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RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS INTERESTING TIMES TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: David Walker Producer: Ingrid Hassler Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 6252 Broadcast Date: 6 March 2003 Repeat Date: 9 March 2003 Tape Number: TLN309/VT1009 Duration: 27. 35 Taking part in order of appearance: Professor The Lord Skidelsky, Cross-bench peer and Professor of Political Economy, Warwick University The Rt Hon Baroness Symons, PC, Minister in the Foreign Office and the Department of Trade, Deputy Leader and Spokesperson on Foreign Policy in the House of Lords The Rt Hon The Lord Owen, Former Foreign Secretary Paul Hirst, Professor of Politics, Birkbeck College, London Dr Mark Wickham-Jones, Senior Lecturer in Politics, University of Bristol Philip Bobbitt, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Texas, USA and author of “ The Shield of Achilles” David Coleman, Professor of Demography, University of Oxford WALKER: All through the 20th century and beyond the end of the Cold War, the United Kingdom’s political class and public broadly agreed on the “national interest” in security and international affairs. But now consensus seems to have broken down. SKIDELSKY: I don’t think there’s any British national interest served by going to war in Iraq. W e shouldn’t be going to war all over the world because that involves the sacrifice of British lives and resources without some clear sense by people in the country that the war is necessary and just. WALKER: Cross-bench peer Robert Skidelsky, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. He speaks for many. He is clearly against the war, but he’s also saying it’s hard to fix the national interest. The question for our programme is whether such ambiguity - such contentiousness - is now Permanent. If, and this is an assumption we’ll need to revisit, Britain is to remain a “player” in world affairs. Over action in Iraq, Lord Skidelsky’s test was ‘necessary and just’. That’s the territory of universal values that don’t stop at this or other country’s boundaries. Once, interest meant counting pluses and minuses on security, trade, guns, energy supply, to come up with a formula for action. The Blair government has encouraged the shift from that material definition. Baroness Symons is minister in the Foreign Office and the Department of Trade and Industry and speaks on Foreign Policy in the Lords. SYMONS: I do believe that there are terrible underlying humanitarian problems which most people in this country, if they saw them on their televisions, the way they saw the mass graves in Kosovo, would have no doubt about the monster with whom we’re dealing, no doubt at all. If they saw, as we saw over those mass graves , children’s limbs coming out of them, what happened on that terrible day in a prison in Iraq when 2,000 people were executed on the same day, people would be in no doubt about what they’re dealing with, and all those people who say well, we could trust him a bit further, we could push this a bit further would really know that is simply not true. We’re dealing with a man completely devoid of the morality of the fine people who argue let’s go a little bit further down the line. WALKER: But Saddam’s criminal career started long ago. Some of Liz Symons’ predecessors thought, child killer or not, he was a man to do business with. Morals alone can’t shape the national interest, says Lord Owen, the former Labour Foreign Secretary and Social Democrat. OWEN: It’s very difficult to tell people that you’re going to war effectively to carry out UN resolutions that were passed in 1991. You know, for a lot of youngsters they don’t remember that at all, they don’t remember what happened to the Kurds, they have forgotten what happened in the 1980s in the Iran/Iraq war and I think then when they discover that there’s so much sort of seaminess and real, pretty nasty compromises and selling of arms and everything like that, I think they find it very difficult to accept that this is a moral case. WALKER: What do you think has gone wrong in terms of Blair’s communication of purpose of national interest to party and country? OWEN: It’s very hard. I’ve asked myself this and I’ve not got any glib answer. I think one of them is that his strength and his weakness is the same thing, it’s this slight morality of being you know right up front and slightly preachiness and I think that too many people know that our policies, Britain and all the western democracies towards Saddam Hussein over the last twenty-five years stinks. We’ve tried to have it all ways and we’ve certainly not been moral. We have taken far too Realpolitik a view, you know, we did not complain when Iraq invaded Iran, we did not complain when he used gas against the Iranians. We made sort of slightly ritual protests when he used gas against the Kurds himself, and we sent a lot of wrong signals, particularly actually the Americans prior to the invasion of Kuwait. And then we told everybody in ’91 this was a moral crusade to change Saddam Hussein and he’s still there. WALKER: Has reason of state ever been consistent? Just because Saddam was once favoured by the British and Americans, that doesn’t trump compelling reasons for him to be deposed now. But the old Bismarckian amorality is in trouble. Ours is a morality-hungry age and statesmen, if that’s what