Is the national interest something which is independent of government or is it, like Herbert Morrison’s definition of socialism, whatever the Labour Government wants to do?

The national interest is clearly defined by the government. But I think government define it in terms of their perception of what the British public feel about themselves and their place in the world. There are certain things that are given regardless of the parties: transatlantic relationship, membership of NATO, the fact that we are economically liberal, and the fact that we are stronger, mostly because of democratic values. The one area that has been the most controversial has been the EU.

Do you think that there is a shared view of the national interest across government?

Yes. If you look across Whitehall you would find that people in the civil service have a very different view from the “Yes Minister” caricature of the civil servant that seeks to make their view prevail in all circumstances. What civil servants like is strong leadership. If you have a situation where people feel that that doesn’t exist, and, with regards to Europe, in the last year or so before the 1997 that was the perception, then you will find that they are unhappy.

If our interests are analogous to those of other European countries, what impact do you think that has on our institutions?

Over time it has a fairly radical impact, but even after 50 years of the EU and almost 30 years of our own membership, we’re still at a fairly early stage. Compare the EU now to when we joined and see the extent of integration in terms of things that we now have a real interest in doing because, in doing them together, we also promote our national interest. For example, in security policy, one obvious example is the whole question of drug trafficking, crime and terrorism which was virtually a non-existent area of EU cooperation until 15 years ago. It’s now inconceivable to us that we would do it in any other way: we are prepared to look at things like majority voting for asylum seeking because we see that we can’t deal with the problems that we face in any other manner. We increasingly approach issues with important constitutional implications in terms of what we want to achieve. That means that the principle of sovereignty, as defined by democratic consent, becomes more important than sovereignty as defined in a rather narrow way.

How do you think that the increased importance of bilateral institutions has changed bilateral relations?

It has certainly dramatically changed the role which diplomats in a bilateral embassy were sent out to do. The role of bilateral embassies is now very different. Once, if you were in a bilateral embassy, you’d spend a very large part of your life talking to your partners about the nitty-gritty of EU negotiations and contributing to the process of working out policy. Now part of that function has become centralised in Whitehall. Every person in Whitehall will have their own contacts in governments around the world.

And do you think Whitehall and domestic departments have the skills they need to do this?

There’s been a dramatic change in the last 20 years or so. When I was dealing with European issues in the early 1980s, you had two or three departments that really knew about Europe: The Foreign Office (because the Foreign Office was responsible for dealing with foreigners), the Ministry of Agriculture (because the CAP was an important part of life) and the DTI (because an important part of trade and industry had aspects of the Single Market).

The Home Office, for example, had no experience of the European Union. Basically, negotiations within Whitehall were infinitely more difficult than negotiations in Brussels. It was much harder to hammer out a deal in Whitehall because people tended to come with absolutely firm departmental positions: that was the British position that had to prevail in Brussels. But then, of course, over the years, more and more people have had experience of serving in the UK Representation. Now when you have discussions in Whitehall, clearly we have British positions, but we also (and increasing majority voting has been a factor) have learnt that you can’t just say “well this is the British position” You have to say “who are our allies?” “How do we make alliances?” “What is the endgame going to look like?”

Do you think that the current structures of government accurately reflect the big issues that we’re dealing with in terms of the balance between national and multilateral affairs?

I think there is still scope for that. When I first arrived in Brussels as Permanent Representative I had lunch with my Spanish opposite number who was just embarking on the Spanish Presidency in 1995, he said ‘forget what you’ve been told about what is done in Brussels – everything in one form or another gets negotiated here.’ In a way he’s right because there are so many issues now where our domestic law is a product of opinions reached in Brussels. I don’t think that we’ve internalised that in Whitehall. There is still a tendency to think of people who know about the EU as European specialists, whereas really, anybody embarking on a Whitehall career now needs to be a European specialist.

Has this changed the role of the Foreign Office?

Yes. In the early days of our membership its co-ordinating role was predominant. That has gradually changed because most of the legislative business of the EU is done in specialist councils. You can’t have a situation in which foreign ministers on the General Affairs Council are experts on the environment, on the Single Market, on energy. Because they’re not the experts, foreign ministers aren’t going to get to grips with the Patent Convention and, of course, because there is that much more real European common foreign policy, they have a pretty full time job doing that – extremely successfully. More and more practical co-ordination work has gone to the European Council of Heads of Government, but that’s not necessarily desirable in terms of the effective management of the European Union, especially when we’re at twenty-five rather than seven. The European Council ought to be making strategic decisions, not sitting there ploughing through the text of conclusions to changes of work here and there: it’s something we’re going to have to look at over the next couple of years. Although the co-ordinating role of the Cabinet Office has grown over the years, the Foreign Secretary remains the senior minister responsible for co-ordinating at the ministerial level. In nine cases out of ten, it is he who concludes ministerial correspondence and ministerial discussion on any particular issue.

Does the civil service culture allow people to take risks?

It does make it difficult, but it is slowly changing. We have traditionally been pretty hierarchical, and the scope for the original view hasn’t been as great as it should be. That is changing through developments in IT which have put paid to the hierarchy of people drafting submissions to Ministers which go up through the layers and end up on blue printed paper. Now, if we in Whitehall are looking at the future of Europe, the desk officer dealing with it in the FCO will put something on an email and we all comment. It’s a much flatter kind of system. And I think that’s much better for the production of ideas and for people’s morale because it makes their job more interesting. But I’m afraid that the tendency to want to produce an agreed view to put to the minister rather than a range of options is still there.

Where do you think our problems on the European question come from?

We emerged from the Second World War with our institutions having served us well and a strong sense of the nation. In de Gaulle’s memoirs he starts off by saying that France as an idea is immutable. But within that, the failures of individuals and the state are very apparent. He contrasts that with Britain, where he comes in 1940 and sees a people dedicated to victory. In the 1950s people failed to perceive the end of empire in a way that seems very simple in retrospect. But it goes back further than that: our whole history as an island is an important factor. There are certain aspects of the reformation and anti-Popery that find an echo in modern euro-scepticism. I’m a Catholic, my father was not, but he married a Catholic. I have a letter which I found when my father died, sent to him by his aunt. It said: “in the church-yard at Derbyvale there are members of the Wall family buried, going back three hundred years. These are yeoman stock, the finest in Britain, and do not allow this tradition to be broken by selling your children out to Popery”. In other words, don’t agree to have your children brought up as Catholics. This was only 1930 not 1630. If my great aunt was alive today she’d be a euro-sceptic. There’s a common thread there.

Do you think that public attitudes to the EU can be changed through experience?

Yes. When I was in Brussels we’d meet groups of constituents who were brought out by MEPs to see the UK Representation. Almost invariably, if they came at the end of their 2 or three days in Brussels and you asked them ‘are you more or less in favour of the EU’, invariably they would say, ‘it’s so different from what we imagined’. When people actually see it they can see that it’s not a sort of sinister, Machiavellian organisation. It’s basically fifteen countries sitting around a table, negotiating, trying to both reflect their individual national interest and come to some solution that is greater than the sum of its parts. And the business of negotiation in the EU is actually pretty recognisable for most people from what they do in their own lives. You just have to open it up so people can see it happening. Now you can’t open it all up, because people have got to be able to do deals and they won’t do deals in front of the cameras. But I would rather that people were bored to death than frightened to death.

