UK and the World Conference Transcript The UK and the World: Rethinking the UK’s International Ambitions and Choices Session 1 The UK in a Changing World 13 July 2010 The views expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the view of Chatham House, its staff, associates or Council. Chatham House is independent and owes no allegiance to any government or to any political body. It does not take institutional positions on policy issues. This document is issued on the understanding that if any extract is used, the speaker(s) and Chatham House should be credited, preferably with the date of the publication or details of the event. Where this document refers to or reports statements made by speakers at an event every effort has been made to provide a fair representation of their views and opinions, but the ultimate responsibility for accuracy lies with this document’s author(s). The published text of speeches and presentations may differ from delivery. Robin Niblett Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Chatham House. I’m Robin Niblett, the Director of the institute and it’s my very great pleasure to welcome you here or what will be pretty much two days of discussion of the UK’s role in the world at this conference that is to some extent a culmination, but probably in the end a mid point, of a project we started about six months ago, looking into the UK’s, as I said, changing position in the world and I’ll say a word or two about the conference in a minute and also about the genesis of the project and some of the main conclusions which you have in some of the papers that you’ve collected with you this morning. What I wanted to do first of all actually, and this is partly why I’m standing up here ahead of Nik Gowing who so graciously – because I know what his scheduled is like – graciously agreed to kick off and chair this opening session and engage all of you and set you in the tone for this conference. I want to say some words of thanks, because projects such of this sort are very hard to undertake without all sorts of support and so I do want to make sure that I’ve covered everyone. I want to say a few words of thanks first of all within Chatham House to two of my colleagues, Alex Vines and Paul Cornish, who’ve helped run the project with me and also to Jonathan Knight and Michael Harvey, the two staff people who’ve laboured extremely hard to put together what has been a comprehensive set of working groups, senior advisory group meetings over the past five to six months and who are in the process of helping us put out a whole series of papers around this project. We’ve also benefited in this project from the advice of a senior advisory group, two of whose members on the panel today, but also a number of whom are in the audience and who’ll be joining us, in some cases, in other parts of the programme during the course of the day, but they’ve been extremely helpful in making sure that the kinds of ideas that we’ve developed and have developed within our think tank mode at Chatham House were stress tested against people who’d had the experience of being practitioners in policy making and in the case of Jeremy Greenstock and Mark Malloch-Brown, they’re going to get a second bite of the cherry by being able to stress test the report after it came out and give some commentary on that as well in a minute. But I also want to thank, again because I know some of you here in the audience, the people who have participated in the various working groups that we’ve held, also over the last five to six months. Their input has been invaluable, especially reviewing a number of papers that have come out and those that are still to come out. We also could not have done this project www.chathamhouse.org.uk 1 without the support of three companies, BP, BAE Systems and Barclay’s Capital and BAE Systems and Barclay’s Capital also very generously put forward some funding for this particular conference so that we could pull together a great group of people over two days and also engage some people from outside the UK, as you’ve seen in the programme in the commentary over the coming day and a half, two days. This as I said has been a project, there could have I suppose been one report, but on the advice from our senior advisory group we decided to try to put out a series of reports on different dimensions of the UK’s role in the world. The idea of doing one single report that would try and capture the entirety of where the UK sits internationally almost seemed impossible and might have led to a lowest common denominator. So we have a series of papers coming out, you have two or three, three have come out, you may have two in your packages right now, an opening paper that I did just of where I see the UK sitting internationally, we had a paper by David Steven and Alex Evans looking at organising for influence and we’ve had one by Vanessa Rossi and Jim Rollo on the UK’s place in the global economy. We’ll have a paper coming out next week on the UK between the United States and Europe. We have one just about ready on the UK playing as a thought leader role in energy and climate change. We’ll have one on development policy and importantly obviously a paper on where all of this leaves the defence review, the strategic defence and security review that’s being undertaken by the government. So there’s a whole series of papers, some of which have come out and some of which are coming out in the coming weeks and we’ve also had an opportunity to quickly dash in and do a quick poll with YouGov and there are copies I know of that poll upstairs, some of you may have collected them already, if you didn’t I encourage you to take one during the coffee break or the lunch break, because interestingly it combined views both of let’s say the public and what YouGov and their partners, YouGovStone, qualify as an elite poll and of course if many of you here weren’t consulted for that elite poll, don’t worry to much about it, I didn’t get consulted about it as well either. So the elite is the elite group that YouGovStone use and have used for a number of years to be able to do comparative work with a public poll and I think there’s some very interesting insights in there, plus a breakdown actually between parties which I think has some interesting reading, perhaps in particular for the coalition government in terms of different attitudes of their party political bases towards particular aspects of UK international priorities. I don’t want to take up too much more time now, but I think Nik wisely suggested that rather than me popping up twice to the podium that I maybe www.chathamhouse.org.uk 2 say a word or two of my remarks of where I see the UK sitting internationally in these opening remarks of welcome and thanks. So I will be very quick and just do a brief synopsis of some of the main points that arose in the paper that I laid out, which again, as you all know, drew on the insights of the senior advisory group and the working groups s that we held to look at Britain in a changing world and I did entitle the paper, Playing to our Strengths, and I didn’t say playing to our strengths just for the fun of it, I suppose, and trying to be uplifting at a time of realism and perhaps even of a little bit of apprehension about the future for the United Kingdom, but also because as I look internationally, although the UK faces some really quite strategic and fundamental challenges to its place in the world. I think there are also opportunities for it to play an interesting hand and I suppose if I were to put it into a nutshell, the UK to my sense has been living very much within a Euro-Atlantic perception of it’s role in the world for the past 40 or 50 years and strikes me as being in the process of trying to make a transition to what the foreign secretary has called a more distinctive foreign policy, but what strikes me as being perhaps a more traditional British foreign policy, which is one that looks to a far more international and global set of partnerships, but it’s going to have to do it in a different way and a different world, where institutionally, economically in terms of power, the balance and the centre of gravity has certainly shifted in the last ten years at the very least. So it’s a more traditional perhaps foreign policy in terms of focus and scope, but it’s going to have to be quite modern in terms of how it’s actually carried out.