they are, command no automatic deference. The honest thing for both peace marchers and think tankers to admit is that there will always be double standards, a cocktail of Kantian universalism and Hobbesian lust for survival. It’s what the government has tried without admitting it, doing a pick and mix on conscience and power politics. If the moral case isn’t compelling, let’s alight on other reasons for action in Iraq, says Baroness Symons. SYMONS: The national interest in pursuing what we are at the moment is upholding the integrity of the undertakings that we have made in the past, that we made to Kuwait in the past and very particularly then in our role in the United Nations. Resolution 687 was very clear. It is the resolution that suspended military operations on the basis that Iraq divested itself of its weapons of mass destruction. The fact is that since then there have been more resolutions, most recently, most explicitly, most stringently, Resolution 1441. There’s no doubt about what it says. It says, “divest now, divest immediately.” That was fifteen weeks ago. I think if we really are concerned to control the way in which these weapons spread around the world and the technology for them is spreading everywhere, if we really then want to ensure that others like North Korea do believe that the international community will not just turn away, that we will act on what we’ve said, then I believe this is enormously important. WALKER: But the government’s problem is how subtle and conditional that argument can sound. To be seen to be making war on a recalcitrant could have untold benefits in convincing others that there is an international regime to control actual and potential deviants - Baroness Symons mentioned North Korea. But the implication is that France and Germany, who oppose action, are derelict in doing their international duty. Since when, you might ask, did the UK become the arbiter of where everyone else, except the US, should set the balance for and against intervention? Paul Hirst is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College London. He diagnoses a case of miscasting. HIRST: We’re the people who’ve gone from being hegemon to bit player. If the United Kingdom had to prevail in the Middle-East, it could just about prevail over Kuwait, it couldn’t prevail on its own over Iraq. So we’re a bit player. So I see our interest conceived in terms of our relative international power in these negotiations. Nothing specific, nothing material. I mean our interest in the security of the Middle-East is no greater than France’s or Germany’s and no more at risk, equally with the economic situation. So the fact that we’re pursuing one policy and they are pursuing another cannot be reduced to the specific distance between our interest and theirs. WALKER: No, but Paul Hirst concedes something with that phrase “relative international power”. Isn’t what I’m doing, Tony Blair might ask, if he wasn’t in evangelising mode, isn’t what I’m doing maximising the clout of this second-rank power? Perhaps, though his success can only be judged post-war. Influence isn’t a theme Labour has pursued. Instead it’s been chipping away at the Realpolitik sense of national interest ever since it came to office. At first there was going to be a new kind of policy, based on pristine principle. Dr Mark Wickham-Jones of Bristol University has written on Labour’s foreign policy. WICKHAM-JONES: What happened I think is that the ethical foreign policy was sort of taken over by Blair’s interventionist approach which was called the Third Way at that time and Blair talked about it as a Third Way, but in a sense what he was proposing was kind of an interventionist role for Britain where Britain would take on this position and be prepared to act where these situations arose. WALKER: A distinctive position? WICKHAM-JONES: I think it is distinctive because it goes beyond the sort of traditional. The traditional view of the national interest would be that a country should be concerned with its borders, with making sure that they’re secure with some sort of immediate strategic interest broadly defined like good communications, good transport, that sort of thing, what’s going on in its immediate vicinity. With Kosovo, what Blair was saying, was, sometimes actually we have to go beyond that and we have to intervene elsewhere. Blair was very explicit at the time of Kosovo in terms of saying, because this is in Europe it’s part of our national interest. I think what’s happened since then, particularly after the events of September 11th, is that the notion of the national interest has been broadened significantly. In other words we can’t define the national interest by reference to borders any more because borders are permeable. I mean the borders that we have are laid out but what happens in a remote part of the world can have dramatic consequences for what’s happening at home, it kind of legitimates action that would have been unthinkable perhaps even three years ago. I think there would have been a reticence towards the kind of intervention that he’s now proposing without that redefinition as to what the national interest is. WALKER: We’re preoccupied with Iraq, naturally, but what if the present crisis anticipates how things now are in the 21st century? Philip Bobbitt is Professor of International Law at the University of Texas - but neither a Texan or a Bushite. His influential