To what extent does sovereignty relate to the national interest? Isn’t national interest something quite long term, which can run through several governments?

There are certain aspects of sovereignty which are fairly constant, in the sense that most of us feel British, proud to be British, we have an idea of what Britain is, we have a sense of wanting to preserve our freedom. But if you define sovereignty in terms of certain fixed things that are immutable as opposed to actually advancing your interests in the modern world, then you end up preserving your power to say no, but not actually having any real power to do positive things. I have my own theory that it is difficult for us because of the historical hangover: De Gaulle’s veto was one of the most traumatic events in Britain during my teenage years. I don’t think we’ve yet completed the adaptation of our own view of ourselves. The Prime Minister is constantly trying to do this in his speeches; to get across the idea that after all the ways we thought of the British interest in the past, we now have to think in the same breath of the EU as being the vehicle through which we advance the British interest.

Do you think that British public opinion and the spread of democracy has had an influence on public opinion in other countries?

We still have a caricature of Britain as the home of the bowler hat and the English Gentleman, rather than as a politically, socially, and economically modern nation, which is what the diplomatic service has to communicate. I was very struck by this on a recent visit to our embassy in Bulgaria where we are genuinely trying to help them in a range of areas, and where we’ve got people advising in a lot of ministries. The Bulgarian government said to me “we have more dealings on a day-to-day basis with your Embassy than with any other embassy of any other country”. That’s what modern diplomacy should be about, not about Ambassadors driving around in Rolls Royces flying the flag.

To what extent in the EU are we trying to influence public opinion overseas as well as the government?

Well quite a lot I think. One of the things that increasingly happen is Ministers writing articles in newspapers throughout the EU. Our ambassador in The Hague, Colin Budd, is virtually bilingual in Dutch, and appears on Dutch chat shows. Michael Jay when he was in Paris was a kind of media figure.

We work constantly with colleagues in other EU countries: I’m talking to my German and French opposite numbers and all my colleagues in the European Secretariat the whole time. But at the very least the days are gone when people are taken by surprise by anything our partners might do. One of the tasks this government set itself in what Tony Blair calls a “step change” is actually building that relationship in a much more systematic way. We’ve got to the point where people actually look to us not just as a partner they’ve got to square in order to get things through but someone they want to make alliances with. And during those long nights at the Nice negotiations, we and the Germans worked together on a paper which we gave to the French presidency on the way through the voting issue. That had never happened in our time in the EU before and it would have been unthinkable a few years ago that the Germans would have wanted to do that with us, and would have been prepared to do it. It may be a small thing, but it’s not insignificant.

The declaration issued by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi following their first bilateral meeting calls for the next European Union summit to represent “a new milestone” in achieving a genuine structural reform of the European economy. Among other things, it calls for greater flexibility of labour markets and for some of the more Byzantine national markets, notably in the energy sector, to be opened up to competition. This marks what has been described as a “nascent axis” or a “multiform partnership” between Britain and Italy, with the enthusiastic support of the Spanish centre-right government. However ugly the phrasing, the intention is clear: to provide a business-friendly alternative to the traditional Franco-German drivers of European strategy.

Get-out clause
The Anglo-Italian pact is undoubtedly very convenient for Mr Blair. Last summer, in Sao Paolo, he named next month’s Barcelona summit as “make or break time for the European economy”. These words could come back to haunt him, especially if, in a year of French and German elections, little progress is made at Barcelona. The establishment of a new axis may allow Mr Blair to claim, after the summit, that any failures were down to electoral cycles, and that he has used the time constructively in building up a real momentum behind economic reform.

Britain, Italy and Spain can be shown to be marching forward to the economic reform summit in Greece next year under the same banner, hauling those Gallic and Teutonic stick-in-the-muds behind them. So, the pact is useful, and it does rest on a common economic agenda. But can the Anglo-Italian partnership really emulate the standards set by the Franco-German engine in setting a new tone for European integration?

Shifting sands
In some areas, the portents are not good. Britain and Italy have diverged on a number of important issues since Berlusconi came to power last May. On the reform of Common Agricultural Policy, a key point for the Brits, Italy has shifted from a very pro-reform position to a more conservative one. On anti-terrorist measures, the core growth area in European competence since the 11 September attacks, Italy resisted to the last the European arrest warrant, and, in true Italian style, may well take a while to implement the measure. Britain, on the other hand, announced this week in a rash of enthusiasm that it would implement the arrest warrant a year early, coming into effect in January 2003.

Even where a common purpose has been identified between Blair and Berlusconi, on developing a non-federal future for Europe for example, it has to be doubted how far the Berlusconi government can be trusted to deliver on its commitments.

Italian affections
Berlusconi himself is rather unreliable. His political appeal is based on his image as “the cavalier”, or the prime minister “with the sun in his pocket”. When things go wrong, he has a history of absolving himself of responsibility by blaming external factors, usually from abroad. If things get harder for Mr Berlusconi, international commitments may be the last thing on his mind. Italy’s new euroscepticism has to be seen in this light.
It is all very well for Berlusconi to strike a politically convenient pose “in defence of the nation state.” But this stance has lasted three months, in contrast to a 50-year history of a unified political class backing any European initiative unreservedly.

While the Italian state has improved since the bribe scandals of the early 1990s, many Italians still prefer to see it operating within the structures established by Brussels. Whatever Berlusconi may say about developing a Europe that maintains Italy’s integrity, his domestic audience is far less convinced of this than Blair’s. And Berlusconi is more likely than most to change his tune.

De Gaulle once famously described the Franco-German axis as “a marriage of convenience with a considerable amount of feeling”. For an Anglo-Italian axis, the convenience is certainly there. But the feeling?

There was a newspaper society survey only last month that said that the vast majority of the British population live, work and play within just a 14 mile radius of their home. BBC local radio strives to give each community an outlet to express its views simply by picking up the phone. That often makes us a crucial lifeline for everyone in the community when major news affects their lives. I believe BBC radio came into its own in the last year partly because of the three ‘f’s, floods, fuel and foot and mouth” One farmer’s wife in Shropshire wrote to me, calling her local radio station the only sanity in a time of gossip and muddled media hysteria. The unprecedented popularity for BBC local radio and BBC regional television is evidence of something quite real that is happening amidst all the sound and the fury of the current debate about Britishness”
Andy Griffee, Controller of BBC English Regions – Global Britain Manchester Seminar

This year The Guardian arranged a conference to discuss the report on the North-South divide, and guess what? It still exists. It’s about poverty up here and not so much poverty down there. Shock horror. The report basically was saying, yes, our city centres have undergone lots of regeneration, really happening, bar culture, you know, Manchester bars have shiny floors. But you drive a couple of miles out of those wonderful city centres, and there is real poverty and real problems. But the report also shows that over the last 30 years, GDP per capita in the regional cities of France has grown slightly more than that in the very high profile and very happening city of Paris. So why, does Northern England have a growing poverty gap with the Southeast of England when the French don’t? It is entirely because of the serious commitment to devolution of power, and because of the existence of mayors. I’ve always thought my feelings were emotional and tribal, but they are practical and real.
Tony Wilson, Founder of Factory Records and Cultural Entrepreneur

