As Margaret Thatcher famously observed at her last cabinet meeting, ‘It’s a funny old world.’ She might have added that it seems to get funnier by the year, to be sliding out of order. Gone are the days before yesterday’s certainties, when the mutual assurance of destruction yoked together in a brittle truce what we called the Free World and its communist adversary. Gone too, apparently, is what followed those perilous decades: the acclaimed global triumph of liberal economic and political values, with the modernization of the world in America’s and Europe’s image and nothing much more to worry about. So what is it – blind but blogging – that slouches onstage instead? Is it denial of the authority of nation-states, which have been so far the political building blocks of our modern world? Is it the overthrow of the notion of sovereignty, which for over three and a half centuries has been ‘the organising principle of international relations’? Is it the rejection of the Western world’s view of modernization? Does economic globalisation – and the social and environmental changes that accompany it – run too far ahead of the ability of politics to cope? What on earth is happening to us, and is it really new at all, or simply more of the drifting spied in his world-weary way by the late-Victorian statesman Lord Salisbury over a century ago?
This book will try to suggest what answers to these questions, and a number of others, might look like. I was motivated to write it by a number of factors. First, without ever believing that before the present Bush administration there were no problems in the conduct of foreign relations, like so many others I reacted with consternation and occasional rage to the politics pursued by Washington from 2000 to 2004. The partial retreat from the more mindless and dangerous forms of unilateralism since then has been a welcome though insufficiently comprehensive recognition of the costs of earlier failure and the impossibility for even the world’s greatest power of tackling every global problem on its own, or, at least, on entirely its own terms. President Bush and his vice-president are not ever-present visitors to these pages, but they do put in occasional appearances (when I discuss terrorism in Chapter 2 for example) and what they represent is never far away.
More important to me than the personalities and policies of an era which we shall soon, with relief, be able to speak of in the past tense, have been four lessons – not especially original ones, it has to be said – that I have learned over the years about international politics. I suppose they pretty well define me. I am not a particularly angry old man, and I have during a fairly long career at the heart and on the fringes of politics been called a lot of abusive things. I recall, for example, the prodigally right-wing Canadian columnist Mark Steyn (to his credit, a journalist who stood by his old patron Conrad Black in bad times as well as good) calling me ‘Chris Petain’ because of my rather moderate criticism at the time of the invasion of Iraq. Mr Steyn believes that its easy accomplishment had vindicated Donald Rumsfeld. Rather like this author on the tennis court, Mr Steyn and others like him must get tired of saying ‘sorry’. One can shrug off straightforward abuse such as ‘Petain’, but I did bridle when regularly described by others with a knowing sneer as a ‘liberal internationalist’ as though it were some sort of rash, intellectual deformity or defect in my patriotism. To my mind there is nothing else for a sensible person to be. So I thought I should set out what this liberal internationalist thinks, and what he believes liberal internationalism means today. What are to me its main themes – all of them especially germane to coping with the problems of the twenty-first century – run like threads through the different chapters of this book.
First, liberal internationalism should encompass a strong belief in the rule of law, democratic government, open markets and free trade. I also reckon that it is a proper aim of foreign policy to pursue these desirable outcomes consistently, coherently and without a constant parade of double standards or a precisely delineated template into which every country has to fit. Many of the problems of the poorest parts of the world are the result of them being shut out of, or shutting themselves out of, competitive global markets. They also stem from bad governance, which is both a cause and a consequence of political instability and violence. Dependence on easily lootable resources like diamonds and oil, and the proliferation of small arms (Chapters 6 and 7) stoke and pay for conflict. We need to avoid future conflicts over water (Chapter 8).
Second, the global order established after the Second World War on the sort of lines advocated by Woodrow Wilson after the First, has been challenged in two major ways. Its institutions – the United Nations (UN) above all – work much less well than they should, and the power balances between countries especially in economic terms have recently changed with the re-emergence of Asian economic strength. We should not resile from trying to reform and reinvigorate the UN. But we cannot postpone international cooperation until a perfect UN has emerged from its chrysalis. Regional and global collaboration is essential to deal with issues like epidemic disease (Chapter 13) and, above all, the biggest challenge to the world: global warming and climate change (Chapter 12). America and Europe can no longer set the global agenda on their own. They have to involve China, India and others like Brazil and South Africa in the management of the world’s problems. Crucially, China has to be found a place at the table without the democracies accepting the validity of that country’s implied and sometimes explicit critique of the guiding values and standards of plural, free societies.