book “The Shield of Achilles” argued that we do live in a new world which turns “national interest” inside out - more than ever before no nation is an island. BOBBITT: Iraq doesn’t threaten the United States or the United Kingdom with weapons of mass destruction. We were able to deter the Soviet Union for quite some time, almost fifty years. I can’t imagine we wouldn’t be able to deter Iraq. So the Iraq example might serve as a sort of test case for whether or not states are able to get beyond a purely national perspective in dealing with their own security. And I have to say, that your Prime Minister is giving I think the world an excellent lesson of both how difficult it is but how important it is for leaders to transcend the natural tendency of nations to look inward because these are not problems, any of them: aids, migration, human rights, weapons of mass destruction. These are not problems that we can hide from by securing our national borders and tending to our own gardens. I don’t mean there isn’t an interest of society, an interest of the nation, but simply that that interest can’t be fully served without a perspective on more collective goods for the society of states at large. WALKER: If publics still cleave to this anachronistic idea of interest being confined by the nation’s boundary, why isn’t it also the case that the politicians they elect should also be captive of this older idea? BOBBITT: I think most of them are frankly, and I think you see this in the fact that at this moment we are not writing new international rules for our legal procedures, for intervention, for international co-operation, to create new institutions. We’re doing none of this. We seem to be frozen between either a national very heavy-handed use of institutions to block other nations or the effort to go it alone unilaterally and these are two unacceptable alternatives. WALKER: But the UK isn’t “frozen”. The Blair government has attached Britain to today’s unilateral power, the United States. A lot of people take grave exception, especially to the Prime Minister’s attempt to argue that it’s a way of realising those wider Kantian or ethical interests. Paul Hirst earlier called the UK a bit player. But it’s a bit player with pretensions. On Iraq, after the Bush administration decided to act in the wake of September 11th, the inhabitant of No. 10, whoever it might have been, couldn’t just stand pat. But he had options, one of which was to muster the strength of Europe. Why did Blair not see the UK’s national interest lying in some Third Way, located somewhat further off the American shore? Paul Hirst. HIRST: There’s a huge gap in a sense between Gerhard Schröder and say Donald Rumsfeld where, if we were intelligent, we could be filling it with very tough policies that are put to the Iraqis to try and clip their wings. Permanent inspectorate, a NATO garrison to defend the inspectors, various measures to ensure that Saddam can’t oppress his own people to the degree that he’s doing. If he refused those on a slow and considered move, we could probably get the whole Security Council behind military action. It seems to me that, you know, you can only conceive the national interest of the United Kingdom in this not materially in terms of its economic interest, not in terms of any specific security interest, but in terms of playing the part of a major broker between Europe and the United States and we may just be, you know, heading for a major fall on this one. WALKER: Blair’s bridge between the Washington hawks and the European doves is buckling. Where, since we do remain as well as anything else a European power inside a European Union, does that leave the national interest. David Owen. OWEN: Blair would say, with some truth, well I will try to deliver to the United States a European foreign policy which agrees with them and I think that was fine if he was a bit more open about the fact there would be times when they couldn’t deliver a united European policy. So Blair has to decide the balance. I think he’s got it broadly right. On balance it has served British interest well to be the candid, quiet friend of the United States not going public on differences. SKIDELSKY: Britain has been doing this balancing act ever since the Second World War. It’s to avoid having to choose. Always to avoid having to choose because choice is too painful. WALKER: Robert Skidelsky. SKIDELSKY: So what’s really emerged is that Britain’s strategic relationship is with the United States, its economic relationship is increasingly with Europe. But I suspect that Blair’s lost a lot of influence in Europe over Iraq, he hasn’t become a leader of Europe talking to the United States, one of the leaders of Europe. He’s become America’s sort of Trojan horse in Europe as de Gaulle put it a long time ago. WALKER: But thanks to the horse, the Greeks did capture Troy. It’s not just Blair who’s ambiguous. He shares that reluctance to choose America or Europe with the British political class at large, most newspapers and, judging by the polls, the British people. Does he even stand out in terms of the Labour Party, wonders Mark Wickham-Jones. WICKHAM-JONES: Labour governments have historically been associated with economic difficulties and as a result of economic difficulties they often come under pressure from the United States to follow a particular course of action. So the Attlee government was very dependent on American