The whole problem it seemed to me with the multicultural discourse in the 21st century is that it assumes that there is a thing called the nation that is largely white. Whereas the rest of us are delighting in our differences all the time, having our separate schools in this very strange country called multicultural Britain, playing marbles in the ghetto and not interfering with the nation. And so there is talk about setting up these black cultural centres in London in places such as Tower Hamlets. Excuse me, why should my son who is twenty three, who grew up here, went to Edinburgh, why should he go to a place deliberately designated for him as a black cultural centre? Why should that be the assumption? He may want to go there, he may not. He may want to go to the national theatre and see Chekhov but with a very integrated cast. Pray, what’s the point of having an arts centre in a place which is deprived and angry, which has so many white people of various sorts who feel let down by the new economy and so on, and placing a black arts centre in the middle of such an area. How many minutes before it’s going to be vandalised, how many hours before people are going into it are going to be resented?”
Yasmin-Alibhai Brown, Senior Researcher, The Foreign Policy Centre

One of the things that people have to pull away from in this society is the fact that the traditional rivalries that existed from the subcontinent and other places people have come from, really aren’t functional in this day and age anymore. Those things have to be overcome. We need to look at how children are going to be able to grow up in this society to be able to work together. I quite appreciate people wanting to pass on their heritage, their culture, and their religion to the children: there is nothing wrong with that. What one should do it take the best of that. Only last weekend there was the Diwali festival here. We have the Eid festival in Birmingham and the Carribean festival. So we have a variety of all those things. But do we get many people from the Hindu community coming to the Eid festival, and vice versa? I think some of the funding streams still need to reflect that. I’ll be pushing for some of the funding that goes out into individual organisations to allow organisations and people to link together and to be more representative – issues related to communities as a whole, not segregated communities
Khalid Mahmood MP

I actually think the cricket test is a false test. How can I possibly say that all my life I have done other than support England? I spent 22 years as a doctor near Paddington station. Half of my practice was in Notting Hill where I got more and more involved in my local community, particularly when young black people where swept up by the police, and you could hear the police jumping up and down on them in the police vans. They asked me to come and examine them to make sure they were all right, as their families were worried. The more I got involved in Notting Hill, the more I found myself rooting for the West Indies and I have to say that when England are playing the West Indies, I have no problem, I could root for both. I think that’s terribly important. It’s a false test, why should I have to pick one or the other, I can support both sides in my view.
Richard Stone, Chairman of the Stone-Ashdown Trust

Despite the media frenzy that followed, the 2002 nationality White Paper was a step in the right direction. The paper dealt with some of the most pressing issues surrounding the immigration debate – the trappings of citizenship, the plugging of skills shortages through targeted work permit schemes and the delivery of basic services for asylum seekers.

Sadly the paper failed to tackle the sensitive issues about how we can help newcomers become full members of our society and how we can harness their skills; in other words, how we promote their ‘integration’.

Partly to blame is our entrenched inability to come to terms with what is still viewed as a dirty word in the UK, laden with assimilationist implications – immigrants made to sacrifice culture, language or creed to become ‘Westernised’. The furore that followed the announcements regarding citizenship classes, oaths of allegiance and measures to curb arranged marriages was a reflection of the extent to which the integration debate has failed to take root in this country.

The government is right to insist that in order to have a successful immigration system good management is paramount. What it fails to address is that if we are to have a successful immigration system, we need to put in place the tools of integration. If not, we will continue facing a double failure. On the one hand a loss of faith in the immigration system which today verges on hysteria. The public overwhelmingly perceive immigrants and immigration as a problem – ‘scroungers’ and ‘burdens’. More, for example, are concerned about immigrants than about education, the economy or drug abuse.

On the other hand a pool of wasted talent. 70% of refugees are unemployed according to Home Office figures, and 60% of those who had worked as managers and trained professionals at home cannot get jobs here. And this is despite the fact that those applying for refugee status are young and keen to find work: two thirds are aged between 21 and 34.

Countries like Canada and Holland have looked these problems in the eye for many years. Not only have they been selectively recruiting people from abroad, but they have also set up managed integration programmes which help develop language skills, make people feel welcome, introduce them to the ways of their hosts, and make sure that they have all the help they need to enter the job market.

These countries have recognised that for integration to work it needs to be a two way process, a bargain where the host helps create an open and welcoming environment and provides the relevant services to facilitate integration and where the newcomer agrees to participate in the process openly and responsibly.

In Canada new citizens are asked to sign up to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, in Holland refugees sign a contract committing themselves to a certain number of hours of language classes. Their experiences show that these integration strategies can and do work. In the Netherlands, for example, only 17% of the population objects to the presence of refugees within their borders and Canadians generally agree that their multicultural make-up is “the best thing about the country”. Compare that to UK figures – 80% think that the government does too
much to help refugees and almost half think that Britain should stop welcoming asylum seekers.

Similarly, in Canada, unemployment levels among immigrants stand at 10%, the same rates as those of their Canadian-born counterparts. In Holland ambitious structured programmes have had
impressive results: 20,000 refugee jobs have been created in small- and medium-sized enterprises, and ethnic minority unemployment figures are down from 16% to 10%.

Immigration is now firmly on the government agenda. The old-timers in the immigration debate often observe how reforms in the UK seem to come in three-year cycles. The question for the next three years should be: can we have integration well as immigration?

Imagine a large room, filled with boxes containing machines that are switched on once every two years to perform a single function. They are single function machines, used to count votes and produce an accurate election result within hours of the polls closing. Florida? Washington DC? No, these relatively expensive pieces of technology are housed in a large office in the Regional Electoral Tribunal of Parana, Brazil. Every six months officials are charged with taking the machines out of their boxes and turning them on to make sure they still work, before turning them off again and carefully replacing them in boxes on the shelf. Given the uncertainties of the electricity supply, a back up of car batteries is used if the supply fails on election night, roughly every two years.

The officials who show visitors around are rightly proud of a system that can reduce voter fraud and produce an accurate count within hours of the polls closing, particular in a country with a huge electorate, where voting is compulsory and electoral democracy re-established within recent memory. But the skeptical observer is forced to wonder if electronic counting of votes is really the answer to the issues of corruption, vote rigging and buying that plague Brazilian and other elections. Surely the problems lie much earlier in the process, when the votes of poor or illiterate people are ‘bought’ – not at the polling station when people turn up to cast their ballot.

At a time when the Internet backlash is still underway, the dot-com boom and bust has been and gone and even PC penetration at home in the UK seems to be peaking, public and third sector faith in the transforming power of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) seems undimmed. And nowhere is this faith more profound than in those concerned with developing countries. The United Nations Development Programme, in common with most donor organizations, now has an explicit commitment to the ‘digital agenda’ and to bridging the North-South, ‘‘digital divide.’’

But the divide between the North and South is no more ‘digital,’ than the divide between poor residents of East London and the wealthy inhabitants of Surrey is ‘digital.’ One group may have access to the Internet at home and work and the other group may not, but what divide them are income, education and life chances. ICTs undoubtedly have a role to play in closing all those gaps – both in inner London and the developing world, but they are not a total solution, not a substitute for other interventions and not a way to let donor organisations or governments ‘off the hook’ of more intractable problems.

The current mania for ICT-led development is often branded ‘e-governance’ – a complex process of institutional restructuring and transformation, involving government and its partners. What we often see however is less transformation and more automation, less process reorganisation and more putting a shiny front end on long-term systematic failure.

