of democratic accountability are non-existent and the institutions of legality are very weak. If we look at the global stage, we see that the powers that are growing are those that have no relevance, no reference, to the frontiers of nation states, and we see other things which by and large we like; for example, the free transfer of information over the internet, the free transfer of trade, the mass movement of people, the power of the satellite broadcasters and the power of this great, vast, swirling money-go-round now circulating at increasing velocity—a volume of money 52 times the amount necessary to fund the trade that it was all created for. We see also the power of the international speculators which nearly wrecked everything only a couple or three years ago.

For the powerful, generally speaking, having lawless spaces is not unhelpful—we rather enjoy it because we can make up the rules for ourselves—but, sooner or later, the lawless spaces get occupied by the destroyers and that is exactly what has happened. For in this space now is also terrorism, which is international; and crime, which is international. The revelation of 9/11 is that you may be the most powerful nation on earth, but it will not save you one bright September day from a faraway danger of which you knew little, which invades your own space and destroys your citizens by using your own systems. It is calculated that 60% of the $4 million taken to fund 9/11 passed through the financial institutions of the Twin Towers.

In what looks to me like a deeply turbulent age, our capacity to create greater stability rather than greater turbulence will depend on our capacity to bring governance to the global stage. There is a sort of rule about stable democracies which is: where power goes, governance must follow. It seems to me, therefore, that if it is true that the globalisation of unregulated power is one of the great threats of our time, then one of the great challenges of our time is to bring governance to the global space. It is entirely in the interests of a medium-sized country such as the United Kingdom for us to assist in making that happen. My own view is that this will not happen through the spawning of further multilateral UN institutions—we need the UN; if we did not have it, we would have to invent it; it is necessary as an international forum; it is necessary as a legitimiser and developer of international law; it is necessary as a legitimiser of actions—but when it comes to taking difficult action in non-permissive circumstances, my guess is that coalitions of the willing will have greater effect. When in Bosnia, I had to report twice a year to the UN Security Council for the conduct of my mandate, but my managing board was the Peace Implementation Council—those who had committed to peace in Bosnia.

As we develop systems of governance on the global stage, I think that they are more likely to be created through the growth of treaty-based institutions. We see those already emerging: the WTO is one; Kyoto is another; the International Court of Justice is a third; and the G20, which is not quite a treaty but it has quasi-treaty powers, is another. It must be in our interests for us Britons to create, and to play our part in the creation of, such new institutions that bring governance to the global stage. We are a medium-sized nation. David Miliband when Foreign Secretary used to talk about a rule-based world order. It must be in our interests to do that, yet this features nowhere in the Government’s foreign policies. We are not actively playing our role. British civil servants and diplomats were the people who created the United Nations; we have an immense role to play. But our response is not only to ignore it but to cut the budget of the Foreign Office at the very moment when it has a significant role to play in something that is of real interest to our nation.

The second great power shift, and I need hardly talk about it, is that from west to east. Put your hand over the side of the boat. Feel how strong that tide is running. It is an economic tide to date, for sure, but that will develop into political power and military power. Let us look at where defence budgets are being augmented and where they are being diminished: they are being diminished in the West and being augmented in the East. We are seeing a new world developing that is totally different from the world that we have had. We are moving from 50 years—rather unusually, by the way—of a monopolar world dominated by a single colossus to a multipolar world in which the role of our foreign policy and our defence will be wholly different. If you want a model of what comes next, do not look at the last 50 years, as it seems to me myopically we do; look rather at the Europe of the 19th century, the famous five-sided concept of Europe, the European Areopagiticus, as Canning and Castlereagh used to call it. Britain’s role there was not fixed; it was always to play to the balance—a period of much more subtle foreign policy. Canning once said that Britain has no fixed allies, but it has fixed interests. It plays the relationships with the rest of the world. The revelation that we see now is that the 400 years of the hegemony of western power, western institutions and western values—I date 400 from the end of the Ottoman Empire—is over. We now have to share power in a multipolar world. I think that the United States will remain the most powerful nation on earth for the next 20 or 30 years, but the context in which she holds her power is wholly different.