economic support. The Labour government in the 1970s was also very dependent on American support or at least had a trajectory almost imposed on it by American actors and by financial markets. I don’t know that previous Labour Prime Ministers had the same sort of cultural affinity with America that Blair seems to have. So Blair’s close relationship, partly a personal one with Clinton, seems to have continued with his successor, despite the fact that he’s from a different party, partly because Blair does have this kind of identification with America because he sees a sort of common cause. I think it’s also the case that Blair’s outlook on life is probably closer to an American one than to that found in Europe in many cases. Harold Wilson was pretty determined to keep Britain out of Vietnam and did so. I mean it would be an interesting sort of counterfactual to see how Blair might have treated that situation because under the kind of arguments he articulates at the moment, he might well have decided that it was a part of Britain’s national interests to be involved in that sort of conflict. WALKER: But Blair, like Harold Wilson and the rest of his predecessors, sees the world, or rather Britain’s interest in the world, through Britain's military capacity. Have gun, will travel. It’s a precondition in the Iraq crisis, Baroness Symons reminds us. SYMONS: We wouldn’t be able to do this you know if we didn’t have the ability to deliver as well. I’m not suggesting for a moment our ability to deliver militarily is any in comparison of course to the United States but within Europe we certainly are, if not the foremost, at least one of the two countries that really can deliver some military muscle overseas and that again is an enormously important issue. So it’s no good just going to the table and saying, well we believe that we should back this with the credible use of force. You’ve got to have the credible use of force in the first place. WALKER: Some people think UK military prowess is anachronistic. But what if it’s both part of British identity and at some level prompts the kind of forwardness we’ve seen lately? We’ve mostly been hearing confirmation of Philip Bobbitt’s point that ‘national interest’ is now inextricably bound up with events and processes that take place inside the national boundaries of other countries. Which may produce flows of refugees. Asylum seeking is a big issue in domestic politics, witness the prime minister’s recent and perhaps hasty promise on cutting numbers. What might war in Iraq do to those asylum equations? David Coleman is Professor of Demography at Oxford and a keen migration watcher. COLEMAN: I think that the Iraqi war is almost certain to produce large migratory flows just as the Bosnia conflict did and of course just like the 1991 Iraqi war did, which will be a terrible thing and which appears to have received far too little attention, and this would be both displacement within the country and also displacement across the borders to Jordan and Turkey and elsewhere and in so far as people can do so, they will doubtless try and get to the west as well. WALKER: So would you say such flows are not in the UK national interest? COLEMAN: I can’t imagine that they can possibly be in any one’s interest other than those poor people who feel obliged to move in that way in order to save their lives. WALKER: Would perceived threats to domestic well-being, for example, in the shape of excessive migratory flows, people presenting as escapees from some situation of conflict overseas justify pre-emptive action by the UK government at the seat of the population problem, if you like, which might include military force? COLEMAN: If it’s permissible to take military action, ostensibly, to defend the interests of Poland in 1939, if it’s permissible for all sorts of rather lofty reasons to intervene in Bosnia in the 1990s, then surely it’s permissible to intervene in our own interests. If asylum flows are really serious, if the denigration of human rights in the sending country are really catastrophic to intervene there as well. WALKER: The picture is far from clear. War in Iraq could produce refugee flows. But peace, prosperity and (big breath) democracy in Iraq might attract exiles back to that benighted country. If you heard some hesitation in Professor Coleman’s voice, that’s understandable. He’s on the right of the political spectrum and the Tories were once avid protectors of national sovereignty. You could make a parallel point about terrorism: it threatens here, but its origins are there. Baroness Symons: SYMONS: Well, people of course say that, if we do engage militarily, the terrorist threat here will rise, but we know we’ve got a very present terrorist threat here anyway. We know we are threatened over the air waves by Osama bin Laden. There are other threats, of which you are well aware, because when arrests are made they are announced, we know that there are a number of organisations who are targeting this country already. I’m afraid that the idea that by not proceeding to try to do something about Iraq, that somehow that will lessen, I just don’t believe, I do not believe that is true, I wish I did, but I don’t. WALKER: Some will take fierce issue with an argument that seems to say because terrorists already threaten the UK, a few more wouldn’t make much difference. David Coleman says, there’s even a prospect of some special visitors if