So why is ICT-led development so fashionable and what are its abiding myths? One is that ICT offers substantial savings in government processes. This is not necessarily true even in developed countries, where the automation of individual processes from parking fines to benefit applications has cut some costs, but no-one has yet produced an accurate, overall figure for ‘e-government’ savings in the round. In countries where labour is very cheap and technology sometimes expensive, this even less likely to be the case.

The maxim “Information is power” is often blithely quoted in discussions of the “digital divide”. But access to information should not be confused with access to power. The potential for ICTs to help create a better informed and educated populace, who in turn become a more demanding and scrutinising electorate, is undoubted. Examples of individual successes abound – for instance the email campaign that helped topple Philippine President Joseph Estrada. But for the majority of the world’s poor the ‘information’ contained on the Internet is difficult to understand (not just because most of it is in English), irrelevant to their daily lives and expensive to obtain.

The possibilities of technological ‘leapfrogging’ for developing countries are also a staple of speeches by Western politicians. It is certainly the case that developing countries can often bypass failed technologies or forge ahead with new ones such as wireless communication in rural areas or e-learning (the six largest distance learning universities in the world are located in developing countries). But ‘leapfrogging’ suggests moving past an incumbent and the world rankings of GDP are proving remarkably resistant to rapid change. All this is not to suggest that there is no role for ICTs either in economic development or in institutional reform in developing countries. There is clearly an important role for both. But if the experience of e-governance in the UK has anything to teach us, it is that technology has to be integrated into broader policy areas, it does not work as an add-on. In other words, there is no e-government, just good government enabled by ICTs, no e-democracy without an underlying healthy democracy and so on.

We need better, more systematic evaluation of e-governance projects that attempt to capture both costs and benefits in the round and, in the case of developing countries, do not start from the assumption that a technological solution is always cheaper and more effective than a purely human one. We need projects that reflect the priorities of areas where they are deployed, not those of donors. Too many e-governance projects are funding-driven and represent off-the-peg solutions developed for different circumstances. Electronic service delivery (ESD) should not necessarily be a priority in countries with very low Internet penetration for example.

Finally, we must not kid ourselves that closing the ‘digital divide’ is synonymous with closing the health, wealth or education divides. If we continue to push technology at people who lack for the most basic essentials, a backlash is inevitable. As Kunda Dixit, editor of the Nepali Times said at a conference on technology and development earlier this year, “Before sticking a computer into a school, how about building a roof over it, staff it with competent teachers who are not absent half the year, ensure there are more girls in the classrooms, make sure the children are adequately nourished and not physically and mentally stunted because they don’t have enough to eat.”

Abraham Lincoln famously described democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. The popular perception of the EU is that it fails on all counts.

When the Convention on the Future of Europe starts its work this month, they will be focusing on how to prove that the EU is run “by the people”. Many of the measures they are examining are designed to deal with the “democratic deficit” – the fact that the European Commission is not elected and that there is no clear way for citizens to voice their preferences. But one of the unfortunate consequences of the way the debate is framed is that very little attempt has been made to address the other side of the democratic principle: ensuring that the outcomes the EU delivers are genuinely “for the people”.

It is almost universally accepted that most citizens worry more about the impact of EU institutions on their lives than about the obscure processes that produce them. The gulf between what people expect from the EU (solutions to cross border problems) and what they think they get (interference in their every day lives and the Common Agricultural Policy) is more damaging to the legitimacy of the EU than any formal democratic deficit. Such attitudes explain why the question of subsidiarity has recently been rising up the EU’s agenda.

The problem with the principle of subsidiarity – apart from its total lack of popular resonance – has been its failure to take hold in practice. This is because none of the actors in the EU system have much of an interest in making it work. Subsidiarity has traditionally been seen as a way of separating powers between institutions rather than as a way of allocating power to the most effective level and the debate about the distribution of power in the EU is still going down this route. The French and British Governments have rightly argued that fixing exclusive competences for each level of government is neither possible (they are almost always shared between different levels of government) nor desirable (it makes the task of future reform ever harder and puts sensitive decisions about sovereignty in the hands of lawyers rather than elected politicians). They have therefore favoured a political approach – involving national MPs or MEPs in deciding whether things are done at the right level. This is a useful strategy, but it ignores the most significant issue: on what basis would decisions about the allocation of power be made?

The guiding principle that I will propose in a forthcoming Foreign Policy Centre pamphlet, is the need for EU institutions to ‘earn the right to act’. The idea is that the European Council should systematically set objectives in each of the main areas of policy. Once the use of these explicit policy objectives has become widespread, there should then be an ongoing and independent evaluation of performance in all the main areas of EU policy competence. This could be carried out by an independent body such as the European Court of Auditors. Evaluations (presented in report form and then published for public dissemination) could examine the following criteria:

Efficiency – essentially a cost-benefit analysis, examining whether policies are justifying the time and money invested in them.

Effectiveness – are the objectives listed in the preambles being met?

Appropriateness – was this the best way to have approached the problem? In cases where objectives have been set at the Community level and policy-design left to the individual national governments, where are the examples of best practice to be found? Is a transfer of competence to a different institution, or the use of different implementing mechanisms, likely to improve the output?

Sustainability – how is the output likely to evolve in the future?

From an examination of each of these criteria, a series of recommendations could be drawn up. These might include a recommendation that authority over a particular policy-area be redistributed: for example, where existing EU-level action is proving unsuccessful, reintegration into national-level policy-making would be recommended, or where EU-level action is working well, further complementary powers can be extended to the Community level. A radical recommendation might be that a piece of legislation be removed altogether.

The potential value of such reports is clear. Recommendations for improving performance would make it easier to root out bad legislation made for the sake of a package deal. Importantly, the reports would also be published for public scrutiny, generating media coverage of the specifics of policy-making. The reports themselves, of course, would be nothing more than a set of recommendations, often of a fairly technocratic nature. They would not in themselves carry the authority to make changes, since the ECA has not been designed to be democratically accountable. But these reports would be the basis for a political review process in which all final decisions on the allocation of competence would be taken.

These ideas draw on the experience of other countries, such as the US, who introduced the “Government Performance Results Act” to ‘improve the confidence of the American people in the capability of the Federal Government by systematically holding Federal agencies accountable for achieving programme results”.

Such an output-based approach can never, of course, be sufficient in its own right, because at some stage people must buy into the idea of Europe, and this idea will embody some kind of ideal as well as a ‘list of practical advantages’. But it does seem clear that people are not going to make that leap of faith unless they see the EU delivering tangible benefits. If effectiveness is not improved, no amount of structural tinkering or meetings of the European convention will convert the unbelievers.

The image of a silhouetted second plane flying into the south tower of the World Trade Center will haunt our collective memory for years to come. In the aftermath of September 11th, commentators were quick to assert that the world would never be the same again, and although the threats we face post-September 11th are technically no different from those we faced before, in the course of a few hours a significant change did occur. Firstly, there is now widespread appreciation of the urgent need to tackle the terrorist threat head-on, and secondly the nature of the threats and the shift in targets from diplomatic staff to the business community and general public, is now understood beyond specialist circles. As a result, counter-terrorism policymakers have gained the support they need to construct new and effective policies for improving security at home and abroad. But the threat to companies is not limited to terrorism. In fact, it is often the lower-impact but higher frequency threats, such as petty street crime and medical problems, whose cumulative effects have more serious long-term consequences for business. The policy community must now make the most of the heightened general interest in security issues, whilst avoiding the pressure to focus on terrorism to the exclusion of all other security threats.