Now, if we want to operate in the world, we have to move beyond the Atlantic club; we have to bring in other partners, and we have to bring in the Chinese. To those who say that the Chinese would play no part, I say that of course they would, because they have an interest in this, too. What is the number of Chinese serving under the blue flag and the blue helmet of the UN in the world today? Does anybody know? The figure is 3,700. In Africa, already committed to multilateral defence, what is the largest naval unit that is today fighting Somali pirates? Well, you are ahead of me: it is the Chinese—of course, it is; they want to keep the sea lanes open, just as we did in the days of our mercantile power. We have to begin to develop those relationships. We have to move into a wholly different kind of policy where we will, of course, rely on the Atlantic alliance as our primary alliance, but we will have to build alternatives and new coalitions beyond that. Where we do that is where we will succeed, and where we do not do it is where we will fail.

We have to get out of the kinetic age. We see a problem in the world and our first instinct is to bomb it. Clausewitz said that war is the extension of politics by other means. We remember the war, but we forget the politics. And so, we forgot the politics in Afghanistan. We did not co-operate with the neighbours; we did it all by kinetic power. We forget today the politics in ISIL; we do it all by kinetic power when there is a great, wide coalition to be built—Canning and Castlereagh would have understood—which would have involved Iran and Russia in order to isolate ISIL; and then you can use your military power to greater effect. We will never beat ISIL simply by using more western high explosive to kill more Muslim Arabs; it needs to be much wider than that. At this very moment, we believe that we live in the kinetic age, but we do not: we live in the new age of diplomacy, in which your capacity to build those wider coalitions to achieve the interests of your nation at the time—not necessarily coalitions of values, but coalitions of interest—will really define success or failure in the age to come. Canning and Castlereagh would have understood that very well; our foreign policy seems to ignore it completely.

Some believe that this means that this is the age of the network, so we do not have to worry about Europe as we can build wider networks with the Commonwealth. However, foreign policy depends on who shares your interests, not who shares your systems. It is madness that we should move away from Europe at this stage. Do we not understand how much the terms of trade have changed in Europe in the past 10 years? We no longer have a United States looking east across the Atlantic but one looking west across the Pacific. We do not have a United States any longer with troops in Europe dedicated to the defence of Europe. They are here because it serves their operations elsewhere in the world. We do not have a United States any longer that we can depend on as a defender of last resort and a friend in all circumstances.

On our eastern borders we have an aggressive Russian President who is prepared to use tanks to capture European territory. To our south-east we have an Arab world in flames. To our south we have a Maghreb in chaos right the way down to Mali. All around us are economic powers which are individually more powerful than any of us are individually in Europe. Is this the moment to abandon our solidarity with the rest of Europe? It is madness—it is madness beyond madness—in pursuit of what is called sovereignty, the totally elusive sovereignty of the cork bobbing around behind someone else’s ocean liner. This is not the moment to abandon that.

The third element that is changing is that this is no longer a world made up of nation states: it is a world which is uniquely interdependent in a way it never has been before. You have swine flu in Mexico; it is a problem for Aberdeen in the next hours. You have Lehman Brothers collapsing; the whole world goes down. You have fires in the Russian steppes; there are food riots in Africa. You have the irresponsible burning of fossil fuels in the West, and the drowning of Bangladesh. We are deeply interconnected and it is that interconnection that matters. We have to realise that there are no longer sovereign states. We used to pretend that there were issues which were domestic and others which were foreign policy. There is no domestic issue that does not have a foreign policy quotient to it. It is no longer the case that the nation state acting alone can determine its future.

When I was a young soldier fighting in the jungles of Borneo in the last of the imperial wars, if you were to ask me about the defence of Britain I would have said that it depended on a strong Navy, a strong Army, a strong Air Force and strong allies. Today that no longer applies. Today the Minister of Health is involved in the security of Britain because pandemic diseases are a threat to our security; the Minister of Industry—if we had one—would be involved because the cyber capacity of our enemies is a threat to our security; and the Minister of Home Affairs is involved because what that second-generation Muslim family in that terraced house in Bolton does is a threat to our security. The security of Britain rests no longer with the Ministry of Defence but with our capacity to network across the piece. It is the network—not the vertical high ground and the command structure—which is the paradigm structure of our age, and Whitehall knows that not at all.