the war succeeds in its stated aims and ousts the Baghdad regime. COLEMAN: One of the odd things about the present situation is that people fleeing war, as we imagine a lot of people in Iraq may shortly be forced to do alas, are not ipso facto entitled to protection under the Geneva Convention which refers to personal persecution. The only people who might be entitled to asylum claiming, as opposed to some kind of temporary protection, are those persons who might flee Iraq on the grounds that they will be executed if they went back, which of course would be Saddam Hussein and his clique. We might be in the ridiculous position, as we have been with the Taliban, of having to grant Saddam asylum if he came here and we would not be entitled to send him back because the human rights legislation would prevent him being sent back to any country which might inflict the death penalty on him. WALKER: Asylum is a touchstone question for many, a question of national interest indeed. Aren’t the people as able as policy élites to make connections between domestic and foreign affairs and weigh arguments for action? Of course, says Robert Skidelsky. SKIDELSKY: I do think the national interest does have a clear meaning and that’s by reference to democracy. We didn’t before. The national interest was defined by the élite, by the government, but we do live in a democracy and therefore it’s up to the people, so to speak, through the electoral system in a way to define what the national interest is. It does imply that representatives should have very clear regard to the mood of the country, to the feeling of the country. The government’s legitimacy derives from the people, and it is not at liberty really to define the national interest in a way that would be repugnant to the majority of the people or in a way with which the majority of the people would disagree. WALKER: That’s a surprising tilt in a populist direction, aligning him with a long but left-wing tradition of criticism of secret diplomacy and élite understanding of foreign affairs. The public, far from infallible judges of international right and wrong, have to be carried sooner or later. Over war in Iraq, the Blair government hasn’t yet done well in securing assent. But let’s emphasise the ‘yet’ in that sentence, says David Owen. OWEN: I think that the proof of the pudding will be in the seeing, if you like. I think if a war does unfold, and it looks pretty likely, whether or not under UN auspices, I hope under UN auspices, but if within a few weeks people see that Saddam Hussein was seriously after nuclear weapons, did retain chemical and bio-logical weapons, I think Blair will be seeing public opinion swinging his way. Overall Blair, I think, will come out of this all right. If there is nothing found and the thing gets bogged down, well it will be more indecisive. But he does know this, when he goes in with the United States, he isn’t going to lose the battle. It may be difficult, things may happen which none of us want to see. But the end victor is perfectly clear. So in that way he is making a fairly safe bet with British interests. WALKER: So you’re okay if at the end of the fight you’re the one left standing beside the playground bully. But that’s a ropey metaphor, too. The assertion of American will over Iraq isn’t just an exhibition of their national interest. Or rather if it is, theirs too is compounded of principle and power politics. To some that’s an unacceptable recipe for double standards - arm the Taliban one decade, fight them the next; support Saddam against Iran then, disarm him now. Does Britain really have to play that game asks Paul Hirst. HIRST: The standards are clear, they’re both reasonable. One is that, wherever possible, we should act on certain basic values. The other is that, because we live in a world of power politics and military realities, we have to be constrained by prudence, you know, you have to bring the two together. I mean sorting out Sierra Leone is possible, invading North Korea is not. It isn’t just Realpolitik, it’s also that you know kind of a degree of proportionality, that the consequences would probably be worse than some other policy. If you like you’ve got Kant on one shoulder and Machiavelli on the other. If either of them falls off you’re in trouble. You can’t be a pure goody-two-shoes in foreign policy, it makes you totally a hostage to fortune. But saying to have a foreign policy guided by ethics, wherever possible, and prudence when necessary, strikes me as perfectly reasonable. People who, you know, say well, we must be totally consistent in our values are unhelpful and wrong. If one’s consistent, one’s got to be consistent for something, which either means we start World War Three or we do nothing. WALKER: If he’s right, the marchers and the public majority against the war would have to accept there is no goody-two- shoes version of the national interest. They might reject Blair’s version but the alternative (perhaps modelled on the French?) would inevitably be as morally tainted. But Paul Hirst is only right if the UK seeks to remain a player, even a bit part player, with its name on a place mat at the top table. The UK could go another way, scale down defence spending, de- align, get into bed with the pacifists in Berlin, give up that anachronistic seat on the UN Security Council. No war, ever. Yet so far, there’s deemed to be no national interest in that. ends.