The Nature of the Threat
Figures from the US State Department’s Patterns in Global Terrorism 1999 show that the business community is now the primary target for international terrorists. In 1999 it accounted for 58% of US targets as opposed to 18% for government or diplomatic staff. This shift in targets is a logical strategy for terrorists to employ, as the private sector is now, in many ways, a more effective target than governments for bringing a country to its knees. National infrastructure and resources – from transport to water and energy supply – are now often owned or operated by private companies. In addition, the prevalence of so-called ‘just-in-time’ production and distribution methods, means that vital supplies like medicines and food can run out quickly. This was illustrated in 2000, when a small group of fuel protesters brought the country to a standstill in 72 hours. With more capacity, determination and weaponry, terrorists are capable of much more. Finally, the middle- to long-term impacts of such attacks on national and global economic confidence are considerable. As Tony Blair commented recently, “Confidence is, by its very nature, directly affected by political events. Those that promote stability increase confidence. Those that tend to instability diminish it. And it can show up, quite quickly, in the jobs, investment and hence living standards of communities in countries like Britain, far from the original source of instability.” By targeting companies and their civilian employees, terrorists spread fear among the public who feel closer to the danger when the targets are offices rather than embassies.

A Public Policy Response to the Terrorist Threat to Business
Many companies have revised their security strategies in the last few months. While there is much that individual organizations can do to reduce the risks and limit the impact when terrorists do strike, it is also vital that companies and the government work together to produce a co-ordinated strategy. Businesses must implement preventative measures to make themselves harder targets for terrorists, by making it more difficult for unauthorized personnel to enter their buildings, by modifying computer systems to limit the possibilities of cyber-terrorism, and by advising their staff on ways of avoiding potential threats in and around the workplace, and when on assignments abroad. The recent Turnbull Report underlined the responsibility company boards have to implement effective risk management plans, and although it could have gone further, it is useful in promoting such disciplines within companies. Terrorism is not a new threat and it is not one that is going to go away. Studies have shown that about 80% of companies without
a workable recovery plan will fail within one year of suffering a major attack, so it is crucial for companies to take business continuity seriously. The fact that the final death toll in the World Trade Center was considerably lower than initial estimates, is in no small part due to the fact that the building had been bombed in 1993 and companies had subsequently carried out training for evacuations and fires. September 11th also highlighted the partnership needed between companies and the public services. Both preventative and impact reduction strategies are dependent on relevant, accurate and up-to-date intelligence, and it is vital to revisit debates about what levels of access British businesses should have to government sources. While all companies have access to information in the public domain, some individuals obtain more detailed briefings on an informal basis through personal or professional contacts, resulting in an uneven distribution of information. Security intelligence is also distributed by a wide range of government departments, from the Home Office, Cabinet Office and DTI, to the Department of Health and the FCO, making it harder for companies to know who to approach. The UK policy community would do well to examine initiatives like the Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC), set up by the US State Department in 1984. The OSAC is dedicated to communicating with US businesses who face security threats in their operations overseas, and welcomes requests and inquiries for information from individual companies, and the business community as a whole. The Regional Security Officer (RSO) within US embassies performs a similar function in each region. The OSAC model may not be a blueprint for the UK, but it could offer useful ideas to be explored further by the UK policy community.

Widening the Focus – A public policy for corporate personnel security
While different security mechanisms are needed to counter different types of threat, a number of generic systems, such as global communication networks, need to be put in place. There must also be common and clear rules about the parameters of corporate responsibility and when individuals’ common sense must kick in. Without such rules, undue pressure is put on corporations and individuals alike. A generic agenda for responsibility should be at the heart of an effective safety policy, and such a policy must also anticipate new challenges, rather than react to immediate concerns. Strategies set up with a single threat in mind will eventually require modification – particularly as terrorists and criminals shift their activities with greater speed and ease than ever before. Governments must demonstrate that they understand the challenges faced by the business community, who in return must take the necessary precautions to limit the damage terrorism and other threats pose to their collateral and personnel.

The Way Forward
The tragic events of September 11th reinforced the UK policy community’s commitment to creating an effective policy for keeping Britons and British interests safe both at home and abroad. The government and British companies have a tremendous responsibility to seize this momentum, and their task is made easier by the fact that there is greater understanding among the general public of the extent of the risks, and renewed support for change. But this new support also puts pressure on policymakers to provide quick fix solutions for the immediate concerns about terrorism. While the terrorist threat is a real and important one, it is vital that any new policy addresses the full range of threats faced by businesses. Not only will this create a better policy now, it will also have a much longer shelf life.

MANUEL DE ARAUJO, President of the Mozambican Association
There is no Western solution or blueprint that will solve African problems,
and, unless both Africans and the West realize that, all efforts to address
them will continue to fail. Peace, democracy and stability are the key for
any attempt to ‘save’ Africa, but they must be rooted in African realities
and traditions. All societies, no matter how poor, have resources. The
trick is to recognize them and harness them effectively. This calls for a
genuinely new development discourse and practice to be adopted and applied.
Then, and only then, can we expect things in Africa to change for the
better. The West can pour into Africa all the money it has, but conflicts,
war, poverty and AIDS will persist unless the West, and indeed Africa
itself, changes the way it looks at Africa. Africa has the potential to
‘take off’, but it will only do so if it listens to its own beats and its
own logic. The West has to stop pasting its model onto Africa, open its markets, fund education, technology transfer, research & development projects in Africa, promote an ethical foreign policy, promote incentives to companies investing in Africa, and encourage those governments that are reforming, while isolate the ones promoting conflicts and wars.

DOUNIA LOUDIYI, Founder and CEO, Dounia Projects LLC (Morocco)
A New Africa Paradigm is in order. African will and capacity exist to guide the Continent towards sustainable recovery; the challenge – for Africa and he West – is to join voices out of a mutual respect instead of moral imperative or sheer desperation. Honest, steady and vocal African leadership is crucial. To achieve worthy results, African political, social and business processes – public, corporate and NGO – must be deconstructed to reflect local realities, then reframed to respond to local aspirations. The striving ‘help Africa’ industry in the West will then need to examine its institutional and individual motivations, and reinvent itself within this New Africa Paradigm.

SALIEM FAKIR, Director, IUCN-South Africa (World Conservation Union)
Afro-pessimism of an internal and external kind feed a vicious cycle of despair and anxiety, contributing to the erosion of hope or any long-term horizon. In its place enters the more corrosive and ominous ethic of short-termism that has gained a sort of nobility in our society. Such endemic negativity can only be impugned from the deep recesses of both the internal and external world consciousness by reminding ourselves of the ‘good news stories’. The vast world of rapid and diverse voices brought to the fore by the world’s media need to bring out the tiny, marginal, and not so silkily clothed success stories. The message is clear: speak too, and many times, of the ‘good news’ and do not feed the world a daily diet of nostalgia.

