21st Century Vision

The Mikado meets the Yeomen of the Guard

The recent spate of articles about the rise of the Far East - with titles like "Is this the Indian Century?" or "Sovereign Wealth Funds - the new Weapons of War" - tells us something not only about seismic upheavals in global economic realities, but also about equally deep psychic movements. The long centuries of the West's effortless superiority are coming to a rapid end, and all its apparently solid assumptions are melting into air.

Much of this is self-inflicted. A capitalist system that could expand only on the basis of heavily indebting weak states abroad and malleable governments at home together with hundreds of millions of their deluded citizens was never a good idea. The future world economy required to support the debt repayment would have implied ransacking the planet's resources to the point of destruction. Sure enough, just as competitor economies in Asia shook off their shackles and entered the rapid growth phase of capitalist take-off, Western economies collided with several barriers. Internally, the "credit crunch" was the first sign that household debt was unsustainable (bankers had already recognised that this was the case as far as poor country debts were concerned). Then there was climate change, itself the product of unrestrained economic growth, and beginning to impose costs which the corporate elite had hoped to dump for ever into the atmosphere and oceans.

On top of that came wars waged to assert the Western grip, but which have proved catastrophic. For their economic impact as estimated by Stiglitz and Bilmes, see this blog, 3rd March.

As economic elites will their bankers to finesse the crisis through manipulation of interest rates (though in truth the space between precipitating a major slump and stoking up inflation is shrinking all the time), political elites manoeuvre to find firm ground in the newly fluid international order. In Britain this takes a tragi-comic form, as Gordon Brown weighs up whether he dare meet the Dalai Lama and incur the wrath of Beijing (the tragic part) and performs an act from a Gilbert and Sullivan comic operetta involving President Plaza Toro of France, a bevy of royals and endless choruses of high-kicking MPs, all with a heavily costumed military escort. But underneath it all, is there a hint of a realization that as the US becomes less predictable, and our "special relationship" increasingly meaningless, we need to pay attention our European backyard after all? If so, old habits die hard, and our first thought is to split the EU by forming an alliance with the newly loose French cannon.

Meanwhile the smart commentators ask whether China and India have learnt the lessons of the West, that uncontrolled expansion brings its own penalties. But there is another question. It is whether we in the West have yet learnt to speak to others from a position other than that of power. As Kishore Mahbubani puts it, the West could "learn to do something new: to listen to the voices from the rest of the world".

The Sermons of Cowards: click here to read Kishore Mahbubani's recent Guardian piece in full

As two spent swimmers that do cling together

Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown are increasingly unpopular in their own countries. Sarkozy's party - the opaquely titled Union for a Popular Movement - has just been soundly beaten in municipal elections across the length and breadth of France, while in the opinion polls New Labour, having backed out of a general election last autumn, is now up to 13% adrift of the Tories. Brown and Sarkozy are not yet discredited politicians, but like so many of the banks in their respective countries, their credit ratings have been severely downgraded. This has not stopped them bringing forward a joint proposal with far-reaching and potentially dangerous consequences.

According to the Guardian they are instituting Anglo-French collaboration on a new generation of nuclear technology which will be sold to the world - especially the developing world. The project builds on undoubted French nuclear engineering expertise, with the French grid dependent on nuclear power for 78% of its supply. With its ageing nuclear park, the dismal record of toxic leaks at THORP and the utter technical and financial failure of the nearby Sellafield Mox facility, it is less clear what the UK brings to the proposal. Brown and Sarkozy's selling point, however, is that their scheme will make a major contribution to combating climate change.

But what is really driving the project? As the Guardian delicately puts it, "there is a growing view within the energy industry that nuclear power could be the next lucrative market", and there is no doubt that in both countries the construction and engineering industries are looking for massive government investment with guaranteeed profits, at the same time as avoiding responsibility for radioactive waste management and eventual decommissioning. Last September this blog reported the concerns of the Royal Society about the huge accumulation of plutonium stockpiled at Sellafield with no effective plan for its long term disposal. This proposal would add enormously to the problem, dispersing stockpiles worldwide and inevitably to environments less secure than Cumbria or Normandy.

And of course the timescale makes no sense. Forget the carbon-emission implications of the millions of tons of concrete the scheme presupposes, the fact is that with development and construction cycles it would take 20-25 years to have any significant impact on power generation. By that time in all probability the die of runaway climate change will have been cast, one way or the other.

