Progressive Foreign Policy after Blair A Democratiya Symposium Notes on the Participants Alan Johnson is the editor of Democratiya. He is also a founder member of Labour Friends of Iraq and co-author of the Euston Manifesto. Since 2003 he has supported the work of Iraqi democrats. With Abdullah Muhsin of the Iraqi Workers Federation he wrote Hadi Never Died: Hadi Saleh and the Iraqi Unions (Trades Union Congress, 2006). John Bew is a Research Fellow of Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge and the Vice-President of the Henry Jackson Society. He is co-author of The British Moment: The Case for Democratic Geo-Politics in the Twenty First Century (Henry Jackson Society / Social Affairs Unit). David Clark is a freelance political writer and analyst. He previously worked for the late Robin Cook MP, joining his staff in 1994 and serving as his special adviser on Europe at the Foreign Office from 1997-2001. From 1991-94 he worked as a research assistant to John Reid MP. David is also chairman of the Russia Foundation and a senior research fellow at the Federal Trust, where he is coordinating a project entitled A Global Strategy for Europe. Isabel Hilton is the editor of openDemocracy. She is a journalist, broadcaster, writer and commentator and has worked for and contributed to a wide range of international media, including The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Independent, The Sunday Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta and the BBC. She has reported extensively from Latin America, South Asia, China, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Oliver Kamm is a columnist at The Times and the author of Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy (Social Affairs Unit, 2005). Ziba Norman is the founder and director of the Transatlantic Institute. She writes regularly on foreign affairs and political issues. Her articles have been published in, amongst others, The International Herald Tribune, The Observer, Prospect Magazine, El Diario Exterior, and The RSA Journal. | 129 | Democratiya 6 | Autumn 2006 Martin Shaw is Professor of International Relations and Politics at the University of Sussex. Martin’s more recent books include The New Western Way of War: Risk- Transfer War and Its Crisis in Iraq (Polity, 2005), War and Genocide (Polity, 2003), and Theory of the Global State: Globality as Unfinished Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2000). What is Genocide? will be published by Polity in early 2007. Introduction to the Symposium Alan Johnson (Chair) I would like to welcome everyone. Our theme today is ‘progressive foreign policy after Blair.’ In London on 21 March 2006, during one of a series of major foreign policy speeches the Prime Minister observed that ‘Over these past nine years, Britain has pursued a markedly different foreign policy [and] confusingly, its proponents and opponents come from all sides of the political spectrum.’ The democratic and progressive left is certainly divided and the intention today is to begin exploring those divisions. Our discussions today will range over four questions. What is the future of humanitarian interventionism (or ‘the responsibility to protect’)? How should we respond to the threat from terrorism? What kind of relationship should we seek between the EU and the USA? What should be the broad outlines of future Labour Party foreign policy? Session 1: What future for humanitarian interventionism? Introductory remarks by Alan Johnson Tony Blair has been a leading proponent of humanitarian intervention as part of a progressive foreign policy. His speech in Chicago on 22 April 1999 set out ‘a new doctrine of international community’ and the Kosovo intervention was widely supported on the centre-left. In 2001 the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), sponsored by the Canadian government, examined the difficult questions of the thresholds and agencies of humanitarian intervention and produced a widely hailed report, The Responsibility to Protect. Kofi Annan openly discussed a possible reinterpretation of the UN Charter to facilitate intervention. Well, we seem a long way from those heady days now. The very idea of humanitarian intervention is mired in suspicion, even dubbed ‘the new imperialism.’ The chances | 130 | Symposium | Foreign Policy After Blair of a rescue of the Darfurians facing genocide are near to zero. How can we make meaningful our commitment to a responsibility to protect? What is the future of humanitarian intervention? Martin Shaw on Humanitarian Interventionism First, I assume that we would agree that populations targeted directly with physical violence by authoritarian regimes deserve international solidarity and protection. Second, once actual violence is underway, some sort of international military intervention may be one way to protect that population – we should not disregard other ways. Third, I assume we would agree that international action has the right to override claims to sovereignty by authoritarian regimes. Those three points – which would have achieved a wide degree of consensus in the past, as Alan has pointed out – are now widely discredited. If we look at the most recent situation which really demanded a serious attempt to protect a threatened population – Darfur – we have to conclude that the response of the international community has been pretty dismal. It is important to ask why this slip back has taken place, and why there is a continuing failure to protect. There are a number of reasons. Some we are familiar with. First, the resistance of authoritarian regimes to the principle of intervention, including of course the resistance of states like China and Russia on the UN Security Council. This resistance is echoed by what we could call the reactionary left. Second, the timidity of progressive leaders and the international community, as demonstrated in Rwanda. Third, there is the bureaucratic inertia of the UN. Fourth, the fact that although humanitarian interventions sound nice in principle, the reality of putting military forces into any situation is always a lot messier than it looks on the drawing board. The actual implementation of humanitarian interventions has not been free of problems, to say the least. But there is another factor, newer and more specific, and that is the association of the idea of humanitarian intervention with, and its cooption by, the more ambitious war-making projects of the Bush administration and the neo-cons, and the endorsement of those projects by the Blair government and by some other progressives. And this is where I would want to focus. These projects have ratcheted up the difficulties of achieving effective interventions to protect threatened populations. In Kosovo, the methods chosen by Clinton and NATO did not | 131 | Democratiya 6 | Autumn 2006 best protect the civilian populations but caused a lot of problems. And what has happened in Iraq has made it difficult to conceive of even a limited proportionate military intervention to protect threatened peoples. So there is a dilemma for the progressive left. One answer to this is to extend the logic of humanitarian intervention into the endorsement of aggressive wars and regime change and the whole radical new agenda that has been opened up by Bush. But this undermines international law, the UN, the principles of democracy and human rights for which humanitarian intervention claims to stand – look at the nature of the bombings, the experience of Guantanamo, and so on. It leads to the cooption of the progressive left. The alternative is not necessarily an easy one. It is to acknowledge that there is a fundamental problem with modern war and military power. This is the ninetieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. Since that time we have learnt the dangers of war in modern society. War is not compatible with human rights. Opposition to war-making is really a fundamental principle of progressive politics which should stand alongside the commitment to democracy and human rights. This is the dilemma that tears the progressive left and it needs to be resolved before there can be any real progress. John Bew on Humanitarian Interventionism I will start with two predictions about the likely future of humanitarian intervention. First, calls for humanitarian intervention are likely to increase in the next decade or so – whatever happens in Iraq – as a consequence of globalisation. Second, there is likely to be a reaction against humanitarian intervention post-Blair in Britain, and post-Bush in the US. For progressives it is better America is engaged with the world, with all that entails, than not engaged at all, with its head in the sand. Yes, it is easy to travel along with critics of Bush’s foreign policy. But just think where Republican foreign policy was pre-Bush! Let’s look at this from top-down and bottom-up. From a top-down perspective, Gordon Brown, for all sorts of reasons, will feel he must draw a line under what has happened in Iraq. How he does that is going to be absolutely crucial for what happens in the next decade or so in British foreign policy. Brown has not been part of the anti-war movement in any sense. George Galloway recently described Blair and Brown as ‘two cheeks of the same arse.’ However, Brown has hardly been Blair’s wing-commander. He has not really shown the same ardour and passion about these issues. | 132 | Symposium | Foreign Policy After Blair So, how will Brown draw his line in the sand? One option is to withdraw troops. It seems to me inconceivable that Brown will do that. It would be a recipe for disaster. The second option is that Brown will say something like ‘we will not go to war again without the UN.’ This is more likely to be his course of action.