GARY COUSINS, Futurist, AmVia Africa (Pty) Ltd (South Africa)
It is with optimism that I observe the growing use of the mobile phone in Africa. Worldwide, subscriber penetration for mobile services in less developed countries is predicted to triple by 2007. The mobile technology revolution, soon to be followed by the mobile Internet revolution, is one of facilitating freedom; and it’s the free access to information and communication that will make for a better Africa in 2010. To achieve this vision, Africa requires open telecom markets and affordable mobile internet technology. Telecom regulation, the banning of the voice-over-internet protocol and an adherence to time and distance billing models will all hold African telecommunications back. With Western support Africa can embrace the mobile Internet. A paradigm shift in communications, banking and societal knowledge will result!

PHILIP EMEAGWALI, Internet Pioneer (Nigeria)
Africa must get on board the Internet and leapfrog from the Agricultural Age to the Information Age. It is knowledge and information that will alleviate poverty in Africa and the West must help Africa develop its intellectual capital, ending the knowledge apartheid that forces its children to eat the crumbs from the dinner table of the information-affluent nations. Since the Internet is the escalator that will store and distribute the knowledge of the 21st century, African schools should be connected to the Net.

KOFFI M. KOUAKOU Director, Timbuktu Ventures, South Africa
For business, Africa and Space remain the last frontiers. Africa is the more accessible, rich in people, fauna and natural resources, but it is plagued by atrocious ills which impede its development. The task is to fast-forward this last business outpost, to make the most of these resources. The possibility of African prosperity by 2010 lies in the nurturing of a home-grown talent which is both efficient and attractive to investors, the encouragement of close trading partnerships with other continents, the establishment of a culture of communication which will improve participative development and the sustainable use, both by Africa and the West, of the continent’s bonanza of natural resources.

DR ALI BAHAIJOUB Head of Maghreb Arab Press, London Bureau.
The West would render a great service to Africa if debts were written off or reduced, and aid were channelled directly to finance socio-economic projects. The eradication of corruption, mismanagement and inefficiency should be urged of all African governments receiving foreign aid, as well as the implementation of a strict policy of transparency and accountability in the use of public funds. The West can also help in stimulating the private sector, by building domestic financial markets and institutions, and developing an infrastructure through privatisation, investment and private initiatives. Promoting indigenous entrepreneurship through small and mediums sized businesses would undoubtedly encourage individual achievements and create jobs and opportunities desperately needed in most sub-Saharan states. There is an urgent need for African governments to manage public expenditure efficiently, exploit local wealth wisely and invest the proceeds on strategic social and economic priorities. Self-reliance should be highlighted and recognised as a key element to achieve success.

LUCIENNE ABRAHAMS
How can the West best help Africa? Establish plans for partnerships in trade and investment with milestones and a 20-year vision; think African diversity, interact, talk, find out, research, discover, uncover, invest, invent, innovate; develop a philosophy of global futurism and integrate relationships with Africa into your futuristic objectives. How can Africa best help itself? Understand that particular ‘African values’ (kleptocracy, economic warlordism) are incompatible with development; plod through the clichés – promote excellence in African governance, the rule of law and build a shared value system through uncompromising peer pressure; build strong policy content and policy alignment; take ‘mind-leaps’ on challenges of economic growth and social problem solving; build a philosophy of global futurism – get the basics right, grow knowledge, grow people, grow leadership: ‘green the Sahara’!. Mix in an African crucible! Simmer for ten years!

DR EDDY MALOKA – Executive Director, The Africa Institute of South Africa
We can be optimistic about Africa’s future for three reasons. First, the democratisation wave that erupted in 1989 is transforming the African postcolonial state. Second, Africa’s new corps of leaders is determined to address the continent’s problems and, with the transformation of the OAU into the African Union and the adoption of the New Africa Initiative, they finally have a framework for tackling the key problems of development, peace and security, democracy and governance, and Africa’s global standing. Thirdly, measures initiated by the United Nations since the mid-1980s aimed at reinforcing Africa’s economic recovery efforts, have been boosted by a number of developed countries taking steps at a bilateral level to enter into partnership with the African continent.

BEN OKRI

What you want for yourself and your
Children, that you must want for Africa.
Africa’s future is the future of the West.
Return the rains that were taken
Centuries ago.
Melt the chains.
Equality in the world’s marketplace.
A positive image of Africa must now prevail.
Help Africa’s own enlightenment to grow.

End corruption.
Sound infrastructure.
Education, order, health, justice.
Fair re-distribution of wealth.
Transcend tribalism.
Politicians with integrity, vision, and
Ability should be guided to the fore.
Give Africa back whatever is illustrious
In its past.
Help Africa be a vital part,
Not of a new world order,
But of a new universal civilisation.

Let Africa develop according to its own
Intrinsic way, from its own deep roots,
Philosophies, wisdom, with its traditions
Renewed in the new ages.
Let Africa be its best self, and it will
Solve its own problems, and bring its
Unique hidden gifts to the world.
All she needs is to get back on her
Feet, and to feel confident, and respected.
Then she can help others in the unpredictable
Cycles of time to come.
A little love goes a long way.

FATHER MATTHEW KUKAH, Nigerian Human Rights Campaigner
Respect (for want of a better word), not money, is what Africa needs. Respect for the ways things are done, which may be different from Western ways. African leaders have often failed to meet the terms of conditionality tied to aid because they do things differently, but African leaders don’t need to mimic the West to develop, they can do it in their own way.

Africans have become cynical, they feel that at the end of the day nothing seems to change. But in the last four or five years a lot has changed for Africa. President Clinton and the Labour Government’s attitudes have inspired a lot of confidence, and the climate and the actors within Africa have changed. When Clinton or Blair talk about Africa you get a sense of empathy which didn’t exist in the time of Reagan and Thatcher.

CHUKWU-EMEKA CHIKEZIE, African Foundation for Development
The issue of remittances and what remittances could do if redirected to more productive uses is absent from NEPAD. Large amounts of money come into Africa from the diasporas, and it seems strange to me that NEPAD and the African Union have failed to engage in a politics that addresses this key constituency that is actually funding a lot of development, at the household and a community level admittedly, but in many cases that is what’s real. If you look at places like Nigeria, whilst people who work for the government have no hesitation in abusing resources, when it comes to the home-town association for example, there are very high levels of integrity associated with it because there’s a sense of accountability, there’s a sense that this really matters and this is addressing real needs. I think it is very important to find out why the African leadership behind NEPAD won’t think strategically about this key source of money for development.

AMOBKA WAMEYO, Action Aid
Is there political will to see NEPAD through? I would say yes, because there’s a lot of Western or Northern commitment to NEPAD, and everybody in the West is talking about it. But if you ask the average person on the street in Kenya, in Tanzania, in Uganda, in Malawi, including government representatives, they will not have heard of it. For a document as important as NEPAD, a document that purports to speak for the African continent, to be so obscure among the African population is not acceptable. NEPAD doesn’t talk enough about women, it doesn’t talk about the issue of children or child soldiers: things that we know are a big concern in Africa. NEPAD might be just the beginning of a process, but a document as big as this, written without consultation and proposed as a way forward for the continent, is, I think, a misanalysis.

HALLIDAY: There’s been all sorts of speculation in the Middle East and outside about why a new kind of radical Islam is spreading; a conservative Sunni version often described as salafi, from salaf meaning ‘the pious ancestors’. One of the arguments used is that there is nostalgia for a lost empire or lost greatness in the Arab and Muslim world. This is sometimes linked to Bin Laden saying it all began 80 years ago with the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the end of the Khalifate. But I wonder if this is the real reason: I don’t detect much nostalgia for a great imperial past – Arab, Persian, Turkish or Mughal – in the Muslim world.