There is no reason why politicians in trouble should not make bold proposals, particularly when they involve international collaboration on so fundamental an issue as climate change. What is questionable is when a deal is stitched together at the apparent behest of powerful financial interests involving great dangers and which - even at the technical level - cannot possibly be delivered in time to impact significantly on the problem it purports to address. Surely it should be obvious by now that major projects with global consequences cannot be undertaken without open public debate based on full publication of the science and ecological background.

Read more about the Sarkozy-Brown proposal (click here) and Mox processing at Sellafield (click here)

It's just not British

Britain was the first country to step bravely into the industrial age, and the first to benefit from the expansion of social, cultural and intellectual horizons that came with it. But Britain was also the first to encounter the many unpleasant surprises the new epoch ushered in: mass urban poverty and squalor, extremes of unwarranted wealth and privilege, the unpredictability of boom and slump, the radical ideologies and religious currents that swept up the dispossessed (and sometimes the merely caring) into social movements bent on justice. So great were the divisions that by the 1840s the novelist - and later Tory prime minister - Benjamin Disraeli was asking whether we were one nation or two, the haves and the have-nots.

Some would argue that social reform saw to it that British society got through the crisis, with the extension of civil rights before the law to everyone, followed by the political right to vote and stand for parliament and finally - with the welfare state and the NHS in the 1940s - the social right to a standard of life, education and wellbeing. Others point out there was more to it than that, that the subjective conditions of national cohesion included the popularization of high imperialism in India and Africa and orchestrated flag-waving for European wars. No doubt the winning formula was a combination of the two, but at all events Britain approached the end of the twentieth century not only as a powerful economy but also as a society which had absorbed major waves of immigrants from Ireland, Eastern Europe and its former colonies into the national community. There were tame nationalisms in Scotland and Wales, and only the IRA disturbed the national concert.

How is it, then, that all this is suddenly in tatters? Why has difference become discord and cultural variation not a strength but a threat? Perhaps it is in part that the social settlement of the postwar years was wrecked by Thatcherism and gross inequalities have emerged, perhaps also that the empire has evaporated and the opportunities for jingoism are so few, so overshadowed by the US superpower and so unsatisfyingly ambiguous - Iraq, Afghanistan - when they do arise. Perhaps too immigrants from Eastern Europe and refugees from an increasingly unstable developing world are arriving with no preconceived allegiance to the "mother country". Many of the latter also have raw wounds from the brutal realities of western domination of their home countries and economies.

So how do we set about re-establishing a sense of common belonging? The issues are complex, and require action at every level, at the UN, in the EU, nationally and locally. What seems less helpful is the hectoring discourse from government about a highly selective "Britishness". For example, according to the Ministry of Communities and Local Government, local authorities should be issuing leaflets to "new migrants" extolling such uniquely national virtues as obeying the law (tell that to BAE's bribery department); raising children properly (the 30% who live in households in poverty?), treating others with fairness and respect (unless they are seeking asylum); preserving the environment (such as by expanding Heathrow); and paying one's taxes (short of being a nondom or using offshore tax havens).

The ministry even wants new residents to be told to "behave morally and ethically", just as if no one outside this sceptr'd isle had ever thought of it, and as if "extraordinary rendition" had never entered our vocabulary.

Come off it. Apart from working multilaterally for an end to war as an instrument of policy, being realistic about our climate change obligations and campaigning at the UN to reverse rampant global inequality, there is one cardinal feature of "Britishness": we do not bang on about it. Would the government please set an example.

Law and Peace

It isn't easy to imagine anyone commanding a large and admiring audience for a lecture on some rather recondite aspects of the interpretation of international law. At the SOAS Brunei Gallery earlier this evening however (10th March), one elderly Swedish professor pulled it off. Of course he is more than an academic: Hans Blix is also the chair of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC) which has just produced its report Weapons of Terror, making 60 recommendations for ending the threat of nuclear annihilation that hangs over us all. But more than that, as chair of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) from March 2000 to June 2003, he led the UN inspection regime in Iraq which steadfastly reported the truth, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in the country. Compare the collapse of our own security services into endorsement of the "dodgy dossier".

Blix's topic tonight was rather different, however. At its core was a discussion of two apparently discrete but in practice related issues: the development in international law of the responsibility to protect; and the claim to exercise a right to anticipatory self-defence. The first is one which commands immediate sympathy: despite the commitment in the UN Charter to sovereignty of states and non-intervention in internal affairs, who can quarrel with the idea that where a population is being brutalized within national boundaries the international community should do something? But however resonant the cry of "no more Rwandas", the fact is that many in the developing world see it as a formula for intervention by powerful nations with agendas of their own.