Imagine that it is not me speaking today but that the year is 1879 and Lord Roberts of Kandahar is telling you about Afghanistan—not about how he lost but how he won. He would talk about his screw guns and his brilliant generalship. He would not mention drugs or poppies growing in the fields because they were not connected to anything. Afghanistan has always been a centre of the opium trade. Nowadays it is connected to crime in our inner cities. He would not have mentioned the mad mullah in the cave, although he had those too. The mad mullah of the time was called the Wali of Swat, about whom Edward Lear wrote a poem in which he asked who or what is the Wali of Swat; is he short, is he fat, is he squat? He would not ask today who or what was Osama bin Laden because he is connected to that terraced house in Bolton. Everything is connected to everything. Lord Roberts would not talk about collateral damage—he caused a lot of that—because it did not matter. Nowadays that piece of American high explosive falling on that wedding party in Afghanistan inadvertently matters very much and it is round the world a nanosecond later. Everything is connected to everything. It is no longer our vertical ability that matters but our ability to network. The most important thing about our nations and our organisations are the interconnectors, the docking points, that help us to build the wider coalitions that produce effective actions, rather than pretending stupidly sometimes that we can act alone or only with our friends.

One final thought: now that we are interconnected and the enemy is now inside the gates and not only outside, something else has changed. For the past thousands of years—I suppose since history began—defence has depended on collective defence; it is been our capacity to stand together that matters. If you are interconnected, you share a destiny with your enemy. It was the realisation of that that enabled me as a young diplomat in Geneva in the 1970s to participate in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union. We understood that we shared a destiny and that using the weapons that we possessed would destroy not only ourselves but the others. It was an understanding of that shared destiny that brought peace, at last, to Northern Ireland. It is a failure to understand that shared destiny between Israel and its Arab neighbours which is the biggest impediment to peace in the Middle East today.

So it is that, in the modern interconnected age, it is not only collective defence that matters but an understanding of common security as well. This has been the common proposition of saints, heroes, visionaries and poets, but now it moves from a moral proposition to a necessity to shape and frame our policies for the future. The great John Donne’s poem states:

“Each man’s death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee”.

For him, it was a proposition of morality; for us it is part of the equation for our success, perhaps even our survival.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

My Lords, it has been a great privilege to listen to this debate, which has been quite remarkable for containing so many weighty contributions, let alone to have introduced it. I am most grateful to the Minister for his comprehensive reply and to all others who have spoken, especially for the kind words that were said.

I want to say two brief things in the three or four minutes that are left to me. First, I pick up the telling intervention of my noble friend Lord Wallace, who said he had been informed that there were no international criminal gangs in Britain that were domestic. The whole point is that there are no longer any issues in Britain that are domestic and that do not have an international dimension. We used to separate domestic affairs from foreign affairs. I do not understand why we have not discussed foreign affairs because, in fact, there are no domestic affairs, not the economy, mortgages, crime, the environment or security—nothing that we call domestic—which do not have an international dimension. What that means is that you cannot deliver to the citizens of this country the things you want to deliver to them simply by working within our borders: you have to work internationally. Internationalism is an essential theme and stream of being able to deliver good governance because, if you will not work effectively with international partners, you cannot deliver within an interconnected world the things you want your citizens to have. That is why it is so important that we should discuss this today.

Secondly, oh how Canning and Castlereagh would have loved this age of movement! There are not one but many powers and shifting alliances. It is an age when you have national interests and you put together alliances that serve those interests in the short term, not the long term. Of course, the cornerstone of all we do will be Europe and NATO but it is how we build alliances beyond that which matters in being able to deliver the best interests of this country. So a shifting, much more subtle foreign policy is required. Yes, I know, in those days the French called us “perfide Albion”, but that was only because they were jealous of our success. The truth is that that is what we have to do again. We have become obsessed by shock and awe into believing that this is the kinetic age—you see a problem, you bomb it. God knows how many times we have done that in the world and ended up not with success but failure, and we are doing it again.

It is diplomacy that creates the context that makes military action effective. That is what Clausewitz said, and that old truth still applies fundamentally today. Unless we learn it, we will go on failing and being puzzled and bewildered as to why we fail. This is not the kinetic age, this is the diplomatic age—a new diplomatic age. So what a terrible tragedy that at this time, when we who are so skilled and good at this, decide to cut our Foreign and Commonwealth Office. If there is one lesson to learn from this debate, which has been remarkable in many ways, it is that to underperform on the diplomatic front is a sure way to going on ensuring that what we try to do in the world we succeed in far more often than we certainly should, at grave cost to our national interest and, even more, to the lives and blood of many of our own citizens and far too many of the citizens of other countries too.

Motion agreed.