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Foreign Policy

My Lords, most noble Lords who have spoken in this excellent debate seem to have accepted that British foreign policy since 1997 has not been an overwhelming success, despite talk of the ethical element that Mr Robin Cook mentioned in 1997 and despite, I may say, the Prime Minister’s excellent French, which struck everyone when he first went to Paris in 1997. What is the explanation? Could it be that the Prime Minister has in recent years wished to control foreign policy himself rather than the Foreign Secretary or the Foreign Office? Is it because the old rules of British foreign policy seem to have lost their validity? For example, it used to be said that the main aim of British foreign policy should be to side with the second most powerful country in Europe against the most powerful. That does not seem to have any relevance today. Or is it because our foreign policy is in many ways beset by great complications? It could be so. Take Europe. What confusion this wonderful idea of Monsieur Jean Monnet has sown in our public life. We still do not really know if we are or are not Europeans. If my noble friend Lord Skidelsky were here, he would recall Lord Keynes telling us of England, in his The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that, "““Europe’s voiceless tremors do not reach her””." What did Churchill—the greatest Englishman of the first part of the 20th century—really think about European integration? It is very hard to discover. Perhaps above all, how can we explain the fact that the Conservative Party and the Labour Party have, over Europe, made a complete switch in attitudes? I do not need to remind members of the Conservative Party in this House that their party was, for many years—from 1950 until about 1990—the party of Europe. The Labour Party was the party of scepticism, beginning with the famous visit by the late Lord Morrison to the Ivy restaurant where he assuredMr Kenneth Younger and Sir William Plowden that the Durham miners would not wear the idea of the European Common Market. Of course, we are all friends of the United States. Since 1941 and 1946, when the phrase ““the special relationship”” was, I think, invented, our relation with the United States has dominated our political life, the only exception being the short period of the Prime Ministership of Sir Edward Heath. Has this United States’ connection prevented or affected our capacity to lead Europe, even if we had wanted to do so? Even more important, what do we really think now of the post-1989 position of the United States in the world? Despite its setbacks, it continues to be the most powerful state the world has seen since the Roman Empire. Do we think that this dominance is desirable? Should we try to limit it? Was Monsieur Chirac right to question it? Incidentally, I should recall that the United States had an idea of liberal interventionism long before the arrival of Mr Bush in power. President Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe doctrine of 1905 justified United States intervention in Latin America—butnot in the world in general—if a state of brutal wrongdoing existed. Perhaps that is a concession by the United States in the 21st century to Latin American preconceptions, as desired by my noble kinsman, the noble Viscount, Lord Montgomery of Alamein. What about the United Nations? This great institution, the jewel of 1945, has been mentioned quite a lot, but still we do not really know whether the ideal of liberal interventionism can be allied with support for the United Nations Charter as the kernel of a new world order such as we might have expected after 1989. We should take into account a factor which was unspoken before 1989; namely, the re-emergence of religion as a factor in world politics. I refer to notjust Islam, but Catholicism and even low-church evangelisation. Are our foreign offices in Europe able to cope with a world in which the divisions created by the death of Caliph Ali in 661AD are more important than the divisions between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks in 1905? Is the State Department capable of such a shift in its emphasis? We cannot of course escape from the fact that foreign policy impinges on domestic policy in a way which never seemed to exist before. The threat of al-Qaeda is the most striking in this respect, but we could compare it with the threat of international violence posed by the anarchists in the early part of the 20th century. In conclusion, we have to continue to accept a conventional, or what sounds a cliché-ridden, position for ourselves in international affairs. We continue to be a very influential, first-class country, if not a super-power, with respected armed services, a fine financial centre, good parliamentary life, a strong culture and unprecedented traditions. This should enable us even now to aspire to lead Europe in the future and so be a natural conduit between Europe and the United States in an Atlantic community, which we should wish to see enriched and which, perhaps, a Foreign Secretary to any new Prime Minister—let us hope that he will be an independent and strong Foreign Secretary—should strive to articulate very clearly.