If intervention is to be acceptable it must be even-handed and legitimate, which in turn means overcoming the democratic deficit in UN institutions themselves - especially the security council.

The second major theme was the stark contrast between the principles of international law and the doctrine of anticipatory self defence propounded in the US National Security Strategy in the aftermath of 11th September 2001. Not only did this arrogate to the US the right to engage in pre-emptive war, but to do so on the basis of a "distinctive American internationalism" and to apply it to non-state actors. This radically breached the prohibition against pre-emptive war and created criteria for military action which were open to public scrutiny only after the event, if at all. A pair of quotations made the point: "when a threat is imminent it is too late" (George Bush) and "no need to wait for the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud" (Condoleezza Rice). And though, as the WMDC report showed, the threat of nuclear proliferation was growing, there was no reason to think that "anticipatory self-defence" was the answer to it: on the contrary it required persistent multilateral action.

As with the responsibility to protect, many states, whatever they might think for example of Iranian nuclear technology, saw in this claim to anticipatory self-defence another formula for unwarranted intervention.

Perhaps for the benefit of the large phalanx of lawyers among the audience of 350, Blix spiced his remarks with a delicate dissection of our own Lord Goldsmith's legal opinions on the legitimacy of the Iraq war. Finally however he noted that far from being a failure, what happened in 2003 was a credit to the UN: the sheriff had not been allowed to shoot at will.

Following questions the lecture ended in a near ovation. This owed something to the subject matter, but more to the feeling that the speaker represented a commitment to principle for which they all too often looked in vain in government and international institutions.

The full text of the talk is available on the website (www.unawestminster.org.uk) of the Westminster UNA branch which - together with the Bar Council and Clifford Chance - organized this event, the 6th Ruth Steinkraus-Cohen International Law Lecture.

Cry havoc

It seems only yesterday (actually two weeks ago) that we were writing of the duty of British forces in Afghanistan and Iraq to supply a "continuous stream of headlines" justifying our involvement in these unwinnable wars, while a couple of months ago we noted the tendency for others to see us as "dreaming of the lost grandeur of empire". In the last few days it was as if all the symptoms of our national self-deception condensed into one image, that of Harry Windsor as soldier prince.

Everything was thrown indiscriminately into this last hurrah for national greatness: the young avatar of Henry V crying "God for England, Harry and St George", trumping Laurence Olivier with his royal blood and actual presence. Helmand was Agincourt and the Taliban were somehow identified with the eternally wicked French, who continue to this day to thwart our aspirations in Europe. Not only that, the modern Harry is the son of the People's Princess, and like her apparently of the people with his accurate televised portrayal of that other Shakespearean stereotype, the soldier "full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard". What brought this whole media spectacular to life was of course the genuine courage he showed, so allowing him unwittingly to feature as the signifier of an immense falsehood.

What are the realities wished away by this piece of military mise en scène? Apart from the dying of the light of western internationalism, the economic dimension becomes clearer by the week. The fact is that the financial burden of the wars in which we are engaged is radically tipping the international balance against the US and its major allies.  We have referred before to the march of the sovereign wealth funds accumulated by oil-rich states and dynamic manufacturing powers like China and South Korea, already valued at $2.2 trillion and projected to reach $13.4 trillion by 2010 (A new (economic) world order?, 24th December; Guardian, 1st March). Along with their acquisition of assets in western economies brought low by unsustainable credit will eventually come a power that will one day be wielded.

Meanwhile Joe Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes* have been doing the accounts of the Iraq war, and conclude it will cost a deeply indebted US at least $3 trillion, with similar bills falling on its allies and through rising oil prices (partly due to the war) on developing countries. So much has been borrowed (Bush cut taxes at the same time as invading Iraq) that they might be called the hire purchase wars, with the repayments falling on future generations. Here the government's failure to meet its child poverty reduction targets further illustrates the distortion of priorities.

One of the ironies of our national fantasy is that whatever Henry V's victories at Harfleur and Agincourt, they were part of a doomed campaign to re-establish English dominance in France and more widely on the continent. Though in the mythical history evoked by images like Harry in Helmand such realities are rigorously suppressed, defeat in the Hundred Years' War led to a marginalization in Europe from which Britain still suffers. Are we about to repeat the mistake on a worldwide scale?

*The Three Trillion Dollar War, by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, Allen Lane 2008