MAKIYA: I agree. It’s the disorder, the failure of the modern Arab order that’s far more of a driving force than any nostalgia for a great past. Here you do have something for which the invocation of the 80 years applies. Somebody like Bin Laden comes along and in every speech he writes off the whole of the last 80 years, to use the number he gives, in order to return to some ideal that is completely imagined.

HALLIDAY: Khomeini wrote off 1400 years. He said that between the death of the Prophet, in 632, or the death of the Fourth Caliph Ali in 661, and the Iranian revolution of 1979, was all jahiliya, ignorance. It was nul. So at least Bin Laden has narrowed the gap to some extent. I get the strong impression when visiting the Arab world, that there is enormous sympathy for Bin Laden; particularly in the Arabian Peninsula, but also in Egypt. Yet the basis for his popularity needs some explanation. He has no programme for politics or the economy; he’s not proposing any solution to the problems of the modern world, and nor has he any religious authority. Bin Ladin’s not a mullah or a sheikh, as many of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt were, or as Khomeini was. In no sense is he a man of learning, which is as important in Islam as it is in the Jewish tradition. He’s clearly a man of great violence, but what accounts for his enormous popularity?

MAKIYA: He stood up to America. It’s as simple as that. Like Saddam. It’s a replay of the 1990-91 Gulf War. It’s not that Saddam ever did anything for the Palestinians, but it looked like he was standing up to the powers of the West. Here you’re probing into a problem that’s got deeper roots, and I think this image he has will pass with his inevitable defeat. But the problem will remain.

It maybe that it will be the source of future Bin Ladens, and it is therefore something that troubles me very greatly. The anti-American sentiment that now exists in this part of the world is very deep, so a person like Bin Laden can come along and tap into that reservoir and emerge as a hero for a period of time.

HALLIDAY: Many commentators, in the Muslim world and in the west, see Bin Laden in atavistic terms, as a preacher of traditional Islamic and cultural themes. But does this not miss what is different, what is modern about him? If one looks at the ideology of the Al Qa’eda organisation’s reading of Bin Laden, they seem to be rather like that of many Islamic fundamentalists today: a mixture of certain Islamic ideas and broader themes of Third World radicalism. They claim ‘The imperialists have come to take our lands’, ‘they’re stealing our oil’, ‘they’re imposing colonialist settlers and client regimes on us’. Bin Laden quotes the Koran, but to illustrate a nationalist denunciation that is really a product of the modern world and of its conflicts. Is that your sense?

MAKIYA: By and large I agree with you. But there are some distinctive traits that I notice, at least in Bin Laden’s language, which are striking and new. For example, the various fatwas issued over the years and the statements, especially the 1998 one in which he announces jihad and legitimises the act of killing any American in the world, is a complete innovation. This is the only ‘terrorist group of global reach’, to use Bush’s phrase, to say this; no other group has issued such a general fatwa. Maybe some of the Algerian Islamicist groups did something similar, but their operations were local within Algeria. To repeat: what principally constitutes his driving force, the thing that really made Bin Laden as an individual what he is today, was his anger at the American presence in Arabia, ‘the Land of Mohammed’, as he calls it. Secondly there is the issue of Iraq and very much as an afterthought, and perhaps as a result of his Egyptian associates like Ayman al-Zawahiri, comes Palestine. It’s almost as if Palestine was tacked onto the radicalism that we’ve seen in the Arab world, although you know as well as I do, that the Palestine question is central, and has always been central.

Bin Laden was strongly opposed to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and actively proposed, in writing at the time, to organise his Arab Afghans to push Saddam out. The king refused and invited the Americans in instead. For Bin Laden this was the cardinal sin. Here began the journey of his break with the Saudi royal house, which I find very interesting. Let me develop the point a bit here. Bin Laden decided at some point that the Saudi ruling class was hardly worth bothering about, although that was his real target. His logic was: why deal with the puppet when you can go to the puppet master? So the thinking evolved that America was the source of all evil. At least this is my reading of his ideological evolution in the early 1990’s. Tacked onto this comes the Iraqi question. For Bin Laden the turn of 1990-91 was crucial. Again this points to how September 11th 2001 is so closely linked to the Gulf War of 1990-91 in so many ways, but not in obvious ways. It’s not a replay. Its origins lie in the way that that war, that 1990-91 crisis, evolved, and in the way it ended.

One other decision point that is markedly different about Bin Laden, compared to Third World-ist currents, is that in 1990 he came back to Saudi Arabia a victor. The whole Arab world is a story of defeat: four Arab-Israeli wars, civil wars, intifadas, military coups, defeat after defeat, both versus Israel and internally. Mountains of bodies piled up between 1967 and 1990. This is an Arab world that has suffered time and time again, defeat after defeat, from Jordan to Lebanon, to the West Bank, and now with the intifada. With regard to the Palestinians, you’ve got conditions that are hopeless and look hopeless. There’s no obvious resolution to them. Bin Laden acts against such a backdrop of defeat and hopelessness. Here is a man who considers himself a victor over a superpower. He actually believes, and he and the Afghans all believe, that they defeated the superpower.

HALLIDAY: And without American help? They never mention the role of American intelligence forces in the war against the USSR.

MAKIYA: He’s a different animal from, say, the Saddam Husseins, Muammar Gaddafis, Hafez al-Asads that have dominated Arab politics. The men of al-Qa’ida are a new breed. This is a new kind of animal. This is the revolt of the sons against the fathers – the battle of generations.

Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you this morning. Congratulations to the Foreign Policy Centre on your third anniversary. And congratulations on marking it by publishing such a stimulating pamphlet with so many important contributions.

More than six months have elapsed since September 11. A great deal has been achieved: the defeat of the Taliban régime and the dismantling of the Al-Qa’ida camps within Afghanistan have made the world safer.

With the establishment of the Interim Administration, Afghanistan is again a part of the international community. Over the next six months, a truly representative government should follow. Even now, it is a remarkable transition.

This is far from saying that all danger is past, as our latest deployment of Royal Marines to Afghanistan indicates.

But we should all take heart from the success so far, and realise that, when we act with resolve, we can, in the words of the Prime Minister, “re-order this world”.

My own contribution to your pamphlet focuses on the future of Afghanistan. And Afghanistan is an excellent case-study of why foreign policy matters so much.

Its failure as a state did not just turn it into a haven for terrorists.

It was an important centre for the drugs trade, and the source of 90% of the heroin on British streets.

For years, refugees from the chaos in Afghanistan have formed a tide of human misery seeking asylum in the UK.

And the Taliban were a threat to the stability of their entire region, including Iran and Pakistan.

The best way to counter the many threats posed by a failed state is to do precisely what we are beginning to do in Afghanistan: helping to build a successful state.

The final measure of our success will be whether the future state guarantees respect for those core global values on which all successful societies are founded – human rights, freedom, tolerance, the rule of law – the very values which the terrorists attacked on September 11.

But Afghanistan is not the only place where people have been excluded from the benefits of these values, or from the security and prosperity which we take for granted.

Conflict, poverty, discrimination and injustice still blight the lives of millions in every part of the globe. We cannot escape the consequences when communities collapse, societies disintegrate and states fail.

Our national interests are served where human rights, democracy and the rule of law prevail. Where these are threatened our well-being is at risk.

Experience should teach us that large-scale abuse of human rights is often a precursor of failed states or of serious regional instability.

Some of the most serious challenges in foreign policy today have their roots in the human rights abuses of years ago.

The recent history of Zimbabwe might have been very different if the international community had reacted with greater resolve to the massacres which Mugabe’s soldiers carried out in Matabeleland in the early 1980s. It was then that Mugabe’s authoritarian rule was shaped.

To take another African example, I recently paid the first visit by a British Foreign Secretary to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the after-effects of the Rwanda genocide of 1994 still reverberate, and at a cost so far of millions of lives. Who knows what lives would have been spared by firmer international action at the moment when Rwanda was descending into chaos?

In Iraq there is a very powerful central authority. But here, too, there is a consistent record of brutal contempt for universal values stretching back many years.

In the 1980s, many in the West, guided by the principle that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, saw Saddam as a useful ally against the threat of revolutionary radicalism from Iran under the Ayatollahs.

The abuse of human rights in Iraq told a different story. Thousands of Iraqi Kurds were murdered in Saddam’s “Anfal” campaign during the 1980s. His use of chemical weapons against Iran, and ultimately against citizens of his own country in the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988, showed his utter contempt for international law well before the invasion and annexation of Kuwait in 1990.

It would be too easy for us to say today what our predecessors should have done to spare us these problems. Hindsight with 20/20 vision is a wonderful thing. The far harder challenge for us is to face the difficult choices before us now, stand up to bullies like Saddam, and not leave these problems to the next generation to sort out.

Mr Chairman,

What we need is not so much a diplomacy of hindsight, but rather a diplomacy of foresight. Since values can be such a useful indicator of future trouble, it follows that we need the best possible quality of contacts, expertise and analysis from our diplomatic network, so that we can use human rights and the rule of law as what amounts to a sort of early warning system.

We have to have the vision to act before threats arise.

The history of the Balkans in the 1990s illustrates this point well. In the early 90s, we failed to halt the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, despite European nations committing thousands of troops to a UN mission. The Dayton Agreement only became possible when NATO as a whole was ready to put troops on the ground, with a tough mandate.

Four years later, in Kosovo, we were able to act with greater speed and determination on the news of massive humanitarian abuse with a military campaign which soon turned back Milosevic’s tide of ethnic cleansing. Two years later, Milosevic himself was history.

Last year, through a timely deployment in Macedonia, we prevented a descent into ethnic conflict and established a political framework which has held.

Put in figures, the relative success of these three operations becomes even more stark. Sorting out Bosnia cost the British taxpayer at least £1.5 billion. Kosovo cost £200 million. Macedonia cost just £14 million.

Diplomacy is good value for money. Action “upstream” can prevent the need for more costly remedies “downstream”. Those costs may materialise through the need for military action to restore order or development assistance to put a country back together again. Either of these activities is massively more expensive than an investment in diplomacy, provided of course the latter works.

And of course there are cases where a judicious combination of military engagement, development aid and diplomacy can turn around potentially desperate situations, as in Sierra Leone.

The money which we and the rest of the European Union are spending in the Balkans now, on reconciliation, democratic development and prosperity, is money well spent if it helps guide the region away from war and towards membership of the EU.

The benefits of diplomacy are tangible. Yet the public may not always see these benefits, because making peace gets far less media coverage than making war.

How many TV bulletins recorded the extraordinary fact that Kosovo now has its own functioning internal government, with Serb MPs sitting in the provincial legislature?

Most international media have withdrawn correspondents not just from Pristina and Skopje, but from Belgrade as well.

It is not just the Balkans which now loses out in media terms. How many newspapers have reported that 46,000 ex-combatants have been disarmed and demobilised in Sierra Leone since our preventive deployment there?

The media play an essential rôle in focusing public attention on the crises that matter. They would not be doing their job if it were otherwise. But the sad paradox is that media attention, public support and pressure for action are often at their greatest when a situation has already deteriorated to the point where any action would be costly and demanding.

And it seems every time UK forces are deployed overseas to forestall conflict, siren voices are raised questioning whether they are really needed.

Engagement in the world means not just fighting wars, but also preventing them.

Conflict prevention is therefore a key British interest. And it happens to be an area where we have scored significant successes.

The respect in which the UK is held in the international community today derives from many factors: the quality of our armed forces, our political analysis, our regional expertise and our development programmes; but above all from our commitment to the international rule of law and to upholding it worldwide.

We are unique in the way we combine military strength, humanitarian effort, diplomatic effort and a long-term commitment to reconstruction. Where we have intervened, it has been to pave the way for political solutions.

Military deployment has been successful in places like Sierra Leone, Macedonia and Afghanistan.

Our development assistance has had a growing impact on the reduction of poverty, especially in countries where governments are committed to improving their people’s lot.

And diplomacy is an indispensable part of the mix. During the campaign in Afghanistan, our missions in Washington, New York, Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere have been tireless, and successful, in their efforts to build international support for what we have been trying to achieve on all three fronts – diplomatic, military and humanitarian.

The rôle of the FCO is essential in building acceptance of military deployment and development assistance where Britain has the resources directly to intervene, and, where we do not, in persuading people to pursue constructive ways forward.

Our Embassies and High Commissions are increasingly backing up our diplomacy with practical measures on the ground.

We have committed £118 million to two Conflict Prevention Funds, through which the Ministry of Defence, the Department for International Development and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office work together in pursuit of a common set of objectives: fundamentally, to reduce the number of deaths and injuries caused by violent conflict.

This activity is a form of forward defence. And there are many other ways in which we help safeguard our security at home by contributing to stability and prosperity overseas.

We second British experts to transition economies. We train officials in the worldwide fight against terrorism, drugs, crime and environmental damage. We run projects in local communities to promote human rights and good governance.

Diplomacy today means putting our values into action.

It does not however follow that we should sever relations with every country whose observance of human rights falls below standard.

Nor is it impossible to establish a degree of commonality of interest with such countries, where circumstances dictate. But if these states have a poor record in upholding human rights and the rule of law, this will always be an obstacle to developing better relationships with them.

And our closest and most enduring alliances will always be with those countries which share our commitment to promoting these values.

Mr Chairman,

The UK is not a superpower. But we have continuously shown, as we have in the last six months, that we play a pivotal rôle. We can – and do – make a big difference. We are a major sovereign state, working alongside other sovereign states in our national interest and the collective, global interest.

Our strength in the world is immensely reinforced by the strength of our alliances with the EU, the G8, NATO, the Commonwealth – and with the US – within the overall framework of the UN and international law.

Values are essential to the success of states. But more than this, the universal observance of human rights and the rule of law is the measure of a successful global society.

Over the next few weeks, in a series of speeches both here and abroad, I shall be setting out in more detail the reasons why the UK’s interests are best served by an active and engaged global foreign policy, working with our allies to push back the boundaries of chaos.

It is clearer than ever since September 11 that our domestic security and prosperity depend on our willingness to assume our share of responsibility for global security and global prosperity.

Our challenge today is to stave off the Afghanistans of the future. We must not be found wanting.

(ends)